Immigration for Dummies, Part Deux

     Saw these numbers, had to pass them along. Don Imus's  20 year younger trophy wife,  Dierdre, a Faux News contributor, was engaging in Faux's favorite sport, lying about the Obama Administration.

      Invoking the name of Saint Ronald Reagan, she alleged that the current border spate of "illegals" couldn't/wouldn't/ didn't  happen on the "Gipper's" watch. So what do you think? Was she right? We all "know" (if we believe Faux News) everything bad is worse under the current President than any Republican administration, don't we?

     Specifically, Mrs. Imus stated on her hubby's (formerly funny and now practically unlistenable) radio show, "What has happened under President (Barack) Obama, is people thinking they can come here, especially unaccompanied minors, thinking they are getting amnesty."  Of course, such a statement has all the Faux talking heads nodding in agreement, but there is a problem. Not only is Mrs. Imus incorrect, she is incorrect by a huge amount. I will say this, when she is wrong, she stands by her falsehood.

     The actual exchange between Dierdre Imus and Lis Wiehl, believe it or not also a Faux News business analyst, but apparently one with a conscience, went like this: after Imus' initial  statement, quoted above, , Ms. Wiehl stated that this had been going on a long time and in fact, it was no different under Reagan. Imus was nonplussed.

Imus: "They were not pouring in like that, Lis. Are you really going to say that?"

Wiehl: "Yes, they were. They were pouring in. Yes, they were." 

Imus: "No, they weren’t. No, they were not."     

     Well, were they? What is the truth (a murky construct at Faux) of the matter?  Never fear, that's why I'm here. There are two ways to evaluate the number of illegals entering the country, the first is by the number apprehended by the U.S. border patrol each year, the second by the increase in illegal population each year. Apprehensions is the more realistic tool for evaluation, because many illegals aren't eager participants in the census process, even when reassured that it won't result in deportation.  

     Considering data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, we see some rather interesting numbers. In 1986, halfway through Reagan's second term, 1,615, 844 illegals were apprehended and returned, the highest in his eight years in office. During Reagan's eight years, the annual average of apprehensions was 1,056,500.  

During the Obama years to date, the worst year wasn't even this year or last year, but in 2009, his first year in office, during which there were 540,856 apprehensions, just over half of the Reagan highest!

     "But, Mike," you say, "Surely the population increase figures will set this straight and prove Saint Ronnie was tougher on illegals, won't they?"  

      It’s worth noting that apprehensions include everyone who is caught in the United States illegally. This would include the unaccompanied minors who have stirred such concern recently. We know the number of these young people has been rising rapidly and the data in this table only run through 2013. So it is probably  fair to ask if the exponential growth among children would be enough to change the results of this comparison if we had a complete count for 2014. The answer is, probably not.  In 2013, unaccompanied children represented about 6 percent of the total. While they might be the focus of the current debate, even if they continue to grow dramatically, they have a limited impact on the overall numbers.

     There is another issue. There has been a paradigm shift in how attempts to enter illegally are handled since the Reagan/Bush years (1980 -1992), according to Susan Martin, a migration policy expert at Georgetown University, who emphasizes that border patrol tactics changed between the 1980s and today. "The basic strategy in the 1980s, and before, was to apprehend and then return people immediately back to Mexico," Martin said. "A substantial number attempted re-entry until they were successful. It was, in effect, a revolving door. Beginning in the Clinton administration, the strategy shifted to deterrence." Let me reemphasize: it was a Democrat, Bill Clinton who forced a change in policy resulting  in more permanent deportations,

     For a while, that deterrence strategy, which included fingerprinting and a hardened border, tended to push the numbers down as persons apprehended were on record and banned from immigration, legal or otherwise.

Simply put, there were far more apprehensions during the Reagan administration than during the Obama administration, even though efforts are much more stringent now than then.

     The other, previously mentioned method for estimating the scale and numbers of persons illegally entering the U.S. is by   estimating the undocumented population. Measuring the number of undocumented people during most of the Reagan years is difficult. Before 1986, the Census Bureau made no allowance for people who were in the country without authorization. The bureau’s best estimate was that starting in 1980, about 200,000 undocumented people entered the country each year.

     In 1986, the Census Bureau began tracking these numbers, by much more significant than survey methods, in 1986 President Reagan signed  a major immigration reform law that offered amnesty to people who had been in the country continuously since 1982. In short order, more than 1.5 million people applied for and gained legal status.

    Jeffrey Passel is a senior demographer with the Pew Research Center and a leading authority on immigration statistics. Allowing for the people who changed their status, Passel finds "a net increase of about 1.6 million" during the Reagan years. To put that in annual terms, while the flow might have gone up and down, the average rate of 200,000 per year held true throughout Reagan’s administration.

    For Obama however, , Passel said the numbers are "far less than under Reagan." (this, of course in spite of the oft criticized "Dream Act!!) Passel said there was a net increase of 370,000 undocumented people and the average annual change was 120,000 from 2009-12. Not only that, but data from the Department of Homeland Security show an actual decline. The estimated undocumented population in 2010 was 11.6 million. For 2011, it was 11.5 million, and in 2012, it was 11.4 million.

By definition, estimating is not an exact science and so Homeland Security summarized the trend as "little to no change."

    So what does it all mean? For starters, it means that Republican pundits and fellow dittoheads are willing to ascribe almost anything they dislike to the Obama Administration. Truth is always the first casualty in such an instance. Mrs Imus' outraged rant turns out to be much like Karl Rove's 2012 election night meltdown, a tantrum caused by an unpleasant, one might even say, "inconvenient " truth.