The Great Debate

America is losing as many illegal immigrants as it’s gaining

Douglas S. Massey

Apr 12, 2012 13:28 EDT

You’d never know it from the Republican primary debates, but for the first time in more than four decades, illegal migration from Mexico has fallen to a net zero. All data indicate that the undocumented population of the United States is no longer growing. According to estimates from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, that population peaked at around 12 million in 2008, fell to 11 million in 2009 and has remained constant since then. Independent estimates prepared by the Pew Hispanic Trust show the same thing, and Mexican census data reveal unusually large numbers of former U.S. migrants remaining home rather than heading northward.

These population estimates are consistent with individual-level data collected by the Mexican Migration Project, a binational program I co-direct that has been surveying legal and unauthorized migrants on both sides of the border for 30 years. Statistical analyses reveal that the rate of new migration to the United States is essentially zero, while repeat visits by returned migrants are rare. In keeping with these calculations, border apprehensions have fallen to the lowest number since 1970 despite the fact that there are more Border Patrol agents on duty than ever.

Surprisingly, this turn of events does not likely have anything to do with border enforcement. Historically, the volume of undocumented migration is uncorrelated with the size or budget of the Border Patrol. According to a recent assessment by the National Academy of Sciences, studies of migrant behavior “generally show that rising enforcement has little deterrent effect on undocumented migration,” which instead reflects the economic trends in Mexico and the United States and ongoing opportunities for legal entry to the U.S.

Demand for labor plummeted in the United States during the Great Recession, of course. That was especially the case in residential construction, which had been a key driver of migration beforehand. Between 2007 and 2010, Hispanics lost 764,000 jobs in the construction industry alone. Despite America’s recession, however, economic conditions in Mexico did not deteriorate very much. Although Mexican exports to the U.S. initially sagged, after 2009 they surged to surpass the 2008 level by 22 percent on strong sales of oil, tourism, crops and manufactured products, allowing many Mexicans to stay home rather than leave for the U.S. Mexican labor force growth has also slowed dramatically because of a sharp drop in fertility over the past two decades. That contributed to a rise in education levels among young Mexicans, who increasingly see opportunities at home.

Although labor demand continues in agriculture and other U.S. sectors, it has increasingly been fulfilled by legal temporary workers, whose entries rose to a record 517,000 in 2010. Permanent legal immigration, meanwhile, has averaged 165,000 entries per year since 2008. With so many opportunities for legal entry, slowing labor force growth and steady employment in Mexico, and stagnant labor demand in the United States, illegal migration has effectively ceased.

Net zero migration doesn’t just mean undocumented migrants are staying in Mexico; it also means those already here aren’t going home, in large part because the increase in border enforcement did have a very real effect, just not the intended one. Rising border enforcement naturally drove up the costs and risks of border crossing, and migrants quite logically decided to stop crossing the border – not by remaining in Mexico but by hunkering down and staying in the United States once they had made it across.

Is Burma the next Mexico?

Federico Varese

Dec 6, 2011 12:21 EST

By Federico Varese The opinions expressed are his own.

Hillary Clinton had many “hard issues” to tackle during her recent visit to Myanmar. Yet there was no mention of one of the most, if not the most, difficult issue Burma faces: their lucrative drug trade.

Northern Burma is the home of the “Golden Triangle,” a hub for opium production and the location of hundreds of heroin and amphetamine refineries. So how do political leaders and the international community plan to tackle this problem in the event that Burma truly becomes  a democratic country?

The totalitarian regime which has ruled Burma since 1962 has been, to a point, successful in keeping the production of illicit substances under control. In 1999, Burma’s notorious military junta (which is now dissolved) started a ruthless elimination plan of opium in the Golden Triangle (the Shan State, the Wa Region and the Kachin State). The region produced one-third of the world’s opium in 1998, but that figure was down to about 5% nine years later. From 2006 to 2007, the army eradicated 8,895 acres of opium fields. A 2007 United Nations Report trumpeted that “a decade-long process of drug control is clearly paying off.”

The actual story is a little more complicated. The regime did manage to reduce opium production, but this policy led to an increase in the production of amphetamines, methamphetamine in particular. The U.N. estimated that at least 700 million tablets were shipped from Burma to Thailand in 2003 alone, which is about 20 tons of methamphetamine, or 7.5% of what is manufactured globally.

Most recently, opium production in Burma is on the rise again, pushed by an ever-increasing demand for heroin in China, as documented by an eye-opening report compiled by the Transnational Institute, an NGO based in Amsterdam.

In order to see these developments for myself, I spent time this past summer in Muse, a town in the northeast section of Myanmar, and Ruili, right across the border in the Chinese province of Yunnan. “What you’ll see in Ruili you won’t be able to observe in any other part of China,” the taxi driver told me, surprised to find a foreigner around these parts. The place is reminiscent of a Mediterranean country, a relaxed atmosphere reigning supreme, where it’s hard to come by taxis and open shops in the mornings.

California vote and Mexican drug cartels

Bernd Debusmann

Oct 15, 2010 09:48 EDT

What would legalizing marijuana in California, America’s most populous state, mean to the drug cartels whose fight for access to American markets have turned parts of Mexico into war zones? Shrinking profits? Certainly. Less violence? Maybe.

These topics are being raised as the U.S. heads towards Nov. 2 mid-term elections which in California include a ballot initiative, Proposition 19, providing for marijuana to be treated like alcohol and tobacco for Californians over 21. A vote in favour would end 73 years of prohibition and have enormous political impact not only on the rest of America but also on the long-running global war on drugs.

Experts on the issue have been working overtime and the latest of a string of academic studies, out this week, came from the RAND Corporation, a California-based think tank. The voluminous paper is entitled: Reducing Drug Trafficking and Violence in Mexico – Would Legalizing Marijuana in California Help? The study’s four authors, all prominent authorities on the illegal drug business, hedged their answer.

“Our best guess,” they concluded, “is that legalizing marijuana production in California would wipe out essentially all DTO (Drug Trafficking Organization) marijuana revenues from selling Mexican marijuana to California users; however, the share of Mexican marijuana in the United States that comes from Mexico to California is no more than one-seventh of all Mexican imports.”

Note the word “guess.” It stems from the fact that most figures in the long debate on the war on drugs are estimates and many have been manipulated for ideological purposes. According to the researchers, the drug cartels’ marijuana business in the entire United States could virtually evaporate if high-quality marijuana from California were diverted from legal production and smuggled to the rest of the country.

And what effect would that have on the Mexican drug wars, in which the death toll is nearing 30,000? Again, a scholarly hedge, given the difficulties in measuring the drug market and its suppliers. Thus: “It is unclear whether reductions in Mexican DTOs’ revenues would lead to corresponding decrease in violence…The effect of reducing DTO marijuana revenues on violence is a matter of conjecture…(and) could well change over time.”

The reason for the academic caution is simple: there’s no historic precedent for what might happen in California – one state making legal a substance that remains illegal elsewhere in the country and the rest of the world. It is not as straightforward as the 1933 repeal of alcohol prohibition which applied to the entire country.

In Mexico, a drug war of choice?

Bernd Debusmann

May 21, 2010 11:17 EDT

Here is a short history of Mexico’s drug war, as told to a joint session of the U.S. Congress by President Felipe Calderon on May 20.

In 2004, a U.S. ban on the sale of assault weapons to civilians was lifted. High-powered firearms started flowing south across the 2,000-mile border. Violence increased. “One day criminals in Mexico, having gained access to these weapons, decided to challenge the authorities in my country,” he said.

Calderon did not say what happened on that “one day,” by implication the day the president had no choice but to fight back.

There is another version of history, which goes as follows: Calderon won elections in 2006 with a margin so thin (0.58 percent) that it prompted cries of fraud, persuaded his left-wing opponent Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to declare himself the real winner, and gave Mexico the unusual and embarrassing spectacle, for weeks on end, of two men claiming they were the legitimate president.

So, ten days after eventually being sworn in, Calderon announced that he had ordered the army into his home state of Michoacan to make war on Mexico’s drug cartels.

One of Calderon’s most vocal critics, former foreign minister Jorge Castaneda, loses no opportunity to say this was a war of choice, not prompted by any specific outrage but by a perceived need to legitimize a contested presidency. Calderon badly misjudged the strength of the criminal mafias, the alternative version goes, and now is stuck with a war he cannot win, not even with U.S. support. The death toll in the wars the cartels are fighting against the state and against each other stands at around 23,000 and is rising by the day.

To staunch the bloodshed, Congress should consider reinstating the assault weapons ban, Calderon told Congress. “If…you do not regulate the sale of these weapons in the right way, nothing guarantees that criminals here in the United States, with access to the same weapons, will not in turn decide to point them at U.S. authorities and citizens.”

Obama, American guns and Mexican mayhem

Bernd Debusmann

Apr 27, 2010 10:12 EDT

During a visit to Mexico a year ago, President Barack Obama promised he would urge the U.S. Senate to ratify an international treaty designed to curb  the flow of weapons to Latin American drug cartels. It remains just that – a promise. Prospects for ratification are virtually zero.

Top officials in the Obama administration have called the cartels, and the extreme violence tearing apart Mexican cities on the U.S. border, threats to U.S. national security. Joining 30 other countries in the Western Hemisphere in an anti-arms smuggling accord would therefore seem a perfectly sane and logical thing to do. But logic often ends where American gun ownership begins.

The treaty in question is called the Inter-American Convention Against Illicit Manufacturing of and Trafficking in Firearms, Ammunition, Explosives and Other Related Materials. Known as CIFTA for its Spanish acronym, it was adopted by the Organization of American States in 1997. All but four of its 35 members have ratified it. Bill Clinton signed the convention but did not get the Senate to bless it.

The treaty has run into fierce opposition from groups representing America’s huge army of gun owners, many of whom see CIFTA as a plot against their right, enshrined in the second amendment of the U.S. constitution, to own and bear arms. Reflecting such fears, an essay on the website of the National Rifle Association (NRA), the most powerful of the gun lobbies, terms the treaty “a blueprint for dismantling the second amendment” and part of an Obama strategy “to create the foundation for repressive and extreme gun control.”

Faced with such opposition, American lawmakers are no more inclined to tangle with the NRA and other gun lobbies now than they have been in the 12 preceding years. Which really boils down to gun owners and their impact on the ballot box having more weight than national security concerns.

There is no provision in the convention that would allow restrictions on legal gun sales in the United States. It stipulates information-sharing among the signatories that would make it easier to track guns used by criminals back to their last legal sale. That might end a protracted dispute over the origin and the number of weapons in the hands of the Mexican drug cartels whose wars against each other and against the state have killed more than 22,000 people since late 2006.

Nobody knows how many guns are smuggled across the border, how many come from the more than 9,000 licensed arms dealers in the four U.S. states bordering Mexico, or from gun shows and private sales. A widely-used assertion that 90 percent of the guns used by Mexican organized crime come from the U.S. does not stand up to scrutiny but there’s no doubt there’s a steady stream of weapons across the border.

Michelle Obama is ready for Mexico prime-time

Darrell M. West

Apr 13, 2010 09:30 EDT

- Darrell M. West is Vice President and Director of Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution.  He is the author of the forthcoming Brookings Institution Press book, Brain Gain:  Rethinking U.S. Immigration Policy. The opinions expressed are his own -

Michelle Obama is a hit at home and abroad but she will come under particular scrutiny this week as she embarks on her first solo trip outside the U.S., visiting Mexico. How she performs on this diplomatic mission will be closely watched because she is not just the president’s wife, she is the most prominent ambassador for her husband’s foreign policies.

Such trips are not a small undertaking, and they can carry more weight than might be expected.

When the First Lady travels abroad, foreigners take cues about policy substance and tonality from her.  They understand she is the last person the president sees at the end of many days.  Advice that she offers has a meaningful impact on substantive policy.

That Mrs. Obama is traveling to Mexico on her first solo outing is also significant. The country is vital to long-term American interests.  We share two thousand miles of border with our southern neighbor, and our economies are intimately intertwined.  Mexico is America’s second largest trading partner, and there are more than one million daily border crossings between the two nations.  Many of our undocumented immigrants come from Mexico.

But while Mexico is crucial to America’s fortunes, it is also wracked by violence.  Since late 2006, when President Felipe Calderone cracked down on drug cartels, more than 18,000 Mexicans have been killed.  That violence is seeping over into the United States.  Recently, an American rancher was murdered and before that, three people with ties to our country’s Ciudad Juarez consulate were executed.

Against this backdrop, Mrs. Obama will undoubtedly be surrounded by a wall of security, but not to the point where she is hidden from view. She is, after all, one of the most popular First Ladies in recent memory.

In drug war, failed old ideas never die

Bernd Debusmann

Feb 26, 2010 10:08 EST

Here’s a stern warning to the U.S. states of Alaska, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington. A United Nations body is displeased with your liberal medical marijuana laws. Very displeased.

The U.N. rarely takes issue with the internal affairs of member states, and even less with those of the United States. But that’s what the International Narcotics Control Board has just done in its latest annual report, published this week. Without mentioning by name the 14 American states where marijuana is legal for medical purposes, the 149-page report says:

“While the consumption and cultivation of cannabis, except for scientific purposes, are illegal activities according to federal law in the United States, several states have enacted laws that provide for the ‘medical use’ of cannabis. The control measures applied in those states for the cultivation of cannabis plants and the production, distribution and use fall short of the control requirements laid down in the 1961 Convention (on narcotic drugs.)

“The Board is deeply concerned that those insufficient control provisions have contributed substantially to the increase in illicit cultivation and abuse of cannabis in the United States. In addition, that development sends a wrong message to other countries.” The Board’s concern doesn’t end here. It is equally worried over “the ongoing discussion in several states on legalizing and taxing the ‘recreational’ use of cannabis.”

California, the most populous state in the U.S., stands out in that discussion. In mid-February, a California legislator, Tom Ammiamo, introduced a bill that would tax and regulate marijuana (by most estimates the state’s largest cash crop by far) much in the same way as alcohol. In addition, California backers of marijuana legalization say they have collected more than 700,000 signatures for a ballot initiative likely to be voted on in November.

There’s not the slightest hint in the U.N. report of rapidly growing support for more liberal laws on marijuana, the world’s most widely-used illicit drug. The latest U.S. poll on the issue, in January, showed that eight out of ten Americans support legalizing marijuana for medical use and nearly half are in favor of legalizing the drug, in small quantities for personal use, altogether.

Countries that have done that come in for harsh rebuke from the Control Board, which singles out Mexico, Argentina and Brazil for having sent “the wrong message” by passing legislation that takes the crime out of drug use and replaces prison sentences with treatment and education programs.

“Lawless hordes” and the U.S.-Mexico border

Bernd Debusmann

Oct 8, 2009 09:40 EDT

- Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own -

On the first Sunday of October, the Texan city of El Paso recorded its 10th murder of the year. On the same day, El Paso’s Mexican sister city, Ciudad Juarez, recorded its 1,809th murder of 2009. Mayhem on one side of the border, relative peace on the other.

The contrast is stunning. According to an annual ranking compiled by CQ Press, a Washington publishing house, El Paso is the third-safest large city in the U.S. (after Honolulu and New York). According to a Mexican think tank, Ciudad Juarez became the world’s most violent city this year, torn by a vicious free-for-all involving warring drug cartels, hit squads, common criminals, and the military.

The two cities form a sprawling metropolitan area of some 2.5 million, divided by a river and a border fence; united by family and business ties, history and now a shared fascination with Ciudad Juarez’s gradual descent into criminal anarchy. El Paso’s citizens follow the bloodletting across the river with rapt and horrified attention.

Border mayors, business executives and many residents along the 1,240-mile frontier between Texas and Mexico – more than half the 1,951-mile line between the U.S. and its southern neighbour – tend to frown at such phrases as “spillover violence” and “border war” because they conjure up an image of the U.S. border region as a lawless no-go area.

“There’s a wide gap between perception and reality,” says Manuel Ochoa of the El Paso Regional Economic Development Corporation, a non-profit consultancy for companies considering setting up shop in El Paso, southern New Mexico and the Mexican state of Chihuahua. “And the figures speak for themselves.”

You hear similar remarks elsewhere along the frontier. “Crime on the Texas border is still on the way down after decreasing 65 percent over the past several years,” according to Chad Foster, the mayor of Eagle Pass (its Mexican twin is Piedras Negras) and chairman of the Texas Border Coalition of mayors, county judges and economic development experts.

Drug wars and the balloon effect

Bernd Debusmann

Mar 26, 2009 10:42 EDT

– Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –

Why have billions of dollars and thousands of anti-narcotics agents around the world failed to throttle the global traffic in cocaine, heroin and marijuana? Blame wrong-headed policies, largely driven by the United States, and what experts call the balloon effect.

Squeezing a balloon in one place makes it expand in another. Destroy drug crops in one region and cultivation moves to another. Cut a supply route in one place and another one springs up. Take the example of Colombia and Mexico, at present a focus of U.S. attention because of large-scale violence that threatens to spill across the border.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, almost all the cocaine consumed in the United States was grown in Colombia and shipped to South Florida along a variety of sea and air routes. Colombian traffickers fighting for market share turned Miami into a city where shootouts, contract killings and kidnappings became part of daily life.

That began to change when enraged citizens appealed to the federal government for help to crack down on the “cocaine cowboys.” Then President Ronald Reagan established a special force to cut the cocaine pipelines and end the violence. “The Mexicans must rue the day the South Florida Task Force was set up,” said Peter Reuter, a scholar at the University of Maryland. “That was the beginning of the problems it faces today.”

Within weeks of its formation in 1982, the task force scored several spectacular successes. A string of seizures of large quantities of cocaine and marijuana prompted Colombian trafficking organisations to shift their smuggling routes to Mexico, where they partnered with criminal networks.

By 1988, the balloon effect had become obvious: The Mexican Defence Ministry reported it had discovered 4.8 tonnes of cocaine in a cave in Chihuahua near the U.S. border. It was then the world’s biggest seizure of the drug. Its Colombian origin was not in doubt — Mexico produced no cocaine of its own.

First 100 days: Tackle traffic of weapons into Mexico

– Arturo Sarukhan, a career diplomat, has been Mexican ambassador to the United States since 2007. Ambassador Sarukhan was President Calderon’s chief foreign policy adviser and international spokesperson during the 2006 presidential campaign and headed his foreign policy transition team. The views expressed are his own. —

On January 12th, President Felipe Calderón and then President Elect Barack Obama held their first working meeting in Washington, DC, reflecting their commitment to strengthen the bilateral relationship. The conversation between the two leaders made it abundantly clearly that designing a framework that will simultaneously ensure the common prosperity and the common security of both our peoples remains the central conundrum our two nations face in a post 9-11 world.

Mexico is fully aware that a threat to the security of the United States will profoundly affect the bilateral relationship, and therefore common border security has been and will continue to be a top-priority. In this regard, a clear and present threat we both face is transnational organized crime.

From the outset of his administration, President Calderón committed himself to spearheading a battle aimed at dismantling drug trafficking organizations. These efforts have yielded significant results, including world-record seizures of narcotics, cash and weapons, as well as unprecedented levels of cooperation with the United States in the area of extraditions. As a result, on the U.S. side of the border, there are positive indications of decreased cocaine and methamphetamine availability, and a consequent increase in the retail price and decrease in the purity of these drugs.

These advances have not come without a steep human and financial cost for Mexico. Yet President Calderón is fully committed to continue this fight. But the transnational nature of this phenomenon makes it difficult for our country to successfully confront this threat on its own.

The most critical challenge, given the recent violence unleashed by drug traffickers, is the illegal flow of weapons from the United States into Mexico. The Mexican Government, with the help of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, estimates that 90 percent of the weapons that have been seized from drug-traffickers have entered our country illegally from the U.S.. This percentage should come as no surprise given the abundance of Federal firearms licensed dealers (FFL’s) and gun shows along the U.S.-Mexico border. In 2007 there were approximately 7,600 registered FFL’s in border states alone.

The latest record-seizure of weapons in Mexico is indicative of what law enforcement officials confront in the field and why they are often outgunned, and a powerful reminder of why the U.S. has to put a stop to the traffic of weapons into Mexico. Last November, in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, Mexican authorities seized in a single shipment of 500,000 rounds of ammunition, 288 assault rifles, 14 Herstal semi-automatic pistols, 7 Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifles, 2 grenade launchers, 1 LAW rocket launcher, and 287 fragmentation grenades. This cache of arms adds to the staggering total so far seized during President Calderón’s first two years in office: 30,231 weapons (16,401 of which were assault weapons), more than 3.5 million rounds of ammunition, and 2,196 grenades.