Border Enforcement Research Articles

Wilderness Rescue and Border Enforcement Along the Arizona Mexico Border—The Border Patrol Search, Trauma and Rescue Unit

To introduce and describe the US Border Patrol (USBP) Tucson Sector Border Patrol Search, Trauma and Rescue Unit (BORSTAR) and to analyze whether the frequency of its activities were associated with the amount of total border patrol law enforcement activities in the area. Descriptive and nonparametric analysis was conducted on data that were obtained on total USBP apprehensions of undocumented immigrants and BORSTAR activities for a consecutive 3-year period. From October 2004 to September 2007 over 1 million apprehensions occurred within the Tucson Sector. During this time, a large number of search, rescue, and medical intervention events occurred. However, only a weak association was found between the frequency of apprehensions and BORSTAR activities. The BORSTAR unit of the Tucson Sector commonly encounters harsh conditions and provides search, rescue, and medical interventions to undocumented immigrants. The frequency of BORSTAR activities is not strongly associated with the volume of USBP law enforcement activities.

Border Enforcement of IPR Laws in Australia

Customs in the twenty–first century has a role that expands far beyond the traditional role of revenue collection, and includes trade facilitation and border protection. It is now required to guard against both importation and exportation of dangerous and counterfeit products which pose serious threat not only to the economy, but also to the society in general. With its firmly built legislative base coupled with strategically developed implementation mechanism, the Australian Customs Services (ACS) plays a crucial role in ensuring border protection of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) laws. Conformity with the provisions and standards set out by the apex trade bodies in the world is a major strength of the Australian Customs in its ongoing battle against infringement of IPR laws. The Australian Customs maintains a close relationship with other border agencies and the business community with a view to interdicting and disrupting the illicit trade in goods that infringe IPR.

Hardened Borders: A Case Study on Inefficient Solutions to the Immigration Problem in El Paso

With the rising controversy over illegal immigration, Mexican migration to the US twirls into the spotlight. In 2005 the majority (56 percent) of the 11.1 million unauthorized aliens were of Mexican origin (Passel i)—a signal to the US government that the source of the problem is illegal Mexican migration. The solution pursued in the last two decades by the US government was the fortification of the US-Mexico border. The following article argues that hardened borders between the US and Mexico are not a viable solution to unauthorized Mexican migration. The fallacies of the framework for immigration since 1986 are examined by means of a conducted case study on the borderplex of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. The case study illustrates the social, economic, and kinship cross-border ties which contribute to the porosity of the border. Furthermore, it investigates stepped-up border enforcement programs, such as Operation Hold-the-Line, and new modes of entry resulting from the US Customs and Border Protection’s latest strategies to deter illegal migration.

Immigration and the Macroeconomy

We analyze the dynamics of labor migration and the insurance role of remittances in a two-country, real business cycle framework. Emigration increases with the expected stream of future wage gains but is dampened by the sunk cost reflecting border enforcement. During booms in the destination economy, the scarcity of established immigrants lessens capital accumulation, labor productivity, and the native wage. The welfare gain from the inflow of unskilled labor increases with the complementarity between skilled and unskilled labor and the share of the skilled among native labor. The model matches the cyclical dynamics of the unskilled immigration from Mexico.

Close encounters of the deadly kind: Gender, migration, and border (in)security

In this paper, I discuss several findings of my study of migrant women, temporarily suspended in the “intersection” of diametrically opposed processes: those posed by border enforcement measures and those posed by transnational mobility. A pressing issue that emerged from this research was how close women come to encountering death as they side-step the border wall to cross without authorization into the US. Their testimonies shed light on how the intersection of contradictory processes contributes to a humanitarian crisis on the US-Mexico border in which the likelihood of death is increasingly present.

Searching for Work, Striving for Justice: New Perspectives on Latin American Migrations to the United States

– Corridors of Migration: The Odyssey of Mexican Laborers, 1600-1933, by Rodolfo F. Acuna. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2007. – Impacts of Border Enforcement on Mexican Migration: The View from Sending Communities, edited by Wayne A. Cornelius and Jessa M. Lewis. La Jolla, SD: Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, University of California, 2007.1 – Four Generations of Nortenos: New Research from the Cradle of Mexican Migration, edited by Wayne A. Cornelius, David Fitzgerald, and Scott Borger. La Jolla, SD: Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, University of California, 2008. – Mayan Journeys: The New Migration from Yucatan to the United States, edited by Wayne A. Cornelius, David Fitzgerald, and Pedro Lewin Fischer. La Jolla, SD: Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, University of California, 2007. – In Search of Providence: Transnational Mayan Identities, by Patricia Foxen. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2007.

Pathways to U.S. Citizenship

The U.S. foreign-born population includes more noncitizens than naturalized citizens, a reversal of the 1930-1980 trend, especially among European-born persons. As the policy debate continues about border enforcement and an unauthorized presence, naturalization and pathways to U.S. citizenship are more prominent. This article reviews the steps in making the transition to naturalized citizen and eligibility criteria. The article also discusses naturalization as a temporal process of civic assimilation. Museums can play important roles in promoting understanding of immigrant pathways to naturalized citizenship with viewpoints on origin groups, institutions, and communities.

Spectacles of Border Enforcement and Latino Youth

Spectacles of Border Enforcement and Latino Youth

US Immigration Law and its Geographies of Social Control: Lessons from Homosexual Exclusion during the Cold War

Despite its preoccupation with issues of space, power, and subjectivity, as well as being a prominent home for immigration-related scholarship, geography includes little research on the intersection of immigration and sexuality as well as on their joint regulation through immigration law. This paper looks at the intersection of immigration and sexuality through the lens of the Cold War practice of homosexual exclusion in US immigration law. By drawing linkages between homosexual exclusion and current immigration law, I argue that homosexual exclusion is not an aberrant part of US immigration law history, that immigration law has important social control functions, and that, as a result, immigration researchers in geography attend to immigration control beyond border enforcement per se.

Further Analysis of Illegal Migration and Immigration Policy under Risk Preference

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effectiveness of border enforcement and internal enforcement policies under capital immobility and free capital mobility. Different from the previous studies where host firm is assumed to be risk-neutral, we introduce a framework in which host firm is allowed to exhibit different attitudes to risk and examine how the enforcement policies influence illegal migration. We show that the attitude toward risk of the host firm is important in determining the nature of equilibrium and many results with an assumption of risk neutrality continue to hold if the host firm exhibits a risk-averse attitude. We also show that under international capital mobility, the impacts of two enforcement policies on factor prices are different according to the factor intensity ranking between countries.JEL Classification: F21, F22

Entrapment Processes and Immigrant Communities in a Time of Heightened Border Vigilance

In processes of entrapment, police and other state agencies impose significant risk to moving around, while people themselves exercise various forms of agency by both limiting themselves and covertly defying movement controls. Recent US immigration and border enforcement policy has entrapped undocumented immigrants, in particular on the United States side of the USMexico border region. We explore how to operationalize this “macro” pattern in ethnographic research, making the conceptually and methodologically significant point that political-legal forces are only one among many elements leading to entrapment and immobilization; other factors include transportation constraints, poor health, etc. The concept of “morality of risk” is also introduced to help us understand how and why trapped people would take severe risks to defy immigration policing. Three ethnographic cases are examined, noting the complex mix of movement and barriers found in them. We conclude with the significance of entrapment for applied and basic social science: first, for the analysis of spatial mobility, enclosure, and inequalities of movement; second, for public policy; and third, for the methods and ethics of researching trapped and hidden populations.

BOOK REVIEWS

Book reviewed in this articles:Paul CollierThe Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About ItMichael J. RosenfeldThe Age of Independence: Interracial Unions, Same‐Sex Unions, and the Changing American FamilyWolfgang Lutz, Rudolf Richter, and Chris Wilson (EDS.) The New Generations of Europeans: Demography and Families in the Enlarged European UnionLaura L. LovettConceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction, and the Family in the United States, 1890–1938Michel FoucaultSecurity, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78 SHORT REVIEWS Sudhir Anand, Fabienne Peter, and Amartya Sen (EDS.) Public Health, Ethics, and EquityJames ChinThe AIDS Pandemic: The Collision of Epidemiology with Political CorrectnessJennifer Cole and Deborah Durham (EDS.) Generations and Globalization: Youth, Age, and Family in the New World EconomyWayne A. Cornelius AND Jessa M. Lewis (EDS.) Impacts of Border Enforcement on Mexican Migration: The View from Sending CommunitiesRashid Hassan, Robert Scholes, and Neville Ash (EDS.) Ecosystems and Human Well‐being: Volume 1, Current State and TrendsMatthias Koch, Claus Harmer, and Florian CoulmasTrilingual Glossary of Demographic Terminology: English‐Japanese‐German/ Japanese‐English‐German/German‐Japanese‐EnglishIan Pool, Arunachalam Dharmalingam, and Janet SceatsThe New Zealand Family from 1840: A Demographic History

Border Enforcement and Firm Response in the Management of Invasive Species

This analysis presents a theoretical model of firm response to border enforcement and evaluates both the intended and unintended effects under two enforcement regimes: destruction versus treatment of contaminated shipments. The results indicate that importers may respond to increased inspection by reducing shipments and decreasing due care. In response to increased pest populations, firms may reduce shipments and increase due care, indicating that an enforcement response may not be necessary. The analysis reveals the importance of the nature of the due-care technology, as well as the relationships underlying the probability of detection, in determining the effects of enforcement.

Does border enforcement deter unauthorized immigration? The case of Mexican migration to the United States of America

AbstractThis paper asks whether the migration decisions of unauthorized Mexican immigrants to the USA have been influenced by stronger US border enforcement efforts since 1993 that have sharply increased the physical risk and financial cost of illegal immigration. These measures were supposed to have decreased the probability of successful entry, thereby lowering the expected benefits of migration. We carried out a logistic regression analysis of data from a recent survey of 603 returned migrants and potential first‐time migrants in rural Mexico. Our findings indicate that tougher border controls have had remarkably little influence on the propensity to migrate illegally to the USA. Political restrictions on immigration are far outweighed by economic and family‐related incentives to migrate. An alternative, labor‐market approach to immigration control with higher probability of effectiveness is outlined.

Gender Differences in the Labor Market: Impact of IRCA's Amnesty Provisions

How to address the current record-high number of unauthorized workers within our borders has been a hotly debated topic. Although a number of studies have examined the effect of employer sanctions (Bansak and Raphael 2001; Deborah A. Cobb-Clark, Clinton R. Shields, and B. Lindsey Lowell 1995) and border enforcement (Pia Orrenius and Madeline Zavodny 2003), only a handful have examined the impact of amnesty on newly legalized immigrants (Sherrie A. Kossoudji and Deborah A. Cobb-Clark 2002; Neeraj Kaushal 2006). While amnesty is being considered a current solution to immigration concerns, the impact of past amnesty programs on the labor market outcomes and economic well-being of immigrants has not been documented widely, and the analysis has been limited largely to men. In this paper, we examine whether amnesty, a provision of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), affected the labor market outcomes and wages of the legalized population. The analysis is carried out by gender to address male and female differences in labor supply and earnings. Legalization was intended to bring undocumented workers “out of the shadows,” which may have affected their well-being by reducing workplace vulnerabilities, increasing job mobility, and improving working conditions (Sherrie A. Kossoudji and Cobb-Clark 2002). Using data from the Legalized Population Survey (LPS) and a comparison sample from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLYS79), we develop a quasi-experimental framework to assess the impact of IRCA’s amnesty provisions on the legalized population. Gender Differences in the Labor Market: Impact of IRCA’s Amnesty Provisions

On the determinants of optimal border enforcement

We extend the current immigration-enforcement literature by incorporating both the practice of people smuggling and a role for non-wage income into a two-country, dynamic general equilibrium model. We use the model economy to examine three questions. First, how does technological progress in the smuggling industry affect the level of migration and capital accumulation for a given level of enforcement? Second, do changes in border enforcement affect the level of migration, capital accumulation, and smuggling activity? Third, is the optimal level of enforcement sensitive to technological progress in the smuggling industry? We show that the government chooses to devote resources to border enforcement only if the deterrent effect on smugglers is large enough. Otherwise, it is not worth taxing host-country natives as the taxes paid will more than offset any income gain resulting from fewer migrants.

ABOLISHING EXEQUATUR IN THE EUROPEAN UNION: THE EUROPEAN ENFORCEMENT ORDER

On 21 October 2005 the EC Regulation on European Enforcement Order for uncontested claims became applicable. According to this Regulation a judgment of a court of a Member State can be certified as a European Enforcement Order in the Member State of origin. A certified judgment is to be enforced in another Member State without any need of an intermediate procedure for recognition and enforcement. The exequatur procedure from the Brussels I Regulation is abolished in certain cases. In the Member State of enforcement there are only very limited possibilities of refusal of enforcement of a certified judgment. In this article the Regulation is discussed, as well as the further possibilities of simplification of cross border enforcement of civil judgments in the European Union. It is argued that for a further simplification of cross border enforcement a harmonization of the procedural laws of the Member States is necessary.

The 'D.V' Lottery or the Canadian Point System: Costs and Benefits

The diversity visa (D.V) lottery popularly known as the D.V lottery is a U.S relatively new immigration policy that was shrouded with a lot of controversy at its inception in 1995. The main stated objective of this policy is to increase diversity in the U.S. However, from the policy inception, immigration specialists seriously doubted the claimed objective. They strongly believe that the congressional sponsors of the visa lottery adopted the diversity mantra as a cover for a program that was actually designed to satisfy other objectives. In particular earlier short lived versions of the diversity-visa programs were designed to bring more European immigrants, especially English-speakers, to the United States. In December 2005 the United States House of representatives voted 273-148 to add an amendment to the border enforcement bill H.R. 4437, abolishing the DV lottery. Opponents of the lottery said it was susceptible to fraud and was a way for terrorists to enter the country. For now, the abolishment of the DV lottery is still in question as in May 2006, the Senate adopted 56-42 an amendment, to restrict two-thirds of the diversity visas to immigrants with advanced science degrees. In this paper, we review in details the D.V immigration policy program considering qualitatively yet objectively arguments for and against the program and potential costs and benefits to the US. We then highlight in details the pros and cons of a commonly suggested alternative to this program, the point system.

"We Sometimes Wonder What They Will Spring on Us Next": Immigrants and Border Enforcement in the American West, 1882-1930

Complex patterns of unsanctioned immigration emerged along the Mexican and Canadian borders in the late-nineteenth century, spurring federal efforts to fortify the borders. Despite the elaboration of federal border controls, illicit entry flourished, individual immigrants and transnational smuggling syndicates demonstrated tireless ingenuity in subverting the official border. Patrones complejos de migración ilícita emergieron a lo largo de las fronteras mexicana y canadiensea finales del siglo XIX, impulsando esfuerzos federales para fortalecer las fronteras. A pesar de la implementación de controles fronterizos federales, el fenómeno de la entrada ilícita prosperí. Inmigrantes individuales y sindicatos de contrabando transnacionales demonstraron incansable ingenio en la subversion de la frontera oficial.

Does illegal immigration empower rightist parties?

The main goal of this paper is to analyze the political outcome in countries where the relevant issue in elections is the control of immigration. In particular, we explore the consequences on the political outcome of the fact that parties are either ideological or opportunistic with respect to this issue. To do that, we use a simple two-party political competition model in which the issues over which parties take positions are the levels of border enforcement and the way it has to be financed. We show that an ideological rather than a pure opportunistic behavior gives parties an advantage to win the election. This result may help us to understand the recent success of anti-immigrant and rightist parties in several countries.