Do Numbers Add Up on Illegal Entry? : Border: A surge in arrests of illegal crossers along the U.S.-Mexico border is causing concern for government officials, but others say the figures have little meaning.

Already, U.S. authorities have begun a renewed sounding of the alarm bells. After 2 1/2 years of steady declines following passage of the sweeping 1986 immigration reform package, arrests of undocumented foreign nationals along the U.S.-Mexico border have begun to surge, signaling a possible renewed wave of illegal entries, according to officials.

Between May and September, U.S. border guards from San Diego to Brownsville, Tex., recorded more than 435,000 apprehensions of the undocumented, a jump of almost one-quarter over the same period in 1988.

“The numbers are going up, and we’re concerned,” said Duke Austin, spokesman in Washington for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. “It’s something we’re watching closely.”

But the warning of an emerging trend is based on statistics--arrests along the border--that, although widely repeated, also are widely questioned. The arrest numbers, critics argue, are so volatile because of a range of factors--among them INS staffing and priorities, seasonal shifts in migration, and changes in policy and law--that using them to buttress any point can be highly misleading.

“I think the figures’ value has always been very problematic,” said Wayne A. Cornelius, director of the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at UC San Diego and a leading researcher of immigration issues.

Yet the border arrest statistics have long been trumpeted by INS officials as the single most effective indicator of illegal immigration. For decades, the numbers have served a central role in U.S. immigration strategy. During the 1950s, as in the 1980s, rising arrests led inexorably to crackdowns and calls for new controls.

The numbers’ always-suspect reliability, analysts say, has eroded further since passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, the most far-reaching overhaul of U.S. immigration law in two decades. Several provisions of that statute have clearly had a direct impact on border arrests, which dropped after passage of the law until the recent surge.

Among other things, the law’s legalization or amnesty provisions resulted in more legal border crossings, possibly contributing to a parallel decline in illegal entries. And the law gave new responsibilities to U.S. immigration authorities, drawing some personnel away from border enforcement.

INS officials, especially former commissioner Alan C. Nelson, have been quick to seize upon the post-1986 drop in arrests as evidence that new penalties against employers who hire undocumented workers successfully stemmed illegal immigration. The so-called employer sanctions--a centerpiece of the 1986 law--were meant to dry up the undocumented job market.

But skeptical researchers, aware of the lack of success of similar sanctions in various U.S. states (including California) and in Europe, say the agency’s logic is specious. Undocumented workers have easily managed to circumvent the new requirements by using false documents and other means, according to several studies.

Some critics, notably Jorge Bustamante, director of the College of the Northern Frontier, a Tijuana-based research institution, have argued that the INS has manipulated staffing in a deliberate effort to inflate or deflate the numbers and achieve its policy goals. Thus, Bustamante suggests, when INS officials sought passage of immigration reform laws, they conducted an all-out effort to bolster arrests leading up to 1986, when the new statute was finally passed. Once the law was approved, Bustamante said, border enforcement was apparently relaxed, showing a drop-off in arrests.

“There’s a manipulation from the top,” Bustamante said. “The agency has been lying to the American people.”

INS officials defend the integrity of the figures. Although they acknowledge that border enforcement was increased before 1986, contributing to a steep rise in arrests, authorities say that the number of border enforcement man hours continued to increase during 1987, when arrests dropped dramatically. “I think they (the numbers) are the best barometer there is” of illegal immigration, said Austin, the agency spokesman. “It has its weaknesses, but I don’t think there’s a better number.”

Some independent analysts say the numbers are of some use, although corrections must be factored in for swings in INS border staffing, repeat arrests, seasonal shifts in migration (spring and summer are the most popular months), and a host of other factors. The figures correlate to certain events, such as the collapse of the Mexican economy in 1982, which triggered a huge emigration, noted Frank D. Bean, a demographer with The Urban Institute, a Washington-based policy research organization. Arrests began a sharp climb after 1982.

“There are two points of view,” noted Bean, who has done extensive research into the figures as part of the institute’s continuing examination of the effects of the 1986 immigration reform law. “On the one hand are INS personnel who have oversold the (numbers’) value, saying they are an almost perfect indicator of flows across the border. Another point of view says that these things are worthless, that they don’t tell you anything. . . . I think the truth is somewhere in between, that (the numbers’) do tell us something of some use.”

Just how the 1986 immigration statute contributed to the lower apprehension numbers that followed its passage remains a matter of fierce debate. It is a debate that goes to the heart of any effort to gauge the effectiveness of the 1986 law, which was largely intended to stem illegal immigration from Mexico.

Judging the effectiveness of the 1986 immigration law in deterring undocumented border-crossers can be a daunting task. By definition, illegal immigration is a difficult phenomenon to measure. Fearing detection and possible deportation, undocumented foreigners typically avoid contact with local and federal authorities.

The varying estimates surrounding the number of illegal immigrants residing in the United States reflect the confusion. The INS now says that there are perhaps 3 million undocumented foreigners, but officials acknowledge that the number is guesswork.

Most undocumented people are Mexican citizens arriving overland through the almost-2,000 mile-long border; a large number of Central Americans and others also use the border to enter the United States clandestinely.

The apprehension numbers are by nature inflationary. The statistics measure only arrests, so anyone arrested multiple times, as frequently happens along the border, is counted on each occasion.

Nonetheless, the volume of arrests along the border is astounding. That is particularly so in the San Diego area, the single busiest crossing point along the border, which provides a direct corridor to the immigrant job centers of Los Angeles and elsewhere in California.

Take a recent, typical day: Last Sunday, Nov. 5.

U.S. Border Patrol agents in San Diego recorded arrests of 1,219 illegal immigrants, or more than 50 per hour. Of those, 1,117, or 91%, were Mexican nationals; most signed forms admitting they were here illegally and were returned to Tijuana, usually within a day. Among the remaining 102 apprehended were 41 Guatemalans, 36 El Salvadorans, 11 Nicaraguans, 4 Hondurans, 2 Egyptians, 2 Colombians, 2 Chinese and 1 citizen each from Bolivia, Belize, India and the Dominican Republic. Non-Mexicans apprehended may enter a range of legal proceedings, including the deportation process.

Despite the large numbers of arrests, U.S. officials acknowledge that they apprehend only a fraction of those attempting to cross.

In seeking to track the law’s impacts, INS officials, particularly ex-commissioner Nelson, turned once again to to border apprehension statistics, that familiar benchmark. However, many have challenged the INS’s efforts to link the post-1986 declines in border arrests to the new sanctions against employers who hire undocumented workers.

There is widespread agreement, however, that the 1986 law has likely affected the statistics in a variety of ways, some of them still not understood.

In one major development, the newly legalized status for 3 million amnesty recipients--almost 75% of them Mexican citizens and more than half residents of California--has meant that many fewer people have to cross the border illegally; those 3 million people can now go back and forth freely. Not surprisingly, then, the number of legal crossings via ports of entry between California and Mexico have risen considerably since 1986, paralleling the decline in border arrests of illegal border-crossers.

In addition, some Border Patrol resources have been shifted since passage of the law to assist in enforcing the new penalties against employers who hire undocumented workers. And, in San Diego, a hiring freeze has left U.S. Border Patrol staffing at a four-year low. Many agents, faced with hundreds of border-crossers every evening, are openly skeptical of INS claims that the 1986 law is deterring illegal entry.

“They (superiors) have to prove that the law they wanted is doing the job,” said Steven Garcia, an agent with 10 years of experience in San Diego who is president of Local 1613 of the National Border Patrol Council, the agents’ union. “Four or five years ago, we never had a hundred or more people running across the border together. . . . If we had more agents, we’d definitely have more arrests.”

Whatever the true meaning the arrest figures, INS officials continue to cite them in an effort to evaluate trends at the border. They have done so for more than half a century.

The numbers have been in use since the Border Patrol, a uniformed arm of the INS, was founded in in 1924 with 459 “former mounted guards, policemen, sheriffs, gunslingers of various types” and others, according to 1974 INS in-house history of the patrol. In 1925, agents arrested some 22,000 persons for immigration-law violations.

Since then, authorities have used the numbers as evidence of waves of illegal immigration from Mexico. After World War II, apprehensions of the undocumented began to double and triple annually, peaking at more than 1 million arrests in fiscal 1954. Then, as now, illegal immigrants were blamed for a range of problems in U.S. border areas and immigrant communities. “The invasion by hordes of illegal aliens continued and with them came tremendously increased rates of crime in areas where they congregated,” said the INS history.

Authorities took action, instituting the infamous “Operation Wetback,” arresting thousands of undocumented people and sending them back to Mexico. Caught in the web were many legal U.S. residents--and even U.S. citizens--residing in Los Angeles and elsewhere. Some fled out of fear. Researchers have found widespread abuse.

“After the backbone of the wetback invasion was broken in California, task force operations were shifted to South Texas,” the INS article noted.

The ferocity of that operation has not been forgotten in Mexico, where the 1986 immigration law revisions sparked fears of similar actions.

In the years after “Operation Wetback,” the border arrest numbers gradually declined, reaching a low of about 29,000 apprehensions in 1960. An sharp upward trend began in the 1980s, as the Mexican economy worsened, and reached its apex in 1986, when authorities recorded 1.6 million arrests of illegal immigrants along the U.S.-Mexico border, a new record. Again, as in the mid-1950s, there were calls for drastic steps to stem the “invasion.” Those cries culminated in congressional passage in October 1986 of the immigration reform package.

BORDER COMPARISON

Arrests of undocumented foreigners by U.S. Border Patrol along entire U.S.-Mexico border (Figures start in fiscal 1982, year the Mexican economy began its ongoing decline):

1982: 743,830

1983: 1,034,142

1984: 1,056,907

1985: 1,185,795

1986: 1,615,854 *

1987: 1,122,067

1988: 943,063

1989: 854,939.

(* fiscal 1986 was year preceding passage of Immigration Reform and Control Act.)

Arrests by Border Patrol agents based in San Diego Sector:

1982: 314,979

1983: 429,121

1984: 407,828

1985: 427,772

1986: 629,656

1987: 500,327

1988: 431,592

1989: 366,757

Source: U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. San Diego Sector covers San Diego County, including 66 miles of international border, and southern Riverside and Orange counties.