US-Mexico Border: Overview

Introduction

The border between the United States and Mexico has long been an important point of entry to the United States. Beginning in the 1990s and continuing into the twenty-first century, large numbers of people have entered the US without legal authorization, primarily from Mexico but also from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, among other countries, with the proportion of people coming from countries other than Mexico generally increasing throughout the twenty-first century. By some estimates, this is the largest single wave of immigration into the United States recorded in the past two hundred years. However, the Pew Research Center reported that between 2009 and 2014, net migration from Mexico to the United States was negative, with more Mexicans leaving the United States than arriving. A 2016 report by the Center for Migration Studies found that since 1980, the legally resident Mexico-born population in the United States has grown faster than the undocumented population from Mexico. There were an estimated 10.9 million undocumented immigrants in the United States in 2014, continuing a leveling-off trend that followed a peak of 12.2 million in 2007.

By 2017, according to the Pew Research Center, the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States had decreased further to 10.5 million, and Mexicans represented about 47 percent of that total. Although the COVID-19 pandemic, which began in 2020, likely contributed to a significant drop in immigration that year, undocumented immigration at the US-Mexico border surged and broke records in subsequent years, with unauthorized border crossings reaching over two million in both 2022 and 2023.

Immigration has been a hot-button political issue in the United States since the first wave of Irish and German immigration in the 1830s. Opposition has often centered on ethnic and religious prejudice, or fears that immigrants would take jobs away from those who already inhabited America. Laws to control immigration have ranged from outright bans on some nationalities to numerical quotas imposed according to one’s country of origin from the 1920s until the 1960s.

The most recent wave of immigration through the US-Mexico border resulted in demands for political action to curb undocumented immigration and to enforce existing immigration laws. Proposals for how best to accomplish these goals focused on physical barriers, such as a continuous fence along the US-Mexico border accompanied by more border patrol officers (in 2022 there were more than 700 miles of border fence or wall and over 19,500 US Border Patrol officers along the US-Mexico border) as well as erecting barriers to employment. The latter was accomplished by demanding that companies in the United States be held accountable for hiring immigrants without proper work permits on one hand, and on comprehensive immigration reform to create a path to US citizenship on the other.

Understanding the Discussion

Border patrol: A uniformed police agency of the federal Department of Customs and Border Protection. The US Border Patrol (USBP) is charged with enforcing federal laws governing people entering the United States. In practice, however, the term most often refers to agents patrolling the border between the United States and Mexico.

Guest worker program: A proposal based on laws in Europe that would allow citizens of foreign countries to enter the United States temporarily and to take jobs as "guest workers," without obtaining any rights to future citizenship.

Minutemen project: A private organization of individuals that undertook surveillance of the US-Mexico border, nominally to assist the official Border Patrol in spotting people trying to enter the United States illegally, in the mid-2000s.

Title 42: A migrant expulsion order enacted by the Trump administration during the COVID-19 pandemic.

History

The history of the United States is a history of immigration, beginning with English colonists landing in Virginia and Massachusetts in the early seventeenth century to avoid religious persecution. Since then, there have been several great waves of immigration to the United States. The first occurred in the 1830s and 1840s, as large numbers of people from Ireland and Germany entered the United States. The fact that most Irish, and many Germans, were Roman Catholic, disturbed some American Protestants and gave rise to the "Know Nothing" movement, aimed at depriving newcomers of the right to vote.

The California Gold Rush of 1848 attracted a large number of Chinese immigrants to California, who, after the Gold Rush died out, found work building the transcontinental railroad. Their presence generated resentment among European Americans and resulted in a series of state laws that explicitly discriminated against people from China. The federal Chinese Exclusion Law of 1882 banned any further Chinese immigration for ten years (the law was later renewed, but, in 1943 was repealed by the Magnuson Act) and gave birth to the concept of "illegal immigration." Similar prejudice resulted in a treaty with Japan to stop Japanese immigration.

Another wave of European immigration in the decades following the Civil War (1861–65) brought many immigrants from Italy and Eastern Europe. This wave coincided with a period of rapid industrial economic growth in the United States, known as the Industrial Revolution, and proved to be the biggest wave of all.

Between 1900 and 1910, almost nine million immigrants entered the United States. The peak of this immigration occurred in 1907, when 1,285,349 immigrants were counted. The mass numbers of new immigrants sparked resentment and fear that they would compete with US citizens for jobs and political influence.

Subsequently, Congress began to set numerical limits on immigration, with specific quotas assigned to each country. The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 limited the total European immigration to 150,000 per year and set quotas for each country at two percent of that nationality's population in the US as of 1890. The practical impact of the act resulted in large quotas for those countries such as England and Germany, for example, that already had many immigrants in the United States, and much smaller quotas for Italy and the Eastern European countries that lacked a strong existing population in the United States. As it turned out, however, the principal economic impetus behind immigration was about to fade away: The Great Depression of the 1930s severely curtailed immigration, since there were few jobs available as the US struggled with one of the worst economic crises in its history.

It was also during the period of anti-immigrant sentiment after World War I, in 1924, that the United States first established patrols along its borders with Canada and Mexico. Previously, people from Mexico in particular had freely been able to come to the United States, usually to find employment as seasonal agricultural workers, known as migrant laborers, picking crops in California, for example, and then returning home after the harvest.

A wave of large-scale immigration, beginning in the 1990s, predominately came from Latin America, especially Mexico. Unlike earlier decades, when many Mexican citizens had entered the United States as agricultural workers to harvest crops, many of those arriving in the 1990s and early 2000s moved into urban areas. Surveys show that these immigrants, arriving with official "green cards," often took low-paying jobs left unfilled by American workers. In many cases, men came to the United States in order to earn money to send to their families in Mexico. In other cases, women crossed the border to give birth so that their children would have birthright US citizenship.

In a virtual replay of reactions from a century earlier, there was strong political opposition to illegal immigration during the early twenty-first century. Opponents pointed to ethnic criminal gangs and to illegal drug smuggling as evidence that the new immigrants posed a threat to the security of the United States. In the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, the prospect that terrorists from around the world could easily enter the United States from Mexico was also cited as a reason to tighten immigration laws and restrictions. In Arizona, particularly, unofficial groups calling themselves "Minutemen" (a reference to those that comprised the colonial American militia in the Revolutionary War) sent armed volunteers to conduct surveillance of the border and notify Border Patrol agents of suspected undocumented immigration in the mid-2000s.

Critics of immigration pointed to the fact that most new immigrants continued to speak their native language as evidence that the latest wave of immigration posed a cultural threat to the United States, even though this reflected patterns observed in earlier immigrant groups, such as Italians and Germans. This gave rise to demands that English be adopted as the official language of the United States, even at a time when both businesses and the media worked to serve the country's ethnically diverse population by offering services in Spanish and other languages.

One proposal popular with those who advocated physically controlling the border was to build a tall fence along the entire 2,000-mile border between the United States and Mexico. Although the United States Department of Homeland Security expressed opposition in the early 2000s, portions of such a fence were built along several stretches, including the area near San Diego, California. Critics argued that a 2,000-mile fence was impractical and prohibitively expensive, would alienate the government of Mexico, would cut through the private property of US citizens, and would only redirect immigrants to other routes into the United States. In 2006, bills authorizing the construction of 700 miles of fencing or barriers along the border passed in the US Senate and the House of Representatives and were signed into law by President George W. Bush. Construction of the fence caused significant damage to the environment and, in January 2009, $50 million was appropriated to help alleviate the environmental harm already done.

Other proposals to control the border focused on penalizing US companies that hired people who lack the legal right to live in the United States. The motive of these proposals was to make it much harder for immigrants to find work and thus to discourage them from immigrating illegally. A variation of this idea came from George W. Bush, who proposed adopting laws similar to European "guest worker" programs, which allow a designated number of foreign workers to enter the country temporarily in order to take jobs that employers cannot fill with American workers.

In June 2012, President Barack Obama signed an executive order, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), that effectively stopped the deportation of young unauthorized immigrants who met the criteria set forth in the federal DREAM Act, a bill designed to create a path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants who were brought to the United States as minors and met certain requirements. The bill had previously failed to gain sufficient Republican support to be approved by Congress. An injunction issued in February 2016 prevented an expansion of DACA from taking effect. In 2014, President Obama issued an executive action called the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA), which would have allowed approximately five million undocumented immigrants who are the parents of US citizens or permanent residents to apply for a program that would have protected them from deportation and allowed them to work legally in the United States. In June 2016, the US Supreme Court announced it had deadlocked on United States v. Texas No. 15-674 in a 4–4 tie, thereby allowing an appeals court ruling that blocked DAPA to stand.

In the summer of 2014, more than 52,000 unaccompanied minors from Central America tried to illegally cross the southern border of the United States as they fled from violence, abuse, trafficking, limited economic opportunities, and persecution in their home countries. The surge, which severely strained the border patrol system and caused a humanitarian crisis, became a political issue as the debate over border security and immigration reform continued.

In August 2015, the US Department of Homeland Security introduced new traveler screening and information-sharing requirements for partner countries in the Visa Waiver Program (VWP) to address the threat posed by foreign terrorists who may seek to gain entry to the United States. The VWP allowed visa-free travel to the United States for citizens of thirty-eight partner countries. Using a layered system of security, the VWP helped detect and prevent terrorists and criminals from entering the United States. In 2016, the federal government proposed adding requests for the voluntary disclosure of social media accounts to forms filled out by foreign visitors to the United States. US Customs and Border Protection said that such disclosures would be valuable in screening visitors to the United States for possible ties to terrorism. However, some US representatives criticized these measures as being too weak.

The issue of border security was a primary focus of the 2016 presidential campaign, with the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, calling for the completion of the wall along the US-Mexico border, which he claimed the Mexican government would pay for. After taking office, Trump continued to claim that the wall would be built, although Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto insisted that Mexico would not pay for it. In addition, Congress refused to allocate funds for the wall. The cost of the wall, as estimated in a study by the Washington Post, would have been approximately $25 billion.

Trump also signed an executive order expanding the scope of deportations, allowing federal agents to deport immigrants who had not been charged with any crime but were believed to have committed "acts that constitute a chargeable criminal offense." Arrests by immigration agents in the hundred days following the executive order increased by 38 percent compared to the same time period in 2016.

A federal government shutdown occurred from December 22, 2018 to January 25, 2019, because Trump would not approve any budget that did not include $5 billion of funding for the wall. Unable to convince Congress to agree to this amount, Trump declared a state of national emergency in February in order to access additional funds. By May 2019, Trump had secured $6.1 billion in funding, which was estimated to be sufficient for approximately 336 miles of barriers, and additional funding from the Department of Defense was estimated to be enough for 131 more miles. The total length of the US-Mexico border is about 1,954 miles. Soon after a state of emergency was declared, sixteen states filed a lawsuit challenging Trump's diversion of money from the Department of Defense budget to the wall; a second lawsuit, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of the Sierra Club and the Southern Border Communities Coalition, argued that wall construction should not be allowed to go ahead in certain parts of Texas and Arizona due to the likelihood of environmental damage. In June 2019, a federal court in California ruled in favor of the plaintiffs in both cases, preventing a total of $2.5 billion in federal funds from being used for the wall.

US Borders Today

Upon taking office in January 2021, President Joe Biden and his administration reversed several of the Trump administration's immigration policies. For example, Biden suspended the Migrant Protection Protocols, which permitted border officials to send non-Mexican asylum seekers to Mexico while they waited for their hearings (also known as the "Remain in Mexico" policy). He ended discriminatory Trump-era travel bans which barred people from Muslim-majority nations and several African nations from entering the United States. Biden also rescinded Trump's Executive Order 13768, which permitted immediate removal of undocumented immigrants in the US and cut off federal funding to sanctuary states. Biden also called for the 2020 Census to include rather than exclude undocumented immigrants, and he stopped construction of the border wall. In addition to these reversals, Biden sent a comprehensive immigration reform package, the US Citizenship Act of 2021, to Congress, where it was introduced for consideration.

In February 2021, Biden continued to reprioritize US immigration policies. He set a target for lifting the annual cap on refugee admissions to 125,000 for fiscal year 2022, up from the 15,000 which Trump had set for fiscal year 2021. Biden directed agencies to make a number of reforms, including speeding up the refugee vetting process and reviewing the visa program for Iraqi and Afghan people who had assisted US military operations in the MIddle East to ensure the timely issuance of their visas. The Biden administration further established a Family Reunification Task Force to reunite immigrant families whose adults and children had been separately detained under the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" border policy.

In March 2021, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas stated that the United States may have more immigrants at the southwest border than it has had in the last twenty years. To accommodate increasing numbers of immigrants, including unaccompanied minors and their families, Mayorkas announced the construction of new facilities in Arizona and Texas, and the creation of joint processing centers for placing immigrant children with Health and Human Services. By mid-March, there were 16,500 unaccompanied minors in federal custody, some 5,000 of which were held in overcrowded and inappropriate Border Control facilities. The Biden administration responded by opening 16,000 emergency beds to accommodate the children until their placement with relatives or sponsors. Furthermore, Biden appointed Vice President Kamala Harris to lead the administration's response to the increase in migrants at the US-Mexico border.

In late 2021, a federal judge ordered the Biden administration to reinstate the "Remain in Mexico" policy that Biden had suspended on his first day in office. Biden thus restarted the program, with revisions, though it was little enforced and relatively few asylum seekers were forced to wait in Mexico. The Biden administration continued to seek ways to end the policy, including asking the US Supreme Court to block the order on an emergency basis, which the Court refused to do. In June 2022, the Supreme Court ruled 5–4 that the Biden administration had not violated immigration law in canceling the policy and thus had the right to end the program, sending the case back to the district court to determine whether Biden had violated any administrative laws.

In December 2022, the US Supreme Court ruled on another Trump-era policy, this time siding with Trump. In a

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