Managing Illegal Immigration to the United States
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
U.S. Border Patrol surveys the border fence near rancher John Ladd's property adjacent to the Arizona-Mexico border near Naco, Arizona, March 29, 2013 (Samantha Sais/Courtesy Reuters).
As Senate immigration negotiations continue, the Council on Foreign Relations has just released a report on the effectiveness of U.S. immigration enforcement. The authors, Bryan Roberts (a senior economist at Econometrica, Inc), John Whitely (an economist focusing on resource allocation), and my colleague Edward Alden, detail the dramatic surge in border security “inputs”—personnel and money—outlining the sharp increases in the number of border patrol agents and the amount of their budgets. But the report highlights the lack of government data on “outputs” (i.e., the results of each program) and “outcomes” (how successful or unsuccessful each policy was in reducing illegal immigration). Read more »









