In my regular job, I am both lucky enough and unlucky enough to have thousands of metrics and statistics on the performance of my teams to sift through. When you are presented a set of data regarding something you are trying to measure, you need to think through what is being measured and what it is actually telling you because it is very easy to misuse or misinterpret statistics.
Republicans, including Texas Governor Greg Abbott, use the statistic of number of Border Apprehensions per year to determine the success or failure of an administration regarding immigration. There are a lot of problems with using this stat which I will get into in a moment, but let's assume, for now, that this is the best statistic to use.
If it is a good statistic to use, then the most successful President in recent times in terms of dealing with immigration is Barack Obama. Furthermore, Donald Trump made the issue worse after Barack Obama's successes. This is all shown on the graph below, border apprehensions were high under George W Bush, at historic lows under Obama and increased under Trump and then increased further under Biden.
Something tells me this is not the message Republicans hope we take away from all of this.
Let's start with the discussion of why this statistic doesn't say what Republicans think it is saying.
First, let's acknowledge that the number of arrests for a crime is something local police departments count as a metric of success. If a precinct is having issues with robbery, for instance, you want to see a lot of robbery arrests in that precinct. That means the police are doing what they are supposed to be doing to deal with the problem, arresting those who commit that crime.
The President is responsible for law enforcement at the Federal level, and he is responsible for border security and other types of national security.
The letter Texas Governor Greg Abbott sent to Biden accused Biden of being for open borders because of the large number of border arrests of people coming across the Southwestern border. Doesn't that mean the opposite of what Abbott is saying? Isn't that like accusing police of not caring about robbery because they have been arresting a lot of people for robbery?
If Biden was for open borders, he would direct the US Border Patrol to not arrest people coming over the border. It doesn't get any simpler to understand than that. The statistic that Republicans are using disproves the very thing they are trying to say.
I think it is impossible for something this simple to understand to have escaped the staff of Republican elected officials. I am sure that even if Abbott couldn't figure this out himself, that his staff have explained this to him.
In short, Republicans who are elected officials and conservative pundits know they are lying when they use this statistic they way they have been using it.
Like so many issues, Republicans don't actually want to solve it, and have no shame in lying about it, they just want to use it to try to score political points against Democrats.
For those who might care about what is happening, the increase in arrests is explained by two things. First, migrants who wanted to come to the US from March 2020 to the end of 2021 could not do so because of border restrictions relating to Covid. So, there was a huge pent-up demand in people trying to come to this country.
Now you might be saying, if they are coming from Mexico, the additional restrictions on the border from Mexico to the US shouldn't have presented that big of an obstacle.
Exactly! There is a second phenomenon at play here. For the first time ever, more migrants are arriving in the US via the Southwest border from countries other than Mexico or the northern triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador (see graph below). So in order to get here, they had to pass through multiple borders, each of whom had Covid restrictions between the dates I mentioned above. It was simply too difficult to do so. Now that everyone has relaxed restrictions, people are trying to come again in huge numbers, and they are getting arrested in the US when they try.
For those interested, the majority of people coming to the US from other than Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries are coming from Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia and Nicaragua. This complicates efforts to expel them, more can be read about that here: https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/29/us/mexico-border-encounter-data-analysis-cec/index.html
Dealing with this problem is a complex issue, but don't go to Republicans expecting an honest appraisal of the situation.
