Category: Migration, Refugees, and Asylum

Federico was kind enough to send me “If Liberals Won’t Enforce Borders, Fascists Will” (Atlantic). I think that the article might answer the question that I raised in https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2019/03/06/why-werent-families-coming-over-the-border-to-seek-asylum-30-years-ago/. If our laws haven’t changed and Central American countries are experiencing less violence than 30 years ago, why do we see more immigrants from those countries today?

immigration is accelerating so rapidly in the 21st century less because of pervading misery than because life on our planet is improving for so many people. It costs money to move—and more and more families can afford the investment to send a relative northward. “Every boat person I’ve met has been ambitious, urban, educated,” says Doug Saunders, a Canadian journalist who has reported extensively on global population movements. “They are very poor by European standards, but often comfortable by African and Middle Eastern ones.”

The article reminds us that the best way to build a high-achieving society is via a flood of unskilled immigrants:

This massive new wave of immigration has brought many benefits to the United States. Of the 122 Americans who won a Nobel Prize from 2000 to 2018, 34 were immigrants.

In other words, it wasn’t a handful of targeted visa applications by universities bringing in graduate students or faculty that resulted in these 34 folks settling here, but rather a “massive new wave of immigration” that blessed us with their presence. We can never know which caravan member will suddenly become a tenured professor of physics, so one sensible approach to dominating the Nobel scoreboard is to start by admitting unlimited caravans.

The author doesn’t say how many of these 34 were undocumented immigrants versus how many got in through relatives, a visa lottery, or any of the other programs that Donald Trump has tried to scale back. Nor does he raise the question of whether there might be cheaper ways to lure Nobel winners to the U.S. We spend $18.5 billion per year on health care for the undocumented (Forbes). What if we offered Nobel winners and anyone who seemed to be on track for a Nobel the opportunity to split $18.5 billion per year on condition that they move to the U.S.?

The article makes it plain that the U.S. has been transformed and will eventually be unrecognizable:

In the 60 years from 1915 until 1975, nearly a human lifetime, the United States admitted fewer immigrants than arrived, legally and illegally, in the single decade of the 1990s.

By 2027, the foreign-born proportion of the U.S. population is projected to equal its previous all-time peak, in 1890: 14.8 percent. Under present policy, that percentage will keep rising to new records thereafter.

… When natives have lots of children of their own, immigrants look like reinforcements. When natives have few children, immigrants look like replacements. No wonder that, according to a 2016 survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute and The Atlantic, nearly half of white working-class Americans agree with this statement: “Things have changed so much that I often feel like a stranger in my own country.”

The author reminds us that Barack Obama, at one point in his life, had to talk to a car mechanic!

Barack Obama, in his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope, lamented, “When I see Mexican flags waved at pro-immigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I’m forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration.”

(It was too audacious for him to hope that he could learn a language besides English?)

The author proposes a fuzzy line and a policy that is as clear as mud:

Senators Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand have called for abolishing the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Gillibrand denounced the agency as a “deportation force”—as if it were possible to enforce immigration laws without deportation. While it would be destabilizing and impractical to remove all the people who have been living peaceably in this country for many years, it does not follow that any nonfelon who sets foot in the U.S. has a right to stay here.

People who got over the border a month ago have a better entitlement to permanent residence and citizenship than people who got over the border this morning? What’s the logical basis for this and how can this kind of reasoning be applied in practice?

Donald Trump and the people who voted for him are idiots:

The Trump-era debate about a wall misses the point. The planet of tomorrow will be better educated, more mobile, more networked. Huddling behind a concrete barrier will not hold the world at bay when more and more of that world can afford a plane ticket. If Americans want to shape their own national destiny, rather than have it shaped by others, they have decisions to make now.

But at present, the most important immigration decisions are made through an ungainly and ill-considered patchwork of policies. Almost 70 percent of those who settle lawfully in the United States gained entry because they were close relatives of previously admitted immigrants. Many of those previously admitted immigrants were in their turn relatives of someone who had arrived even earlier.

Every year some 50,000 people are legally admitted by lottery. Others buy their way in, by investing a considerable sum. In almost every legal immigration category, the United States executes its policy less by conscious decision than by excruciating delay. The backlog of people whose immigration petitions have been approved for entry but who have not yet been admitted is now nearing 4 million. (Only spouses and children are exempted from annual numerical caps.)

On average, a settled immigrant will sponsor 3.5 relatives to follow him or her into the United States.

Why is it obvious that most people who apply for a tourist visa should be given one and that, afterwards, anyone who shows up in the U.S. by plane can, as a practical matter, stay forever? (see https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2015/04/29/au-pair-to-green-card/ for one current technique) What would stop the U.S. from tracking residents more intensively such that it was practically impossible to live and work as an undocumented immigrant?

Atlantic raises some of the same questions that I raised in https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2017/04/12/how-much-would-an-immigrant-have-to-earn-to-defray-the-cost-of-added-infrastructure/:

Under present immigration policies, the U.S. population will exceed 400 million by 2050. Nobody is seriously planning for such population growth—building the schools and hospitals these people will need, planning for the traffic they will generate. Nobody is thinking very hard about the environmental consequences, either. The average American causes the emission of almost 17 tons of carbon dioxide each year, quadruple the annual emissions of the average Mexican and 45 times the emissions of the average Bangladeshi.

The article makes the same point as Milton Friedman, i.e., that you can’t run a Welfare state and open borders:

Too little immigration, and you freeze your country out of the modern world. Too much, or the wrong kind, and you overstress your social-insurance system—and possibly upend your democracy.

But why is it obvious that there is a risk of being frozen out of the modern world? China has a low rate of immigration. Is China frozen out of the modern world? Newark is modern (27 percent foreign-born) and Shanghai is old and crummy?

All of the choice spots in the U.S. will eventually be primarily populated by immigrants, albeit in crummy cramped living conditions:

Americans in the 2010s are only half as likely to move to a new state as their parents were in the 1980s. What has changed? Economic researchers have refuted some possible explanations—the aging of the population, for example. The most plausible alternative is directly immigration-related: Housing costs in the hottest job markets have grown much faster than the wages offered to displaced workers. Simply put, a laid-off Ohio manufacturing worker contemplating relocating to Colorado to seek a job in the hospitality industry is likely to discover that the move offers no higher pay, but much higher rent. An immigrant from Mexico or the Philippines faces a very different calculus. Her wage gains would be significant. And while her housing options may seem lousy to someone accustomed to an American standard of living, to her they likely represent a bearable sacrifice for all the other opportunities offered by life in the United States—and possibly a material improvement over living conditions back home.

(see also https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2017/03/27/tyler-cowen-says-weve-lost-our-mojo-but-maybe-it-is-just-welfare/ for why the mobility stats may be coming down; it is tougher to switch states when you’re receiving means-tested welfare benefits, such as a subsidized or free house)

Wikipedia lends support to the theory that the places in the U.S. that were formerly considered the nicest are heavily settled by immigrants. Miami, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Honolulu, Boston, and San Diego have foreign-born populations between 25 percent and 56 percent.

After reminding readers that Trump voters are stupid, the author inadvertently suggests that they are likely rational:

… the gains from immigration are divided very unequally. Immigrants reap most of them. Wealthy Americans claim much of the rest, in the form of the lower prices they pay for immigrant-produced services. Low-income Americans receive comparatively little benefit, and may well be made worse off, depending on who’s counting and what method they use.

Estimates from the National Academy of Sciences suggest that on average, each immigrant costs his or her state and local governments $1,600 more a year in expenditures than he or she contributes in revenues. In especially generous states, the cost is much higher still: $2,050 in California; $3,650 in Wisconsin; $5,100 in Minnesota.

Immigrants are expensive to taxpayers because the foreign-born population of the United States is more likely to be poor and stay poor. Even when immigrants themselves do not qualify for a government benefit—typically because they are in the country illegally—their low income ensures that their children do. About half of immigrant-headed households receive some form of social assistance in any given year.

Assertions that federal tax revenue from immigrants can stabilize the finances of programs such as Medicare and Social Security overlook the truth that immigrants will get old and sick—and that in most cases, the taxes they pay over their working life will not cover the costs of their eventual claims on these programs. No matter how many millions of immigrants we absorb, they can’t help shore up these programs if they’ll need more in benefits than they can ever possibly pay in taxes.

The author says that immigrants are making Americans less self-destructive because immigrants are less likely to abuse drugs and alcohol or commit suicide: “white people commit suicide at nearly three times the rate of ethnic minorities.” But this is semantics. The definition of “Americans” is not held constant. The people who were “Americans” before the immigration wave aren’t experiencing a life free of drugs, alcohol, and suicide. They’re just being diluted statistically.

American workers, even as many demand Socialism to ensure that they are paid more, are less educated and lower skilled and therefore have less value to employers:

In 2007, ETS—the company that administers the SAT—warned of a gathering “perfect storm”: “Over the next 25 years or so,” it said, “as better-educated individuals leave the workforce they will be replaced by those who, on average, have lower levels of education and skill.” This warning shows every sign of being fulfilled. About 10 percent of the students in U.S. public schools are now non-native English speakers. Unsurprisingly, these students score consistently lower on national assessment tests than native speakers do. In 2017, nearly half of Hispanic fourth graders had not achieved even partial mastery of grade-level material. According to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, these children are at significant risk of dropping out of high school.

But here’s something more surprising: Evidence from North Carolina suggests that even a fairly small increase in the non-native-speaking presence in a classroom seriously depresses learning outcomes for all students.

Perhaps indicating a huge advance in functional

“Border at ‘Breaking Point’ as More than 76,000 Migrants Cross in a Month” (nytimes):

The number of migrant families crossing the southwest border has once again broken records, with unauthorized entries nearly doubling what they were a year ago, suggesting that the Trump administration’s aggressive policies have not discouraged new migration to the United States.

At least 70 such groups of 100 or more people have turned themselves in at Border Patrol stations that typically are staffed by only a handful of agents, often hours away from civilization. By comparison, only 13 such groups arrived in the last fiscal year, and two in the year before.

The difference is that the nature of immigration has changed, and the demographics of those arriving now are proving more taxing for border officials to accommodate. Most of those entering the country in earlier years were single men, most of them from Mexico, coming to look for work. If they were arrested, they could quickly be deported.

Now, the majority of border crossers are not single men but families — fathers from Honduras with adolescent boys they are pulling away from gang violence, mothers with toddlers from Guatemala whose farms have been lost to drought. Most of these migrants may not have a good case to remain in the United States permanently, but because of legal constraints, it is not so easy to speedily deport them if they arrive with children and claim protection under the asylum laws.

… the practical effect is that most families are released into the country to await their hearings in immigration court. The courts are so backlogged that it could take months or years for cases to be decided. Some people never show up for court at all.

Given U.S. law and policies, all of this makes sense. But why was it different 20 or 30 years ago? We haven’t changed our laws or policies, have we?

Is it Guatemala that has changed for the worse? The population was 8.9 million in 1990 and is now over 17 million (Wikipedia). In other words, there are twice as many people trying to share whatever resources they have down there. But, on the other hand, from 1960 to 1996, the country was embroiled in a civil war. Despite the pressure from the near-doubling of population, surely life in Guatemala today is better than during an actual war.

How about Honduras? Population was 4.9 million in 1990 against 9 million today (Wikipedia). But the 1969-1999 period is summarized as “Wars and corruption” by Wikipedia. Life in Honduras overall should be better today compared to 30 years ago.

Related:

• “‘You Have to Pay With Your Body’: The Hidden Nightmare of Sexual Violence on the Border” (nytimes, March 3, 2019), inadvertently making a strong case for the border wall that the same newspaper says is idiotic?
• “Trump’s Surprising New Ally in Mexico? The Government” (nytimes, March 1, 2019): “Mexican officials are carrying out the Trump administration’s immigration agenda across wide stretches of the border, undercutting the Mexican government’s promises to defend migrants and support their search for a better life.” (i.e., the newspaper that ridiculed Trump for saying the Mexicans would pay for a physical border wall reports that Mexico is now enforcing a virtual border wall)
• https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2019/02/20/the-line-becomes-a-river-birthright-citizenship-is-the-root-of-the-fight-over-family-separation/
• https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2019/02/17/the-line-becomes-a-river-illegal-immigrants-want-to-work/

The Line Becomes a River is by a guy who worked as a Border Patrol agent between 2008 and 2012. He is outraged by U.S. policies that result in families of migrants being separated:

No father should be kept from his family this way, no father should have a young son and wake up unable to hear him in the next room.

A big portion of the book concerns two undocumented immigrants whose children were born on U.S. soil. Due to “birthright citizenship,” the children are U.S. citizens despite the illegal status of their parents. When the father is caught and deported, the parents decide that the children and mother need to remain in the U.S. so that the children can have maximum opportunity (and once the 15-year-old turns 18 he can sponsor his dad by right for a Green Card).

From Mom to the immigration bureaucrats:

Lupe wrote in Spanish on lined school paper borrowed from her children: I Lupe Balderas declare that José Martínez-Cruz is my husband since the year 1999. We have 3 boys age 15, 10, and 8. … now we miss him very much because I Lupe cannot take my boys to the park because lately I have been unwell. My husband took my boys to play soccer every Wednesday and on weekends he dedicated his time to us to eat and go out and now we miss him. My husband has given sixteen years of happiness and love to my sons and me but we won’t return to Mexico because my boys don’t know anyone there and they speak very little Spanish and it’s very difficult to adapt to another country when their whole life has been here they were born here and they are growing here. For us as parents we want the best for our sons Diego, José Junior, and Vicente. … we give hope to God that very soon we will be together because God does not like to see his children separated.

From a son:

Hi I’m Diego Martínez I’m the son of José Martínez I’m his oldest son I am 15 years old. I have two younger brothers. One is 10 and the other is 8. I’m working to keep my brothers happy to buy them what they want to keep them happy. Well my dad José is the nicest guy I know my dad is like my best friend and my father. I treat my dad with so much respect he’s the father any kid would want to have. My mom and my whole family broke down when we saw him at court on the first court he had everyone started crying. … I miss my dad he knew how to cheer us up when we were down. He took us to the park on Monday and Wednesday to play soccer with our church friend he got along with everyone at church my dad was the coolest person most nicest, most religious, most caring person always made my mom happy, always putting a smile in our faces every single day he’s also very smart and very funny. … How I feel right now about my dad being in jail and seeing him like this makes me really sad depressed my father isn’t here with us everyone that asks me about my dad makes me sad to say he’s in jail. My heart kinda stops pauses and breaks down on every letter they send him he was a man with three children and one woman. Each one of my friends I’ve had for many years loved my dad because he took us to places like to any place appropriate, to mountains in the west to parks to many places in the city. My dad did anything to make us happy now my life is depressing hollow my dad’s not here. A missing place for him here waits.

Thanks to modern telecommunications and transportation, the family can talk 24/7 and actually get together regularly:

I asked Lupe about the boys and she told me that an uncle with papers had offered to take them across the border so they could see their father.

A week later I checked in again with Lupe. Did the boys see José? I asked. Yes, she said, but not Vicente. He just got his arm put in a cast. He’s a little sad, she explained, he hasn’t seen his daddy since he was in court. Lupe told me that José was still at the border, that he planned to cross again soon, maybe this weekend, that everything was fine, that he told her not to worry.

I wanted to confess to her that I wished I had the courage to smuggle José myself, to ferry him safely through the desert, past the sensors and watchtowers, past the agents patrolling distant trails and dirt roads, past the highway checkpoints.

From the father:

For a while, you know, a couple months ago, after I had tried to cross again and again, I finally started to think that maybe my family could come live in Mexico until Lupe and I could arrange our papers. I even mentioned it to the boys on the phone. We don’t want to live in Mexico, they told me. We don’t know anyone there. We like it here, they said, we like our school.

When Lupe and I went to get married, the pastor told us that it was important to grow a family, that it was important for children to see their parents together. Es de mucho valor una familia unida. Family should stay together. If I must stay in Mexico and my wife raises my boys alone, they will be getting less care, less love, and so the family will slowly deteriorate. Being a parent is a job that you share, it’s a job you have to be present for.

Some politicians in the United States think that if a mother or father is deported, this will cause the entire family to move back to Mexico. But in fact, the mothers and fathers with the best family values will want their family to stay in the U.S., they will cross the border again and again to be with them.

If I am arrested crossing the border, I understand it’s part of the system. I realize that I am crossing illegally. But it’s complicated, you see. I know I’m breaking the rules, but it is necessary because my family is there. I don’t want to cause harm to the country, but I have to break the law. I have to. Es una necesidad. It is a situation of emotion, of love. Those who accept staying apart from their family are without love. Their children grow up without love. So I must fight against this.

I don’t want to carry drugs across the desert, I don’t want to get myself into more problems, but sometimes it’s not a choice. The same people who control the drug smuggling control the human trafficking, so in some places if you want to get across, you have to carry a load.

To be honest, I would rather be in prison in the U.S. and see my boys once a week through the glass than to stay here and be separated from my family. At least I would be closer to them. So you see, there is nothing that can keep me from crossing. My boys are not dogs to be abandoned in the street. I will walk through the desert for five days, eight days, ten days, whatever it takes to be with them. I’ll eat grass, I’ll eat bushes, I’ll eat cactus, I’ll drink filthy cattle water, I’ll drink nothing at all. I’ll run and hide from la migra, I’ll pay the mafias whatever I have to. They can take my money, they can rob my family, they can lock me away, but I will keep coming back. I will keep crossing, again and again, until I make it, until I am together again with my family. No, no me quedo aquí. Voy a seguir intentando pasar.

The final paragraph above is actually the last paragraph of the book, prior to a brief Epilogue.

The book reveals what I think is a fundamental contradiction in our laws occasioned by birthright citizenship. We cannot bear the idea of the federal government separating families. At the same time, we won’t simply allow anyone who claims to be the parent of a minor child to enter and stay in the U.S. forever. If the child is a U.S. citizen, however, there is no way to implement our stated values. We cannot deport the child. We insist on deporting the parent. But we also insist that the federal government should never separate parents from children.

[Separately, the author is a product of U.S. state government separation of parents from children via our no-fault divorce laws. His mom has been through family court so many times that the author thanks “three fathers” in the Acknowledgments. Mom of author did not meet her own father until she reached the age of 17. Until that age, the only contact that she had with her mother’s former partner was a photograph. Like Elizabeth Warren, Americans are eager to see children separated from one parent in the event that an American adult wants to have sex with some new friends (and will offer significant cash incentives for this behavior), but they’re inconsolable if children are separated from one or both parents in the event that a parent is detained and/or deported.]

Helicopter enthusiasts and Airbus salespeople will appreciate The Line Becomes a River. Whenever there is a need for transportation, a Border Patrol Eurocopter spins up. It might be a dehydrated migrant. It might be looking for a corpse in the desert.

The Line Becomes a River is by a guy who worked as a Border Patrol agent between 2008 and 2012. It is a worthwhile book if you want to understand the texture of land-based illegal immigration and border control (only a subset of illegal immigration; a lot of our uninvited permanent guests showed up in an airplane on a visa of some sort and then either asked for asylum or simply stayed).

The book repeatedly makes the point that illegal immigrants are good people and want to work:

At the station I processed the man for deportation. After I had taken his fingerprints he asked me if there was any work for him at the station. You don’t understand, I said, you’ve just got to wait here until the bus comes. They’ll take you to headquarters and then on to the border. You’ll be back in Mexico very soon. I understand, he assured me, I just want to know if there is something I can do while I wait, something to help. I can take out the trash or clean out the cells. I want to show you that I’m here to work, that I’m not a bad person. I’m not here to bring in drugs, I’m not here to do anything illegal. I want to work. I looked at him. I know that, I said.

My mother sighed and looked up at the ceiling. There are ways to learn these things that don’t put you at risk, she said, ways that let you help people instead of pitting you against them. But that’s just it, I offered—I can still help people. I speak both languages, I know both cultures. I’ve lived in Mexico and traveled all across the country. I’ve seen towns and villages that were emptied out by people going north for work. Good people will always be crossing the border, and whether I’m in the Border Patrol or not, agents will be out there arresting them. At least if I’m the one apprehending them, I can offer them some small comfort by speaking with them in their own language, by talking to them with knowledge of their home.

it I saw two figures lying on a blanket that had been spread out between the pews and the altar. As I approached, a man looked up at me and squinted, holding out his hand to block the light. We were resting a little, he said. It’s just that we are lost, muy desanimados. A woman huddled close to him, hiding her face. The man propped himself up on one elbow and told me that they had crossed four days ago, that their guide had left them behind on the first night when they’d failed to keep pace with the group. They were lost for days, he said, with nothing to drink but the filthy water from cattle tanks. Puede ser muy fea la frontera, I told him. The man shook his head. Pues sí, he replied, pero es aún más feo donde nosotros vivimos. The man told me that they came from Morelos. My wife and I, we’re just coming to find work, he said. He rubbed his eyes in silence. I have fresh water for you, I told them. At the station there’s juice and crackers. The man looked at me and smiled weakly, then asked for a minute to gather their belongings. He stuffed some things into a backpack, then helped his wife to her feet. Her face was streaked with dried tears, and when she turned toward me I saw that she was pregnant.

The author describes encounters with drug smugglers and other criminals, but stresses that the majority of illegal immigrants are looking for work that would be legal if they were documented U.S. residents or citizens.

So the book supports the open borders abolish-ICE point of view? Yes, but it also inadvertently supports the “build the wall” point of view! The immigrants described, no matter how long they’ve lived in the U.S., never graduate from Welfare. They work at minimum wage and have 2-6 children. Thus they’re entitled to subsidized public housing, food stamps, Obamaphones, and either Medicaid or subsidized Obamacare health insurance policies. So they are simultaneously workers cheered by advocates of expanded immigration and lifetime welfare recipients decried by opponents. Example:

Agents found Martin Ubalde de la Vega and his three companions on the bombing range more than fifty miles north of the border. The four men had been in the desert for six days and had wandered in the July heat for over forty-eight hours without food or water.  … I had been charged with watching over de la Vega until his condition was stable, at which point I would transport him to the station to be processed for deportation. I settled in a chair next to him, and after several minutes of silence, I asked him to tell me about himself. He answered timidly, as if unsure of what to say or even how to speak. He apologized for his Spanish, explaining that he knew only what they had taught him in school. He came from the jungles of Guerrero, he told me, and in his village they spoke Mixtec and farmed the green earth. He was the father of seven children, he said, five girls and two boys. His eldest daughter lived in California and he had crossed the border with plans to go there, to live with her and find work. We spent the following hours watching telenovelas and occasionally he would turn to ask me about the women in America, wondering if they were like the ones on TV.

So this guy will be earning a middle class wage as soon as American employers need a lot of Mixtec speakers. The drug dealers, at least, have credible plans to make money:

We caught our first dope load only two days after arriving at the station. We were east of the port of entry when a sensor hit, just three miles away. … Two hundred fifty pounds of dope—not bad for your second day in the field. I asked Cole if we should follow the foot sign up into the pass, if we should try to track down the backpackers. Hell no, he said, you don’t want to bring in any bodies with your dope if you can help it. Suspects mean you have a smuggling case on your hands, and that’s a hell of a lot of paperwork—we’d have to stay and work a double shift just to write it up. Besides, he said, the prosecutors won’t take it anyway. Courts here are flooded with cases like this.

On the ride back to the station, the kid regained some composure. He told me he was eighteen, that he had planned to go to Oregon to sell heroin, un puño a la vez.

The book leaves some questions unanswered, e.g., why didn’t all of the people the author catches immediately claim asylum and thus delay their deportation for a few years? Why didn’t everyone find a young companion (who at least can credibly claim to be under 18) with whom to cross the border and then stay together after being caught under the Obama Administration’s policy of releasing parents if they had been snagged with a child?

As a taxpayer, I was horrified to read about the money being spent. The cost of border patrol agents, including pension and benefits, is staggering. Helicopters are flying constantly, notably for medical evacuation of dehydrated migrants found by these highly paid border patrol agents. These aren’t $350/hour Robinsons, but $1,500/hour Eurocopters (which become $4,000/hour Eurocopters when federally operated; 40,000 aircraft hours per year in 2014!). I wonder if we could simply pay the Mexicans to patrol the border. If we offered them $10 billion per year and then subtracted the cost of lifetime welfare (about $2 million?) for every unauthorized person who slipped through, I have to believe that they would be a lot more efficient and effective. It would also cut down on gun fights between U.S. agents and bad guys, which have killed 123 officers since 1904. The author of the book makes the job sound incredibly dangerous and spends quite a few pages recounting his vivid dreams. The Marines on Iwo Jima faced only token resistance by comparison. The author never explains why Border Patrol agents are able to purchase life insurance at a lower cost than other federal employees from an independent nonprofit association. Either the underwriters are pinheads or carrying a gun for the Border Patrol is actually less hazardous than sitting at a desk in a D.C. bureaucracy.

Given that immigration policy will determine the future of the U.S., I recommend reading the book. I don’t think it will change anyone’s mind, though. Folks who support more immigration will be cheered by the stories of all of the big-hearted hard-working migrants who come to the U.S. to work. Folks who are against more immigration won’t be surprised to learn that the best-case scenario painted by the author is someone who earns minimum wage, is entitled to nearly every variety of U.S. welfare, and doesn’t commit any crimes.

More: read The Line Becomes a River