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DOANVO: Untangling immigration

The statistics alone cannot tell us whether Obama’s immigration policy has been a success or a failure

The wave of children from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala had reignited the debate on Obama’s relations with undocumented immigrants earlier this summer. And over the past few months, we’ve seen comments from people who blame Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) law for the crisis, as well as people defending Obama’s record as the president deporting the most undocumented immigrants in history. But evaluating Obama’s immigration record has proven to be far more complicated than either Republican or Democratic comments suggest.

According to Homeland Security’s Budget in Briefs, funding for immigration enforcement has increased by about 6 percent under Obama. Customs and Border Protection’s “Fiscal Year Staffing Statistics” showed a 6 percent increase in border staffing and its budget history stated that its funding increased by 30.5 percent, with increases slowing down with the Republican House’s arrival in Fiscal Year 2011. These numbers indicate anything but weakness in border control.

But funding increases haven’t been coupled with increases in extractions of undocumented immigrants. In Homeland Security’s “Yearbook on Immigration Statistics,” extractions are differentiated into two categories: “removals” and “returns.” While “removals” (deportations) carry penalties for immigrants who reenter the country, “returns” refer to immigrants sent out of the United States without the long-term consequences of “removals.” Obama’s 45 percent increase over Bush’s yearly “removals” has been touted by Media Matters, a left-wing think tank, as evidence that Obama’s strong deportation record.

When “removals” are added with “returns” for yearly extractions, we find that extractions declined under Obama. The statistic of total extractions has in itself caused a debate — the fact that “removals” carry strong penalties for repeat offenders might mean they are more valuable for border enforcement than “returns.”

The decline is best attributed to the decline in apprehensions, which Obama cannot control without changing immigration enforcement funding. The ratio between extractions and apprehensions under Obama has been the approximately the same as it was under Bush — 1.10. The United States is extracting more than it’s apprehending to catch up on pre-2000 cases when the ratio was below one.

The reason why apprehensions declined far more than during the 1980, 1970, and 1930 recessions is also debatable. Thirty years of data on apprehensions and border staffing has shown a strong negative correlation between staffing and subsequent apprehensions, so the small size of residuals from 2009-2012 when apprehensions are regressed with staffing and GDP growth imply that Obama deterred migrants in those years. But correlation doesn’t imply causality, so further investigation is needed.

In spite of Senator Ted Cruz’s rants on “amnesty,” DACA merely called for “prosecutorial discretion” — reprioritizing deportation for criminals, instead of providing amnesty. And when immigrants talked of “amnesty,” they talked of “permisos,” not amnesty, that were introduced under Bush with the Trafficking Victims Reauthorization Act, allowing children to stay if a review showed that they had family in the states.

Neither acts are culprits for the wave of recent immigration, as it occurred long after both were implemented. Violence may be responsible as worsening security levels unique to El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala coincided with increased immigration, pushing children to flee and go to the United States. Further investigation is needed, as Central American murder rates are notoriously hard to pin down — the UN reported over a 16 percent difference between its 2012 Guatemalan estimate and that reported by the United States.

With all the lies on national news, the first step in this debate is recognizing what we do not know. Only then can we research where further investigation is needed.

Anhvinh Doanvo is a first-year student in the College.

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