The perpetual invasion

The Mexican – American border has been a key point in nationals elections since the 1980’s and the 2016 presidential election is not any different with Donald Trump, the GOP candidate, promising to “Build a Wall” alongside the totality of the border. In fact, Trump is only exaggerating a long life policy of border enforcement, which has been totally self defeating according to D. Massey, J Durand and K.A Pren in “Why border enforcement backfire ?” from American Journal of Sociology.

Indeed, the main objective of the continuous border enforcement policy was to discourage the maximum (if not the totality) of illegal immigrants from crossing the border, objective which was seen as so important that 53 billions of dollars have been spent in 34 years. Well, not only this policy didn’t stop at all the flood of immigrants but it actually raised the number of immigrants who decided to stay permanently in the United States ! The border enforcement policy broke a going back and forth circle between the US and Mexico, by discouraging only the return from the US to Mexico and not the travel from Mexico to the US. The practical effects outside failure have been the increase of the number of deaths across the border and the increase of the use of “coyotes”, so instead of weakening the smugglers it strengthened them.

The persons in charge for this failure, a failure both in term of money and human lives, are the bureaucrats, the politicians and the pundits ; who ignored the reasons of immigrations, such as demographic or labor demand, and replaced them by the fear of “an invasion” in order to follow their own interests. They created a moral panic by shaking the threat of an invasion to help themselves to reach material gains. Sadly as we can see now, the lesson is far from by being learnt, at least for the GOP.