In his State of the Union speech, President Trump failed to mention one important phenomenon that occurred under his watch last year. Except for one other year, 2017 saw the fewest illegal border crossings since World War II. While he has often bragged about this in other settings, it is possible that his advisors left it out of his speech because it clearly downplays any urgency to build a massive wall or send in reinforcements for Border Patrol.
In any case, he was right not to brag about it: 98.8 percent of the decline in illegal entries from 1986 to 2017 occurred entirely before Trump’s inauguration. While his year in office has continued a preexisting downward trend, his campaign rhetoric appears to have caused a pre-inauguration surge in arrivals. His overall effect is essentially zero.
Illegal crossings are naturally difficult to count, but researchers use Border Patrol apprehensions as an indirect measure of the number of attempts to cross. All else equal, more crossers results in more apprehensions. While apprehensions could also rise due to increased agents rather than increased crossers, researchers control for this effect by looking at the number of apprehensions per agent.
Figure 1 shows the number of apprehension per Border Patrol agent from the 1920s through the end of Fiscal Year 2017 (September 2017). As it shows, illegal entries were a significant issue in the early 1950s and again from 1970 to 2000, but since 2001, and particularly since 2009, illegal immigration has slowed to trickle. In 1986, each Border Patrol agent apprehended nearly 530 people—44 people per month. By the end of 2017, that number had dropped to just 16, barely more than one arrest for each per month.
Figure 1: Annual Apprehensions Per Border Patrol Agent, FY 1925 to 2017
Sources: Agents: INS; TRAC; CBP; Apprehensions: CBP
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