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BRIEFING: "Good neighbours make fences: America is building a border barrier that is both too tight and not tight enough," The Economist, 4 October 2008.
Arrests are down along the border, owing to a combination of tougher enforcement and lowered economic prospects here.
What does not change over all the up-and-down on enforcement over the past 15 years? The steady climb of the value of remittances from roughly $1B in 1996 to $6-7B today.
Little has changed over the last century and a half. A U.S. government surveyor in 1850 noted the followed:
Labour is cheap and abundant in Mexico. At El Paso, Mexican labourers could be had for sixty-two and a half cents per day, they finding themselves; but men could doubtless be procured at even less price.
Back then, copper mines, today it's industrial ag and construction.
You either deal with the wage differential or the flow continues. It's as simple as that.
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