ImmigrationTexas draws more illegal immigrants, but overall numbers fall

Border Patrol numbers show that there has been a shift east in recent years in illegal immigration along the Southwest border, with more illegal crosser being apprehended in Texas at the same time that the overall numbers of illegal border crossers falling in other border states.

In fiscal 2009 there were 125,000 people who were caught trying to cross the border from Mexico into Texas. A KTAR reports that as of September 2013, just two weeks before the end of the fiscal 2013, there were 225,548 people who were caught trying to cross into Texas.

This is an 80.4 percent increase in five years.

Apprehensions in Border Patrol sectors in Arizona, New Mexico, and California dropped by 238,141, or 57.2 percent, in the same period.

Experts say that a combination of tougher law enforcement in Arizona, a strong Texas economy, and a greater number of Central American immigrants choosing the “relatively closer route” through Texas may be driving the shift.

Michelle Mittelstadt, communication director for the Migration Policy Institute, told KTAR that Mexicans still make up more than half of illegal-entry apprehensions, but that their numbers have been shrinking. She noted that as increasing numbers of Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Hondurans try to cross the border, coming through Texas would be a geographically more logical choice.

Pew Research’s Hispanic Trends Project estimated in a report this week that Mexicans made up 52 percent immigrants who were in the United States illegally in 2012, down from 57 percent in 2007.

Mittelstadt said that with fewer Mexicans trying to cross the border, there should be less pressure on Arizona, and that it is not likely that Mexican illegal immigration would increase any time soon.

“Central America does not have a population large enough to supplant Mexican migration, and the demographic, educational, and economic trends in Mexico are such that a turnaround in Mexican migration on a large scale remains unlikely,” she said.

Raquel Rubio-Goldsmith, coordinator of the University of Arizona’s Binational Migration Institute, told KTAR that it is not surprising that “people would always choose the easiest way they think to come to the country.”

James Lyall, staff attorney with American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, said that with illegal crossings at a historical low, “it does not make any sense to spend more money on continued operating that would cause hundreds of deaths.”

He said that “investing millions of dollars on a continued exponentially growing” border patrol is a questionable policy when illegal crossings are at a historical low.