Cato: Fences Made Crossings Deadlier—Asylum Made Them Much Less So

Following the deaths of two children in Border Patrol custody, President Trump made his pitch on how to solve the humanitarian crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. He spoke about “the dangerous trek up through Mexico” and pledged to end “the cycle of human suffering” at the border. His solutions were a border wall and ending the chance to apply for asylum, which he called a “loophole.” Yet the evidence indicates that border fences have made the journey far more dangerous—even deadly—and that asylum made the border safer.

In fact, asylum and other humanitarian relief programs appear to have already saved about 1,300 lives along the border since 2013. By contrast, increased enforcement—including the fence—appears to have resulted in about 4,600 more deaths from 1999 to 2019.

The Rise of Border Deaths

Border Patrol reports the number of dead bodies and other deaths of migrants that it finds along the border. Overall, Border Patrol has recorded 7,529 deaths from FY 1998 to FY 2019. This death count excludes hundreds of people who local authorities discover, according to separate investigations by CNN and the Arizona Republic. This means that overall Border Patrol figures are undercounts, but the general trends up or down from year to year are still useful to determine whether more migrants are dying in the harsh conditions along the border.

Figure 1 shows the official number of deaths identified by Border Patrol each year. The grey bars show total deaths, and the black line shows the number of deaths per 100,000 apprehensions—a proxy measure for how likely any particular crosser was to die crossing the border in that year. The absolute number of deaths increased from 263 to a peak of 492 in 2005, and it remained at about that level until 2013, after which it fell back to the lowest levels since the 1990s. The rate of death per 100,000 apprehensions, however, underwent an even greater eight-fold increase from 17.3 in 1998 to 132 in 2012 before dropping back to just 25.5 so far in FY 2019—the lowest level since 2000.

Read more at https://www.cato.org/blog/fences-made-crossings-deadlier-asylum-made-them-much-less-so