Chart of the Day: Our Crisis At the Border

I guess you’ve all seen this before, but here’s a multi-decade look at apprehensions of people illegally crossing the border into the United States from Mexico:

Why not just declare victory and go home? Whatever it is we’ve been doing over the past few years, it seems to be working: despite far more personnel and increased funding, the Border Patrol just isn’t catching very many people. That’s because far fewer people are trying to cross the border. The current rate of border crossings is about a quarter of what it was in 2000.

At this point, we already have the border itself pretty well in hand. The obvious thing to do if we want to reduce the number of undocumented immigrants even further is mandatory E-Verify, but neither Democrats nor Republicans nor Donald Trump seem to be very excited about pushing for this. This revealed preference suggests that no one is really all that unhappy about the current rate of border crossings. We should move on.

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AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

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