Border Crisis

I was doing some reading around to better understand the problems at the southern border. This page of statistics is particularly interesting.

Fiscal year to date (Oct thru May) the number of border apprehensions of either unaccompanied children or family units with at least one child went up from ~90,000 during that period last year to ~390,000 people this year. That incremental 300,000 people is like the entire population of Pittsburgh suddenly showing up with no houses, no facilities, etc.

None of this goes to excuse actively bad behavior being allegedly committed by some members of the border patrol and by leadership intent on making an example of illegal immigrants for political reasons. However, it's also easy to see how even if everyone were acting in good faith suddenly having to deal with four times the number of people that were dealt with last year would cause all sorts of logistical and housing problems. Most of us were experience problems if we suddenly had to feed and house four times the usual number of people that we were responsible for last year.

This migration pattern also represents a significant change in the types of people crossing the border. Although the number of people apprehended who are either children alone or families with children has gone up by 4x, the number of single adult apprehensions is up only 27% from ~160,000 to ~200,000. For whatever reason, the increase in people crossing the border is almost entirely an increase in family and child crossings.

Meanwhile, PRI reports that while the number of people requesting asylum each month has been relatively constant about about 4,200 per month, that's only because the US has persuaded Mexico to keep a lot of the asylum seekers on their side of the border, where there is a 18,000 asylum seeker backlog. Even so, the roughly 40,000 people who have either applied for asylum or are waiting to do so are only one tenth the number of people who have been picked up crossing the border during the current fiscal year. While there are a swelling number of asylum seekers, there's a much bigger problem with people just crossing, and the US then having to figure out what to do with them. And that number of people is large enough to completely fill a new mid-size US city just with border crossers from the last eight months.