U.S.-Funded Study: Mass Immigration from Mexico Ended, Border Enforcement Has Backfired

Mass immigration from Mexico has ended, an escalation of border enforcement has backfired and the greatest need now is a path to legal status for the 11 million illegal immigrants who are already in the United States, according to a new study funded by the governments of both countries. The findings, in the midst of a border migration crisis that includes Islamic terrorists, could lead some to wonder what the taxpayer-funded researchers were smoking when they compiled this one.

It’s no joke, though. Not only has mass immigration from Mexico ended, it won’t be coming back, according to the college professor in charge of this affair. His name is Douglas S. Massey, an Ivy League sociology and public affairs teacher who co-directs the Mexican Migration Project (MMP), which is partially funded by Uncle Sam through the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). With a headquarters in Guadalajara, Mexico MMP strives to further understand the complex process of Mexican migration to the United States. Massey attributes what he has determined to be the end of mass immigration from Mexico to the “decline of Mexican fertility from 6.5 children per woman in the 1960s to around 2.2 children today.” It’s time to shift from a policy of immigration suppression to one of immigration management, according to Massey and his fellow academics.

Their recent study is titled “Why Border Enforcement Backfired,” a collaborative effort between American researchers and their Mexican counterparts at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, a publicly-funded education center specializing in social science. Besides the government cash that regularly flows to the MMP, the study itself got an infusion of taxpayer dollars from the NICHD which operates under the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the nation’s medical research agency which annually doles out tens of billions of dollars to hundreds of thousands of researchers at universities and institutions around the globe. Established in 1962 under President John F. Kennedy, NICHD has a monstrous budget of its own ($1.3 billion in 2015) and distributes quite a bit of money to causes that seem to follow leftist protocol.

In this instant the research found that “border militarization” has actually resulted in higher numbers of illegal immigrants coming to the U.S. from Mexico. That’s because border enforcement has “affected the behavior of unauthorized migrants and border outcomes to transform undocumented Mexican migration from a circular flow of male workers going to three states into an 11 million person population of settled families living in 50 states,” this esteemed group of academics claim. They argue that border enforcement emerged in response to “moral panic” about the perceived threat of Latino immigration to this country. “The end result was a self-perpetuating cycle of rising enforcement and increased apprehensions that resulted in the militarization of the border in a way that was disconnected from the actual size of the undocumented flow,” researchers found.

It gets better. In a promotional announcement released by his university, Massey, the lead researcher, says this: “Rather than stopping undocumented Mexicans from coming to the U.S., greater enforcement stopped them from going home.” Here is his attempt to explain that absurd theory: “Greater enforcement raised the costs of undocumented border crossing, which required undocumented migrants to stay longer in the U.S. to make a trip profitable,” Massey said. “Greater enforcement also increased the risk of death and injury during border crossing. As the costs and risks rose, migrants naturally minimized border crossing — not by remaining in Mexico but by staying in the United States.” Are we supposed to take this guy seriously? It’s bad enough our tax dollars fund his work! One of his Ivy League pals, who also studies immigration, urges policymakers to pay attention to this earth-shattering research. Her name is Mary Waters, also a sociology professor, and she says this study shows that “throwing money at militarizing the border led to the growth of undocumented immigration and if we had just done nothing, undocumented immigration would be much lower.”

In the meantime, the porous southern border has created a huge national security risk and the region is a cesspool of violent criminal activity perpetuated by heavily armed Mexican drug cartels that have joined forces with Islamic terrorists to enter the U.S. Judicial Watch has reported on this for years and in fact, back in 2011 cited a Texas Department of Agriculture report confirming that Mexican drug cartels have transformed parts of the state into a war zone where shootings, beheadings, kidnappings and murders are common. More recently JW published an investigative series about Islamic terrorists operating camps in Mexico, just a few miles from the U.S. border and slipping into the country with the help of narco-traffickers. Just last week a high-ranking Homeland Security official forwarded information to JW involving an ISIS operative, Shaykh Mahmood Omar Khabir, stationed in the Mexican state of Chihuahua not far from El Paso, Texas, that crosses into the U.S. with the help of Mexican drug traffickers to explore targets for future attacks.