Double the Border Guard? Syracuse Study Says Not So Fast

Broad public concern about the flow of illegal immigrants into the United States has fueled demands in Congress for the approximate doubling in the size of the Border Patrol (BP), from about 11,000 to 21,000 agents.

Although the BP has grown substantially in the last two decades, the proposed addition of 10,000 new agents in the next five years would be unprecedented. It also would make the BP the largest federal law enforcement agency in the country — much bigger than the FBI and with over four times more agents than the Drug Enforcement Agency, over seven times more agents than the IRS and almost nine times the number working for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. See table below.
Agency Number of Agents (full-time)

FBI 12,214

Border Patrol 11,106
proposed 21,000

DEA 4,925

IRS 2,829

ATF 2,401

Such an enhancement would also be expensive. At its present size, the current annual cost of the BP is about $1.7 billion. This would more or less double. The overall cost, however, would not be limited only to the agency. If, for example, the new “get tough” policy was coupled with a decision to fully enforce only the laws that are now on the books for the current number of BP apprehensions, there would necessarily be a dramatic rise in the total workload being handled by the federal criminal court system. At that point, also, the makeup of workload would would dramatically shift, with roughly 10 immigration cases for every current non-immigration prosecution. Such a volume clearly would require a substantial increase in funding for the additional prosecutors, judges, detention beds and support staff needed to process them.

Given the dimensions of many of the proposals now under consideration — the House has passed new legislation and a Senate Committee is currently holding hearings — the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) has undertaken a special analysis of government data examining how changes in BP staff in the past have affected its principal job: the apprehension of illegal immigrants.

Curious Outcomes

For all enforcement agencies — federal, state or local — the common sense rule-of-thumb is that more agents or more police officers result in more official actions — more inspections, more arrests, more apprehensions or whatever. (This is thought to be true because the number of offenses — whether it is people taking illegal drugs or aliens sneaking across the border — typically far exceeds the capacity of law enforcement ever to handle them all.)

This theory , however, does not appear to hold true for the BP on either a short or long term basis. From FY 1995 to FY 2005, for example, beginning in the Clinton Administration, the number of full-time BP employees more than doubled, jumping from 4,876 to 11,106. But for the whole period, BP apprehensions went the other way, dropping by over 10 percent from 1,324,202 in 1995 to 1,188,977 in the most recent available year.

An examination of BP records for a much longer time period reinforces the doubts about the direct link between agents and apprehensions. Looked at from 1947, for example, the data show three peaks in the overall number apprehensions — in FY 1954, FY 1986 and FY 2000.

Surprisingly, the unusually large number of apprehensions the BP reports making in both 1986 and 2000 — about 1.6 million of them — were considerably higher than the 1.2 million recorded in 2004 and 2005, even though the BP now has a lot bigger staff. See Figure 2 and supporting table.

From the new TRAC website at Syracuse.