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Flow of Illegals Slows With Economy

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This article was written by Dave Eberhart.

A slowing U.S. economy, resulting in fewer available jobs, is discouraging immigrants from illegally crossing into the United States, according to economists at Arizona State University in Tempe.

The economists, cited by The Christian Science Monitor in a report, maintain that the current trend of falling border apprehensions by the U.S. Border Patrol may be an early predictor of where the U.S. economy is headed – down.

Dawn McLaren, a research economist at Arizona State’s business school, has been looking at the figures for a decade and has concluded that every time apprehensions declined, the economy slowed about a year later.

"About a year before a recession, or a down cycle, there was a slowdown in the number of arrests” on the border, she said, according to the Monitor report.

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McLaren noted a very straightforward phenomenon: Since new illegal immigrants hold some of the economy’s most marginal jobs - the first to be left unfilled in a slowdown - when jobs are scarce, word quickly filters out to would-be immigrants.

"Because it is difficult and dangerous to cross the border, they’re not going to come unless they have a job lined up,” McLaren said. "If they get a call from someone saying it’s a good time to come, they do. If the caller says wait for the times to get better, they do that.”

Indeed, if she is correct in her theory, said McLaren, bad economic news is on the horizon. U.S. border officials are capturing fewer illegal immigrants - 30 percent fewer for the first quarter of this year compared with the same period a year ago.

The researcher noted some dramatic cycles: