With voters ranking immigration high on their list of concerns, both Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and Republican contender Donald Trump have been pledging to boost border security and curb the flow of asylum-seekers across the country’s southern border.
As an academic researcher and the daughter of immigrants, I wanted to understand what restrictive migration policies have accomplished in the past. Digging into newspaper archives, government reports and accounts by nongovernmental organizations from the early 1990s to the present, I found that while laws and policies intended to slow migration at the U.S.-Mexico border have not generally curbed migration, they have consistently led to more migrants dying along the journey.
I also found that mobile phone-based innovations meant to make asylum safer and easier may not help as much as intended.
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Since 1993, decades of economic instability, political instability, intensifying violence and the effects of climate change across Latin America have spurred increasing migration rates into the U.S. as people flee life-threatening situations. In 2023, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported approximately 2.5 million apprehensions and deportations of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border. That’s up 750% since 1992.
This uptick in the early 1990s roughly coincided with Operation Blockade, a federal government effort to tighten security at the then-relatively porous…
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