Hebbronville, Texas – The Border Patrol is bigger than ever, but ranch manager Bill Hellen says he is seeing more illegal immigrants than ever.
When the Border Patrol put up a new checkpoint on a highway near Hebbronville, about 50 miles from the border, illegal immigrants simply went around it, slashing his fences and sneaking through his ranch, he said.
He doesn’t see that changing soon, even with President Bush’s promise of 6,000 new agents along the border.
The Border Patrol doubled in size from 1995 to 2005, reaching 11,500 agents, but many experts agree with Hellen that the buildup hasn’t done much good.
“What we find pretty consistently is that the number of agents just does not seem to be related to the number of apprehensions that they make,” said Linda Roberge, a research fellow at the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University in New York.
“Ultimately, I suppose if they spend enough money, they can build a wall, station a Border Patrol agent every hundred yards for 2,000 miles; that might do it. But what would that achieve?” said Doug Massey, a Princeton University sociologist.
Massey said Border Patrol buildups gum up a cyclical migration among men who usually stay a year or two and then return home. The buildups make them stay in the U.S. for fear they won’t be able to return and then have their families smuggled in to join them, he said.
