The Mexican border fence was supposed to stop illegal immigrants from sneaking into the U.S. Instead, it’s keeping them from going home.

For the first time in decades, the leading presidential candidates are all calling for a comprehensive immigration policy. And they agree on one other thing: It’s time to bring on the fence.

More than six out of every ten Americans believe a physical barrier between the U.S. and Mexico would help deter attempts to illegally cross the southern border. That means it would be political suicide for the candidates to tell their constituencies that building either a real or “virtual” fence along the entire border isn’t a viable option. But that’s what needs to be done.

In the last decade, over 250 miles of pedestrian and vehicle fences have been constructed along the U.S.-Mexico border. Underground sensors, encrypted radios, radar towers and infrared night scopes have also been deployed, and some 15,000 guards patrol the border 24 hours a day. Just last week, the Bush administration announced it was willing to circumvent environmental laws in order to erect 30 more miles of fence.

But none of these efforts have prevented Mexicans from illegally entering the country, partly because of the near constant demand for Mexican labor.

Of the 400,000 Mexican immigrants that come to the U.S. each year, experts estimate that around 200,000 arrive without papers. Moreover, four out of every ten of those in the U.S. entered the country legally and simply overstayed their visas.

Since the two countries signed the Bracero Agreement in 1942, the flow of people coming into the U.S. has not changed drastically, even if it varies a bit when the economy takes a downturn (like now).

The real difference is that now fewer are able to get back home.

Instead of halting the influx of illegal immigrants, the fence has increased the number of immigrants who die trying to sneak across the border to one per day. At the same time, it has discouraged those already in the country from returning home.

Despite the measures taken by the Clinton administration in 1996 to prevent illegal border crossings, the total population of Mexicans in the U.S. doubled in the 1990s. By 2005—when 80 miles of federally enforced barriers and fences had already been built—about 11 million Mexican-born individuals lived in the U.S. Today, that number is approaching 12 million, half of which are undocumented.

Experts attribute this surge to increased border enforcement. In previous decades, when it wasn’t as difficult to cross into the U.S., Mexicans would come to do seasonal construction or farming; they’d work for a few months and then return home with their savings. The following year, they’d do the same thing, creating a cyclical pattern of seasonal migration.

But it has been shown that when the most popular crossings in Southern California and Texas were fenced off, the flow of migrants simply moved to Arizona, where the desert’s extreme temperatures have made crossing even more difficult.

This gave rise to a new industry of professional smugglers, who charge as much as $1,500 to get illegal immigrants into the country. The inherent risk and, more recently, extravagant expense have led many of these individuals to decide to settle permanently in the U.S.

“People who for years had been coming and going between the two countries decided it was time to settle down north of the harder-to-cross border,” explained Jorge Castañeda, Mexico’s former minister of foreign affairs. “They gave up seasonal migration, brought the family up when possible and affordable, and hunkered down until they became legal—one way or another.”

Watch video interviews with Jorge Castaneda, author of Ex Mex and Mexico’s former foreign affairs minister, as he discusses how “the situation will only get worse.”
In our interactive timeline and graph feature, see how the population of Mexicans living inside of the U.S. has exploded in the past century, and find out the key historical moments that spurned on that migration north.

As it became harder to go back and forth across the border, Mexicans started to move outside of California and Texas, where eight out of ten of those in the U.S. had lived at the beginning of the 1990s.

At that time, the economies of Mexico and California had taken a downturn, while the economy of the rest of the U.S. was booming. When these economic factors were added to an upsurge of anti-immigrant sentiment in California, a perfect storm was created that led more and more immigrants to move to different states.

The 2005 Census indicated that the population of Mexican-born individuals in South Dakota grew by 44 percent over the previous five years, while Delaware, Missouri and Indiana registered an increase of more than 30 percent. Meanwhile, New Hampshire’s Mexican population grew by 26 percent.

This presence of more Mexican immigrants—both legal and illegal—in more places has fed a growing anti-immigrant reaction. It also doesn’t help that Americans are concerned about national security and the economy, and are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the direction in which the country is headed. This has increased the sense of urgency many people feel about building a physical barrier between the U.S. and Mexico.

Advocates for the fence think it’s essential for protecting the country from possible terrorist attacks. Some argue that if the Berlin Wall was possible, why can’t the U.S. build something similar?

In fact, there are several reasons this can’t be done. For starters, the concrete wall that separated East and West Germany for decades was 96 miles long and built on a flat urban terrain. The U.S.-Mexico border is 1,960 miles long and crosses mountains, deserts, two major rivers and more than 20 railroads, not to mention four states in the U.S. and six in Mexico.
Our interactive graph shows you exactly how the Mexican population living in the U.S. has dispersed from the southern Tex-Mex states north, all the way to the Dakotas, between 1990 and 2005.There are 12 million people living on either side of the border, and poverty levels among them are below both countries’ national averages. In addition, the border is the most frequently crossed frontier in the world, with about 250 million legal crossings every year, which only adds to the complexity of sealing it off.

Activists who acknowledge the difficulties of the terrain argue that adding a fleet of helicopters equipped with radar and sensors would be enough to patrol the border.

But if such a virtual wall—or even the 2,000-mile state-of-the-art border fence, which the Department of Homeland Security estimates would cost between $4 and $8 billion—were to be constructed, the problem would persist.

Even now, illegal immigrants are finding other ways to get into the U.S.

“Since the construction of the wall started, reports of increased tunneling have come up. Smugglers are also turning to the sea,” according to Michelle Mittelstadt of the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington D.C.-based nonpartisan think tank on global migration issues.

“You can’t underestimate the ingenuity of smugglers or the desire of people to come for a better life,” she added. “As Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano once said: ‘You show me a 50-foot wall, and I’ll show you a 51-foot ladder.’”
Our short documentary “One Man’s Story of Crossing the Border” follows the journey of one typical man from Central America to New York. It’s a harrowing journey that you’ll never forget.