CARAVANS of MURDERERS and RAPISTS they said. Republicans have a very fertile imagination. Very dystopian and very dark, and not at all bound to reality, but very fertile.

It’s hard to find good data on this, partially because illegal migrant crossings are, well, illegal, and so those migrants intend to cross without being found, and won’t appear in any statistics. But in the cases where migrants are caught in process and are able to be sent back over the border, well, they are going to pick another place to try again. So those numbers are likely to be inflated a bit, as the same people may be caught multiple times.

But what’s not in dispute is that the number has been rising every year, and the current structure we have to process them can’t catch up. Republicans are aghast that sometimes, when we catch an illegal on our side of the border, all we can do is give them a court date and release them. But if our system is overloaded, there’s not much else they can do.

And the bussing of migrants from Texas to Chicago and New York might be a political stunt (and possibly illegal itself), but it’s an effective one. It’s hard to deny the numbers when they show up at the bus station. But it further emphasizes that the people running Texas think of these migrants as little more than cattle.

I think it’s important to add that this “surge” is a statistical surge, not a literal one. “God’s Army” is not going to come to the border and find a big hole in the wall, and migrants pouring in. Yes, there are a lot of migrants currently on the other side of that park, but thats because it’s easy to get to. they can always just find a different place to cross. The border is so massive that people can leak through, a few at a time, and still amount to a statistically significant increase.

In an election year!? Of course there’s a surge!

I find it really odd that a migrant caravan or immigrant surge always seems to start on January in even years, and often are more frequent in years that are divisible by 4.

They suddenly disappear, never to be heard from the Wednesday after the first Monday in November.

I can’t quite put my finger as to why but maybe someone smarter than me can look into it.

Found some data that is digestible. Their have been peaks, but a lot of the noise about the border during the Obama years was the GOP boy crying wolf. But now there is actually some real shit going down at the border and a lot of people are only now realizing that there is a fuck load of people trying to get asylum. Way more border encounters than ever before.

Although, I do wonder how many of these encounters are a result of the new trend of migrants willingly surrendering to border patrol. I imagine that, in the past, many more people did the opposite and were not counted as an “encounter” statistic. They were never encountered at all.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/11/09/whats-happening-at-the-u-s-mexico-border-in-7-charts/

https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/cbp-enforcement-statistics

It can be easy to get lost in all the media noise about this. Honestly, the best thing to do is to look at the data. The US government has been tracking “southern boarder encounters” for decades.

I’m rushing to a meeting right now and don’t have the time to grab some data, but as I recall, the previous to high peaks were around 1.6m encounters a year. And that had everyone freaking out. I believe the US is hovering around 2.4m southern border encounters for 2023.

My numbers might be a little off, but the point is, border encounters are significantly higher than they’ve ever been. Which is why even blue state governors and mayors that are pro-sanctuary are holding press conferences and asking for federal intervention.

I can’t put my hands on the actual statistics so my numbers could be off, but I was listening to an interview with Chris Murphy where he said that in the last 10 years, there’s been a jump greater than an order of magnitude in immigration 500/year to 8000/year with no increase in tools or people to assist.