CCIS Emeritus Director Wayne Cornelius was featured on CBS’s 60 Minutes program recently, talking about the virtual fence being built on the U.S.-Mexico border.
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“It’s a great deal for Boeing and its subcontractors. It’s a bad deal for the taxpayers,” Wayne Cornelius, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, told Kroft.
There are some, like Cornelius, who think the virtual fence provides only the illusion of border security. He has studied and written about the border for years and says the only thing that has ever stopped people from illegally entering the United States from Mexico was the …

“… Some researchers have cautioned that border enforcement would not prevent Latino immigrants from returning if the economy picked up. Based on the pattern of past recessions, ‘full economic recovery is likely to bring a quick rebound in northbound migration,’ said Wayne Cornelius, who recently retired as director of an immigration research center at the University of California San Diego …”
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“In an effort to address some of the health ramifications of California’s large immigrant population, the University of California launched the Center of Expertise on Migration and Health on Nov. 9 — part of its new Global Health Institute.
The COEMH, to be located at UCSD, was created to examine the impact that large population movements have on both the destination country and the migrating population’s country of origin. The program will pay particular attention to consequences that changes in federal health-care policy have on California’s refugee and immigrant population … ”
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CCIS furnished information for the graphics in the following article, which appeared in the newspaper El Colombiano. Click the image for a larger version.

Speaking on the KPBS program These Days, KPBS reporter cited research from the Mexican Migration Field Research program: ”… Where there’s a will, there’s a way, and people cross the border even who know that – Wayne Cornelius from UCSD did a study recently and he was down in the Yucatan talking to migrants who wanted to – who were thinking about crossing and about more than 40% of them knew someone who had died crossing the border and the grand majority of them said we know it’s difficult and we know that it’s hard to get around the Border Patrol but, …

“…Immigrant rights groups say Operation Gatekeeper and similar enforcement efforts along the U.S.-Mexico border are responsible for the deaths because they were designed to push illegal immigrant traffic into the mountains and deserts.
The strategy was to use the dangerous terrain as a deterrent.
It did not work, according to Wayne Cornelius, former director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at UC San Diego.
Illegal immigrant traffic simply shifted to states such as Arizona and Texas…”
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“…U.S., Mexican and international officials must recognize the deaths of migrants occurring during unauthorized crossings of the U.S.-Mexican border as an international humanitarian crisis and respond with reforms that make human life a priority, according to a new report released today by the American Civil Liberties Union of San Diego and Imperial Counties and Mexico’s National Commission on Human Rights (CNDH). The report, Humanitarian Crisis: Migrant Deaths at the U.S.-Mexico Border, finds that border deaths have increased despite fewer unauthorized crossings due to the economic downturn…”
Download the full ACLU & CNDH Humanitarian Crisis Report»

“…There are different reasons why border-crossing arrests are down, said  Wayne Cornelius, director emeritus of the Center for Comparative Immigration  Studies at UCSD.
Those who can afford it are also paying as much as $5,000 to be smuggled through border ports of entry, he said, seen as a safer alternative to treks through increasingly remote routes in the desert and mountains.
The depressed U.S. job market is a key factor, and even border security appears to have an economic factor. Tighter security has led to steeper smugglers’ fees, Cornelius said, often $3,000 just to cross on foot…”
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…The federal agency in charge of patrolling the borders, Customs and Border Protection, has added 11,212 agents in the last three years. In a recent study, Wayne Cornelius, co-director of a center on migration at the University of California, San Diego, found that 28 percent of Mexican immigrants he surveyed in early 2009 had slipped into the United States through a border station, including 52 percent who were hidden inside a vehicle and 39 percent who used fraudulent documents.
“This is now a well-established mode of illegal entry,” Mr. Cornelius said, preferred by women and children and anyone else seeking to …

“…Wayne Cornelius, director emeritus of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California in San Diego, says he has conducted 4,000 interviews with illegal immigrants and potential migrants from Jalisco, Zacatecas, Oaxaca, and Yucatan in the past five years. His assessment:
‘The existing border fortifications do not keep undocumented migrants out of the US. Not even half are being apprehended on any given trip to the border, and of those who are apprehended, the success rate on the second or third try is upwards of 95 percent.’
‘There is no reason to believe that additional investments in the fence …