It is much harder to sneak in from Mexico

Miami Herald:

It was about 10 p.m. on a frigid Sunday in the Arizona desert when Avelina, a 24-year-old Mexican textile factory worker, heard footsteps and shouting: U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents had found her.

The five days she had just spent trekking by foot across rugged terrain to find a way around the U.S. government's new billion-dollar border fence were lost. Instead of heading to meat-packing plants, lettuce fields or factories across the United States, Avelina and fellow migrant travelers were sent to the federal immigration detention facility in Nogales, Arizona, to be booted home.

''The agents told us they almost missed us, but then they saw us on the cameras,'' Avelina recounted recently while locked up with other women. ``Can you imagine? They have cameras in the middle of the mountains!''

That's exactly the message the Border Patrol hopes people like Avelina will spread back to their hometowns: Don't bother; there are too many agents and plenty of cameras.

Unprecedented spending on infrastructure, technology, and thousands more boots on the ground may finally be working. Here in the busy Tucson sector -- which encompasses a third of the U.S.-Mexico border -- 317,000 migrants were apprehended in fiscal year 2008. That's down from 378,000 the year before and 35 percent fewer than just four years ago.

A recent survey by the Mexican government's National Statistics and Geography Institute found that about eight of every 1,000 Mexicans left to live abroad between February and May of this year -- a 42 percent drop from the same period in 2006.

In 2006, the survey found, 1.2 million Mexicans left the country, compared to 814,000 a year later.

That decrease is directly related to enhanced enforcement and infrastructure on the border, agents say. A 10-day trip through both sides of the Arizona border show they might be right.

... people who work, live and await passage on the border said the drop in immigration came far before the U.S. recession.

It came, they say, with the fence. Fewer people are making the journey, experts said, and those who for years went back and forth with ease are staying put for fear of getting caught.

...

There is more.

It appears those who claimed the border protection measures would not work were wrong. It has clearly inconvenienced the casual crossings and requires significant additional effort which is discouraging many. Perhaps they should apply for legal entry.