There is a long, painful story in the March 22 New York Times, "Officials Still Seek Ways to Assess Border Security", about how to measure the effectiveness of immigration control, with the notion being that there is a political need to have some indication that we have illegal immigration in hand prior to any amnesty.
The pain (to the Times) is evident because a senior civil servant, Mark Borkowsi, had said that he "had no progress to report on a broad measure of border conditions that the department [DHS] had been working on since 2010."
It all reminded me of one of those 1950s little idiot jokes that have been long since banned because of political correctness.
Sharply condensed: the two little idiots were in a pasture and were having trouble distinguishing the two horses grazing there; each had a mane and a tail of about the same size, and each had a slight cut on the right front leg, as a result of an encounter with the barbed wire fence. Then one of the two turned to the other and said "You know, the white horse is bigger than the black one."
In other words, instead of looking at the micro-metrics of apprehensions or Border Patrol staffing, as the government seems to be doing, why not look at the big picture, the number of illegal aliens in the country, and the trends in the size of that population.
Both the DHS Office of Immigration Statistics and the Pew Research Center issue estimates of the size of this population each year; the estimates usually move in step with each other, and collectively these estimates are accepted by most people who pay attention to them.
If you need a metric that immigration control is working, why not agree to look at these estimates of the illegal alien population, and agree that if these measures fall by, say, 15 percent a year for, say, three consecutive years then immigration enforcement is working and it is time to consider an amnesty.
Why worry about work-load statistics (e.g., apprehensions) when there are Census-based population data available? Why measure the manes, when the comparative sizes of the horses is known?
