Well, not so much, Mr President,,,, 

There Is No Invasion at the Southern Border

Data from the U.S. Border Patrol show illegal crossings are at historic lows.


On Sunday, about 200 Central Americans arrived at a border crossing near San Diego after an arduous, monthlong journey, on foot, through Mexico. The slow-moving “caravan” has been closely monitored by President Donald Trump, whose obsession with immigrants has gone into overdrive lately. In tweets and other public statements, Trump has evoked dramatic images of a mass invasion at the Southern border. He summoned National Guard troops to guard the border earlier this month, and he has repeatedly renewed his demand for a massive border wall. “Are you watching that mess that’s going on right now with the caravan coming up?” Trump asked the crowd during a rally in Michigan on Saturday night, claiming that San Diego is “being just overrun” by migrants. “Everybody pours through,” Trump said to the crowd.

But images of the migrant caravan belie the reality on the ground. The question of whether an invasion is actually occurring at the Southern border is, of course, an empirical one, and the federal government’s own statistics tell a much different story than the one offered by Trump. According to data from the Department of Homeland Security, illegal crossings are now at historic lows—about one-fifth of what they were at their peak in the late-1990s and early-2000s—and a large proportion of the immigration flows from Mexico that once occurred illegally now occur through legal channels.


In the six months between October 2017 and March 2018, for instance, the Border Patrol says it apprehended 177,021 unauthorized border crossers. This is about 12 percent fewer than it apprehended during the same six-month period last year. In total, the Border Patrol caught 310,531 illegal border-crossers between October 2016 and October 2017. That may sound like a big number, but the previous time apprehension figures were that low was in 1971, when the Border Patrol caught 302,517 people crossing the border.

Border Patrol apprehensions increased steadily during the 1970s and 1980s, and then skyrocketed during the 1990s when millions of people—mostly from Mexico—crossed the border illegally to fill jobs during the economic boom. Apprehensions along the southwest border peaked at 1.7 million in 2000. They’ve been declining ever since.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/04/data-from-the-u-s-border-patrol-show-there-is-no-invasion-at-the-southern-border.html