When Ronald Reagan said, “There you go again …” in the 1980 presidential debate, he wasn’t talking about people repeatedly crossing the border without documentation or repeatedly being arrested for new crimes. But he could have been. While border security and recidivism are both grave problems that reveal larger failings, the data on each is often presented or interpreted in a way that overlooks a crucial reality: the same people account for much of the activity.
Relying only on data that conflates these chronic cases with many others that involve people whose first apprehension or arrest is their last is not a harmless, esoteric research matter. Instead, combined with the failure to consider how enforcement practices can also affect these metrics, it feeds a flawed public perception that both systems fail an inflated number of unique individuals. This obscures the need for differentiated policy responses for each group. It can also lead to cynicism about the viability of any solutions let alone radical approaches, such as closing the border even to legal traffic and abolishing prisons.
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