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According to the BBC,

Most of the Mexicans who are in the US illegally entered through legal means and then overstayed their visas, not by illicit border-crossing that a wall could prevent.

Looking for data on this, I found a 2006 Pew Report based on INS data from the 90s, an INS report and a GAO report from the early 00s, and there's also a recent DHS report.

But it's not clear to me that there's any recent estimate of either (1) how many Mexicans currently in the U.S. illegally (including those who entered decades ago), entered legally and overstayed, or (2) what percent of the current flow of illegal Mexican immigration to the U.S. is by legal vs. illegal means of entry.

Is there data to support the BBC's claim?

ff524
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1 Answers1

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There are two reasons to believe that less than 17% of illegally-present Mexicans entered using visas but overstayed.

First is the article Review of the Declining Numbers of Visa Overstays in the U.S. from 2000 to 2009 by Robert and John Warren. (Robert Warren was Director of Statistics at the INS, 1986 to 1995). According to Warren:

In Warren (1997), 17% of all unauthorized immigrants from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras were estimated to be overstays. For reasons related to the provisions of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (a relatively higher proportion of EWI than overstays were legalized), this percent was higher than it would have been in the 2000-2009 decade.

[above "EWI" means "entered without inspection", the opposite of entering legally with a visa]

Secondly, in the GAO report in the OP (tables 6 and 7), the number of Mexicans who were overstays was analyzed by assessing whether or not Mexicans arrested in security operations were overstays or not.

Only 42/472 Mexicans or 9% of Mexicans arrested for being illegally present were found to be overstays.

Additionally, in every single security operation studied, when two or more Mexicans were arrested, it was always true (23 out of 23 operations) that less than half were overstays.

(The comment by @dsollen helps illustrate how BBC would come to the wrong conclusion. It's easy to look at numbers for all illegal immigrants and see a large fraction are due to overstays, and then misapply these statistics to Mexicans. But because Mexico shares a border with the United States, it is much easier for Mexicans to cross illicitly by land without a visa, compare to immigrants from Asia for example. So it is critical to look at statistics that are specific to Mexicans to answer this question.)

DavePhD
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    This doesn't seem definitive - if overstays are significantly less likely to be caught, then they could make up a majority of illegals while still having smaller arrest numbers (not saying that's the case, but I haven't seen numbers either way). – Dan Smolinske Jan 27 '17 at 16:20
  • @DanSmolinske How you'll give the numbers that they are more abundant if they aren't getting caught? You have to somehow measure the number of immigrants to give this sort of statistic, and the evidence we have up to now points to the other direction. – T. Sar Jan 27 '17 at 16:22
  • I would guess DEA and Border Guard would head the list of security operations catching illegal presence. Both those are probably more likely to look for "EWI" than overstay issues. Another way to check numbers might be to look for an immigrants rights or Mexican-community group who conduct surveys of their people. –  Jan 27 '17 at 17:47
  • @notstoreboughtdirt These operations targeted workers at high security locations like at airports. They would arrest everyone who was illegal. – DavePhD Jan 27 '17 at 17:58
  • @tsar I'm not making the claim either way. It's just that if arrest rates are different between overstays and illegal entries, then it is possible that overstays could still be a majority while making up a minority of arrests. So purely looking at that statistic isn't sufficient to refute the statement in the OP. – Dan Smolinske Jan 27 '17 at 18:11
  • @DanSmolinske These aren't general arrests. These were operations where ICE would investigate all the workers at a given location (a specific airport, all nuclear power plants, a shipbuilding location) and then suddenly move in and arrest all the relevant people. – DavePhD Jan 27 '17 at 18:16
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    The GAO report itself states " These three alternative data sources on illegal immigrants indicate varying—but uniformly substantial—percentages of overstays: 31 percent, 27 percent, and 57 percent. " It also states numerous times that they believe the estimation of 1/3 of illegals being overstays from previous studies is an *under* estimation. I don't see how you can use this report as basis for a claim of less then 17% for overstays when the report itself states many times their estimation is for a higher value. – dsollen Jan 27 '17 at 18:21
  • @DavePhD There could still be a case if demographics are different (for example, the majority of ICE investigations concentrate on areas that favor illegal entries, while overstays tend to have jobs that ICE rarely looks at). But it seems unlikely the difference would be that great. At the very least it makes it hard to imagine overstays as a majority. – Dan Smolinske Jan 27 '17 at 18:22
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    @dsollen The question is specifically about Mexican immigrants. Obviously illegal immigrants from New Zealand would be less likely to walk across the border. – DavePhD Jan 27 '17 at 18:23
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    @DanSmolinske If you look at the lists of locations (tables 6 and 7) they are very well distributed. – DavePhD Jan 27 '17 at 18:27
  • Neither of the two reasons you present shows than less than 17% of Mexicans came legally. The first shows that 17% is the average of a larger group, assuming it applies to every subgroup is a fallacy of division. The second shows that 8% of an unrepresentative sample applies to the whole. – Sklivvz Jan 28 '17 at 09:14
  • @Sklivvz Regarding your first point, a maximum error that the addition of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras introduces can be calculated from the fraction of illegal aliens coming from each country http://immigration.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=000845#countries. 4,680,000 from Mexico and only 880,000 from the other 3 countries in 2000. So even if we assume that 100% the people from the 3 other counties traveled through Mexico and then entered illegally, the 17% would only increase to 20%. (I don't understand your point about 8%.) – DavePhD Jan 28 '17 at 14:36
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    @DavePhD sorry I meant 9%. Showing that 9% of the *arrested* Mexicans came legally does not tell us anything about the rest of the Mexicans. – Sklivvz Jan 28 '17 at 14:43
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    @Sklivvz I disagree because the entire population of illegal workers at each location is arrested in such operations. You could say it is biased towards people who work, or people who work at airports and other high security locations. – DavePhD Jan 28 '17 at 17:23