Biden's border 'wall' won't work any better than others did

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How many ways can you build a wall on the U.S. southern border?

The White House, for one, thinks it can erect a better one. Over the last few months it has devised an elaborate system of deterrence to convince the many prospective migrants fleeing Venezuela and Nicaragua, Haiti, Cuba and beyond that the dangerous trek all the way to the United States is not worth the risk and the cost.

The political survival of the Biden administration may rest on that system's success. Unfortunately, the long history of walls, physical and legal, that the U.S. has erected along the southern border does not make for a promising precedent. If anything, the past suggests this newest wall won't work either.

Its test began at midnight. The end of the three-year plus official pandemic emergency takes away the main tool the administration has been using to expel hundreds of thousands of unwanted asylum seekers summarily by calling them a health risk.

Things will be messy, at first. Tens of thousands of hopeful migrants have massed at the border - somehow convinced that the end of the health-related expulsions under the now famous "Title 42" rule will make it either easier or impossible for them to make their way into the U.S., depending on what the smuggler told them.

Last weekend U.S. officials apprehended 8,700 people per day on average, up from some 7,400 per day the weekend before.

The administration is sending forces from the National Guard and the Army to help manage an expected horde of desperate people arriving at or between official border crossings. Never one to miss a political opportunity, Gov. Greg Abbott is dispatching a Texas Tactical Border Force, "loading Blackhawks and C-130s" to deal with "the chaos caused by President Biden's elimination of Title 42."

And then, President Biden and his advisers really really hope that after a few weeks, maybe even a month or two, awareness of the wall of deterrence they built with such effort will sink in, convincing migrants to stop showing up at the border without an appointment.

The new wall, to be sure, is sturdier than what the U.S. has tried in the past — beginning with the expulsions under Title 42, which did nothing to stop prospective migrants from turning around and trying their luck again. With that provision gone, the U.S. will revert to its standard approach, under what's known as Title 8, booking and deporting people who try to make it into the country without authorization.

An essential difference is that migrants removed in this way are automatically blacklisted, barred from entering the country for at least five years. Recidivists can be prosecuted and jailed. To make its intention extra clear, the administration is shouting to the four winds that folks who try to enter the U.S. surreptitiously, or show up without an appointment at a border crossing, will be presumed ineligible for asylum and thus subject to removal.

The expectation is that migrants who trudged north in miserable conditions and spent $15,000 on a smuggler only to find themselves back in Colombia will think twice before trying again. Hopefully, so will their brothers, nieces and cousins. "Early on this is going to look like an unmitigated disaster," said Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute. "But if they are able to formally deport large numbers of people, either to Mexico or their country of origin, they will slow arrivals."

Critically, the hardening legal wall comes with some new doors that the administration hopes will encourage people instead to try legal channels far from the border.

They include 1,000 appointments available per day to aspiring immigrants who use the CBP One App to book an appointment on their smartphones while on their way up across Mexico. The administration is also offering a monthly allotment of 30,000 two-year parole visas for Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, Cubans and Haitians who have a sponsor in the US and a passport, and apply close to home.

This measure could potentially add more than several hundred thousand legal slots per year. On top of it, there are expanded opportunities for H-2A and H-2B guest-worker visas, more family reunification visas and the restart of a visa program for Cubans. What's more, the U.S. is opening regional processing centers - originally in Guatemala and Colombia - in coordination with Canada and Spain to allow migrants to learn about their options and have their applications processed closer to where they live.

And yet, for all the bells and whistles, this could go wrong in lots of ways, for the same reason that all the other walls along the U.S. border have failed before: The set of incentives pushing migrants to the U.S. is extremely powerful. A massive effort will be needed to raise the cost and/or reduce the benefit of migration to blunt it.

Would millions of migrants and asylum-seekers expelled under Title 42 have turned around and gone back to their home countries to stay, if they had been subject to the legal penalties under Title 8? "I doubt it," said Wayne Cornelius, founding director of the Mexican Migration Field Research Program at UC San Diego. "The risk-to-benefit calculus still strongly favors migration."

As proof of concept, the administration touts how attempts by Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, Haitians and Cubans to enter the U.S. unlawfully have plummeted since January, when Washington first offered the 30,000 temporary parole visas and committed to expel to Mexico those who were caught at the border.

But as Adam Isacson of the Washington Office on Latin America pointed out, migrants from these countries just haven't shown up at the U.S. border (yet) because they're in Mexico, Honduras and Panama. "The expulsions have absolutely not deterred these nations' citizens from migrating," Isacson wrote. "They're still fleeing — but they're stranded."

The numbers don't work. The hope that the new legal paths opened by the U.S. will end the flows of unauthorized migrants inevitably crashes against the paltry 1,000 new interview slots offered per day. Over 72 hours last weekend the border patrol caught some 27,000 people trying to enter the U.S. unlawfully. Another 7,400 got away.

A few hundred thousand additional slots per year may look like a lot, but last year U.S. agents encountered migrants at or between border crossings 2.8 million times. Even if a third of these encounters were repeat attempts, that's nearly 2 million people.

Cornelius's research team interviewed thousands of experienced and potential Mexican migrants between 2004 through 2015, to figure out how making the border more challenging — via more agents, a wall, higher odds of imprisonment and prosecution, or harsher, deadlier treks through the desert — would affect their propensity to migrate.

"Nothing was found to have an appreciable discouragement effect on unauthorized migration," Cornelius said. "The monetary costs and physical risks created by stronger border enforcement were always exceeded by the potential benefits of U.S. employment."

Deterrence is difficult. From the early 1990s, the U.S. has invested tens of billions on border enforcement. Fences have gone up. They have been festooned with sensors, complemented with drones. The consequences for unauthorized entry have been tightened and loosened and tightened. They didn't convince millions of migrants to stay home.

It will take months to see whether the Biden administration's new shot at the problem will succeed. It's not even clear what counts as success. Reducing migrant encounters at the border to 650,000, as in the last year of the Trump administration? Maybe just preventing an immigrant surge. Getting Gov. Abbott to put away his helicopters may suffice. "This could be a turning point," Selee said. "I just don't know where it is a turning point to."

Eduardo Porter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Latin America, US economic policy and immigration. He is the author of "American Poison: How Racial Hostility Destroyed Our Promise" and "The Price of Everything: Finding Method in the Madness of What Things Cost."