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684 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 6 (2019)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0684 and id is 1 raw text is: Debacles on the Border: Five Decades of Fact-Free Immigration Policy By JORGE DURAND and DOUGLAS S. MASSEY Since 1987, the Mexican Migration Project (MMP) has compiled extensive data on the characteristics and behavior of documented and undocumented migrants to the United States, and made them publicly available to users to test theories of international migration and evaluate U.S. immigration and border policies. Findings based on these data have been plentiful, but have also routinely been ignored by political leaders, who instead continue to pursue policies with widely documented, counterproductive effects. In this article, we review prior studies based on MMP data to document these effects. We also use official statistics to document cir- cumstances on the border today, and draw on articles in this volume to underscore the huge gap between U.S. policies and the realities of immigration. Despite that net positive undocumented Mexican migration to the United States ended more than a decade ago, the Trump administration continues to demand the con- struction of a border wall and persists in treating Central American arrivals as criminals rather than asy- lum seekers, thus transforming what is essentially a humanitarian problem into an immigration crisis. Keywords: migration; undocumented migration; immigration policy; border enforcement; deportations; border wall; Mexico; Central America or more than three decades, the Mexican Migration Project (MMP) has annually gathered data on documented and undocu- mented migration to the United States from random samples of households in sending com- munities located throughout Mexico and from purposive samples in U.S. destination areas.1 Over the years, the project has compiled an extensive database of qualitative and quantita- tive data on patterns and processes of Mexico- U.S. migration. These data have been shown to provide valid and reliable information on pat- terns and processes of Mexican migration to Correspondence: dmassey@princeton.edu DOI: 10.1177/0002716219857647 ANNALS, AAPSS, 684, July 2019 6

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