I read a lot of right-wing and conservative sites on the web and I often see the authors highlighting the huge number of illegal aliens crossing the southern border. What I rarely see is any of them noting progress, from their viewpoint, when it happens under Biden.

That’s one of many reasons that the Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh’s work is so valuable. He does careful empirical work to document what’s happening, On March 29, on Cato’s blog, Alex wrote a piece titled “Biden’s Border Immigration Policy Is Still Reducing Border Crossings and Illegal Immigration.”

An excerpt:

From December 2022 to February 2023, encounters of migrants crossing the southwest (SW) border with Mexico are down 39 percent. President Biden’s immigration and border plan that expanded legal migration to the United States through humanitarian parole should take credit for this decline. Under Biden’s plan, up to 30,000 migrants from Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Haiti (VCNH migrants) are allowed to enter the United States legally each month through humanitarian parole. As a result, more of them are waiting to come legally rather than attempting to cross illegally.

In February 2023, the number of VCNH migrants encountered, found inadmissible by Customs and Border Protection (CBP), or apprehended by Border Patrol decreased by 84 percent compared to December 2022. The number of VCNH migrants showing up at the border fell from 91,344 in December to 22,084 in January and then further down to 14,381 in February (see Figure 1).

The picture above is Alex’s Figure 1.

Read the whole thing.