New Report Examines Evolution of U.S. Southwest Border Control since 1990s and How Today’s Migration Challenges Were Decades in the Making

WASHINGTON, DC — The U.S. border control enterprise at the U.S.-Mexico border has faced two distinctly different eras of unauthorized migration: The first, from the 1980s through the early 2010s, was addressing overwhelmingly Mexican seasonal adult flows. The current era has been marked first by a rise in arrivals of Central American children and families beginning in 2014, and most recently unprecedented flows of asylum seekers from Latin America and beyond.