Contemporary immigration

Until the 1930s, the gender imbalance among legal immigrants was quite sharp, with most legal immigrants being male. As of the 1990s, however, women accounted for just over half of all legal immigrants, indicating a shift away from the male dominated immigration of the past.

Contemporary immigrants tend to be younger than the native population of the United States, with people between the ages 15 and 34 substantially overrepresented. Immigrants are also more likely to be married and less likely to be divorced than native-born Americans of the same age. Immigrants are likely to move to and live in areas populated by people with similar backgrounds. This phenomenon has held true throughout the history of immigration to the United States.

Three-quarters of immigrants surveyed by Public Agenda said they intend to make the U.S. their permanent home. If they had to do it over again, 80 percent of immigrants say they would still come to the U.S. 50 percent of immigrants say the government has become tougher on enforcing immigration laws since 9/11, and 30% report that they personally have experienced discrimination.

Public attitudes about immigration in the U.S. have been heavily influenced by the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks. The number of Americans who told the Gallup poll they wanted immigration restricted increased 20 percentage points after the attacks. Half of Americans say tighter controls on immigration would do "a great deal" to enhance U.S. national security, according to a Public Agenda survey.

Public opinion surveys suggest that Americans see both the good and bad sides of immigration. A June 2006 NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found the public evenly divided on the fundamental question of whether immigration helps or hurts the country, with 44 percent saying it helps and 45 percent saying it hurts the U.S. Surveys show that the U.S. public has a far more positive outlook about legal immigration than illegal immigration. The public is less willing to provide government services or legal protections to illegal immigrants. When survey data is examined by race, African Americans are both more willing to extend government services to illegal immigrants and more worried about competition for jobs, according to the Pew Research Center.

Demography

Current immigration rates are moderate, even though America admitted more legal immigrants from 1991 to 2000 (between 10-11 million) than in any previous decade. In the most recent decade, the 10 million legal immigrants that settled in the U.S. represent an annual growth of only about one-third of 1% (as the U.S. population grew from 249 million to 281 million). By comparison, the highest previous decade was 1901-1910 when 8.8 million people arrived increasing the total U.S. population by 1 percent per year as the U.S. population grew from 76 to 92 million during that decade. Specifically, "nearly 15% of Americans were foreign-born in 1910, while in 1999, only about 10% were foreign-born."

"The racial and ethnic identity of the United States is - once again - being remade. The 2000 Census counts some 28 million first generation immigrants among us. This is the highest number in history - often pointed out by anti-immigration lobbyists - but it is not the highest percentage of the foreign-born in relation to the overall population. In 1907, that ratio was 14 percent; today it is 10 percent."

Legal immigration to the U.S. increased from 250,000 in the 1930s, 2.5 million in the 1950s, 4.5 million in the 1970s, and 7.3 million in the 1980s to about 10 million in the 1990s. Since 2000, legal immigrants to the United States number approximately 1,000,000 per year, of whom about 600,000 are Change of Status immigrants who already are in the U.S. Legal immigrants to the United States now are at their highest level ever at over 37,000,000 legal immigrants. Illegal immigration may be as high as 1,500,000 per year with a net of at least 700,000 illegal immigrants arriving each year to join the 12,000,000 to 20,000,000 that are already there. (Pew Hispanic Data Estimates) Immigration led to a 57.4% increase in foreign born population from 1990 to 2000.

While immigration has increased drastically over the last century, the foreign born share of the population was still higher in 1900 (about 20%) than it is today (about 10%). A number of factors may be attributed to the decrease in the representation of foreign born residents in the United States. Most significant has been the change in the composition of immigrants. Prior to 1890, 82% of immigrants came from north and Western Europe. From 1891 to 1920, that number dropped to 25%, with a rise in immigrants from East, Central, and South Europe summing up to 64%. Animosity towards these different and foreign immigrants rose in the United States, resulting in much legislation to limit immigration.

Contemporary immigrants settle predominantly in seven states: California, New York, Florida, Texas, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Illinois. These are all high foreign-born population states, together comprising about 44% of the U.S. population as a whole. The combined total immigrant population of these seven states is much higher than what would be proportional, with 70% of the total foreign-born population as of 2000. Of those who immigrated between 2000 and 2005, 58% were from Latin America. Bureau figures show that the U.S. population grew by 2.8 million between July 1, 2004, and July 1, 2005. Hispanics accounted for 1.3 million of that increase. If current birth rate and immigration rates were to remain unchanged for another 70 to 80 years, the U.S. population would double to nearly 600 million. The Census Bureau's estimates actually go as high as predicting that there will be one billion Americans in 2100, compared with one million people in 1700 and 5.2 million in 1800. Census statistics also show that 45% of children under age 5 are from a racial or ethnic minority.

In 2006, a total of 1,266,264 immigrants became legal permanent residents of the United States, up from 601,516 in 1987, 849,807 in 2000, and 1,122,373 in 2005. The top twelve migrant-sending countries in 2006, by country of birth, were Mexico (173,753), People's Republic of China (87,345), Philippines (74,607), India (61,369), Cuba (45,614), Colombia (43,151), Dominican Republic (38,069), El Salvador (31,783), Vietnam (30,695), Jamaica (24,976), South Korea (24,386), Guatemala (24,146), Other countries - 606,370. In fiscal year 2006, 202 refugees from Iraq were allowed to resettle in the United States. Muslim immigration to the U.S. is rising and in 2005 alone more people from Muslim countries became legal permanent U.S. residents — nearly 96,000 — than in any year in the previous two decades.

In 1900, when the U.S. population was 76 million, there were an estimated 500,000 Hispanics. The Census Bureau projects that by 2050, one-quarter of the population will be of Hispanic descent. This demographic shift is largely fueled by immigration from Latin America.

Race legislation in the United States has known several historical phases. Its roots are to be found in the European colonization of the Americas, the Indian Wars, and the triangular slave trade. However, the 1776 Declaration of Independence included the statement according to which "all men are created equal," which contradicted racial discrimination and was one of the inspiring principles of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments.

The first period goes until the Civil War and the Reconstruction, the second spans the nadir of American race relations period, approximately until World War II, while the last period begins with the civil rights movement leading to the repeal of racial segregation laws. Apart of purely domestic issues, race legislation is also intertwined with immigration laws, which sometimes included specific xenophobic provisions Until the Civil War, slavery was legal, and the Naturalization Act of 1790 limited naturalization to aliens who were "free white persons" and thus left out indentured servants, slaves, free African-Americans, and later Asian-Americans. In addition, many states enforced anti-miscegenation laws (e.g. Indiana in 1845), which prohibited marriage between whites and non-whites, that is, blacks, mulattoes, and in some states also Native Americans. After an influx of Chinese immigrants, marriage between whites and Asians was in some states also banned.

Fugitive slave laws were enacted by Congress in 1793 and 1850 to provide for the return of slaves who had escaped from a slave state to a free state or territory. Black Codes were adopted by several states. In some states the Black Codes were incorporated into, or required by, the state constitution, many of which were rewritten in the 1840s. Article 13 of Indiana's 1851 constitution stated "No Negro or Mulatto shall come into, or settle in, the State, after the adoption of this Constitution." The 1848 constitution of Illinois led to one of the harshest Black Code systems in the nation before the Civil War. The Illinois Black Code of 1853 extended a complete prohibition against black immigration into the state.

The Indian Removal Act of 1830 legalized deportation of Native Americans to the West, a policy known as "Indian removal," while the Indian Intercourse Act of 1837 created the Indian Territory. Blood quantum laws determined membership in Native American groups, also deprived of citizenship. Reservations were created with the Indian Appropriations Acts in the 1850s. The Dawes Act of 1887 registered members of the so-called "Five Civilized Tribes" and included privatization of common holdings of American Indians. Some of its measures were repealed with the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, allowing a return to local self-government. Citizenship was not granted to Native Americans until the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.

The victory of the North during the Civil War led to the abolition of slavery with the Thirteenth Amendment and an expansion of the civil rights of African-Americans with the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Fourteenth Amendment also overturned the Dred Scott case of 1857, in which the Supreme Court ruled that people of African descent, whether they were enslaved or free, could not be citizens of the United States. The Fifteenth Amendment prohibited disenfranchisement on the basis of race. The Naturalization Act of 1870 concerned itself with naturalization of people of African descent.

However, the end of the Reconstruction period saw the nadir of American race relations, with increasing racial violence, in particular (but not only) in the South (with the activities of the Ku Klux Klan), while Southern states turned around the federal Constitution by implementing Black codes, Jim Crow laws and other forms of legislation aiming at prohibiting African Americans from exercising their voting rights. In 1896, the Supreme Court basically overturned the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendment in the Plessy v. Ferguson case, which established the "separate but equal" interpretation of the Constitution, thus legalizing racial segregation for the next decades. In 1899, the Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education case ended in the legalization of segregation in schools.

Anti-miscegenation laws were state laws that prohibited marriages of whites with blacks, and in some states also with Native Americans and Asians. Such laws were first passed during the Colonial era in several of the Thirteen Colonies, starting with Virginia in 1691. After the American War of Independence, several of the newly independent states repealed such laws. However, all the slave states and many free states enforced such laws in the Antebellum era. During the Reconstruction Era, several Southern states repealed their anti-miscegenation laws. But in all these Southern states, such laws were once more established between 1870 and 1884. After the Civil War, anti-miscegenation laws continued to be enacted in the new western states, where not only blacks and Native Americans but also Asians were targeted.

As one of many examples of such state laws, Utah's marriage law had an anti-miscegenation component that was passed in 1899 and repealed in 1963. It prohibited marriage between a white and anyone considered a Negro (Black American), mulatto (half black), quadroon (one-quarter black), octoroon (one-eighth black), "Mongolian" (East Asian), or member of the "Malay race" (a racial classification put into place to target Filipinos). No restrictions were placed on marriages between people that were not "white persons."

In addition to the expulsion of African Americans from the so-called "sundown towns", Chinese Americans were also driven out of some of the towns where they lived. For example, in 1870, Chinese made up one-third of the population of Idaho. Following a wave of violence and an 1886 anti-Chinese convention in Boise, almost none remained by 1910. The town of Gardnerville, Nevada blew a whistle at 6 p.m. daily alerting Native Americans to leave by sundown. In addition, Jews were excluded from living in some sundown towns.

Redlining of minority neighborhoods

Coloured people who lived in the red zones could not get mortgages to buy or improve their homes. Redlining was officialized with the National Housing Act of 1934 which established the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). In 1935, the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB) asked Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) to look at 239 cities and create "residential security maps" to indicate the level of security for real estate investments in each surveyed city. In these maps many minority neighborhoods in cities were not eligible to receive loans at all. This meant that ethnic minorities could secure mortgage loans only in certain areas, and it resulted in a large increase in the residential racial segregation and urban decay in the United States. Urban Planning historians theorize that the maps were used for years afterwards to deny loans to people in black communities by private and public entities.

Furthermore, numerus clauses in universities specially affected Jews, victims of anti-Semitism. On the other hand, mass immigration lead to restrictive laws, influenced by the Nativist movement. They were mostly enacted according to national origins, but also involved racial typologies developed by scientific racism theorists. For example, although Indian Americans were not classified as members of any races until the end of the 19th century, the Supreme Court created in 1923, during the United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind case, the official stance to classify Indians as non-white, which at the time retroactively stripped Indians of citizenship and land rights. While the decision was placating racist Asiatic Exclusion League (AEL) demands, spurned by growing outrage at the Turban Tide / Hindoo Invasion alongside the pre-existing outrage at the "Yellow Peril", and while more recent legislation influenced by the civil-rights movement has removed much of the statutory discrimination against Asians, no case has overturned this 1923 classification. Hence, this classification remains, and is still relevant today because many laws and quotas are race-based.

The 'Yellow Peril' and the National Origins Formula

Xenophobic fears against the alleged "Yellow Peril" lead to the implementation of the Page Act of 1875, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, expanded ten years later by the Geary Act. The Chinese Exclusion Act replaced the Burlingame Treaty ratified in 1868, which encouraged Chinese immigration, provided that "citizens of the United States in China of every religious persuasion and Chinese subjects in the United States shall enjoy entire liberty of conscience and shall be exempt from all disability or persecution on account of their religious faith or worship in either country" and granted certain privileges to citizens of either country residing in the other, withholding, however, the right of naturalization. The Immigration Act of 1917 then created an "Asian Barred Zone" under nativist influence.

The Cable Act of 1922 guaranteed independent female citizenship only to women who were married to "alien[s] eligible to naturalization". At the time of the law's passage, Asian aliens were not considered to be racially eligible for U.S. citizenship. As such, the Cable Act only partially reversed previous policies, granting independent female citizenship only to women who married non-Asians. The Cable Act effectively revoked the U.S. citizenship of any woman who married an Asian alien.

The National Origins Quota of 1924 also included a reference aimed against Japanese citizens, who were ineligible for naturalization and could not either be accepted on US territory. In 1922, a Japanese citizen attempted to demonstrate that the Japanese were members of the "white race," and, as such, eligible for naturalization. This was denied by the Supreme Court in Takao Ozawa v. United States, who judged that Japanese were not members of the "Caucasian race."

The 1921 Emergency Quota Act, and then the Immigration Act of 1924, restricted immigration according to national origins. While the Emergency Quota Act used the census of 1910, xenophobic fears in the WASP community lead to the adoption of the 1890 census, more favorable to White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) population, for the uses of the Immigration Act of 1924, which responded to rising immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, as well as Asia.

One of the goals of this National Origins Formula, established in 1929, was explicitly to keep the status quo distribution of ethnicity, by allocating quotas in proportion to the actual population. The idea was that immigration would not be allowed to change the "national character". Total annual immigration was capped at 150,000. Asians were excluded but residents of nations in the Americas were not restricted, thus officializing racial discrimination in immigration laws. This system was repealed with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.

During World War II. President Roosevelt enacted discriminatory practices with Executive Order 9066 of February 1942, which paved the way for Japanese American internment during which approximatively 120,000 people of Japanese descent (American citizens as well as Japanese nationals) were interned during the war. Americans of Italian and German descent, along with Italian and German nationals, were also interned, but on a much smaller scale. In Yasui and Hirabayashi, the court upheld the constitutionality of curfews based on Japanese ancestry. Despite these renewed xenophobic fears concerning the "Yellow Peril", 1943 Magnuson Act repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act and allowed naturalization of Asians.

In 1983, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) concluded that the incarceration of Japanese Americans had not been justified by military necessity. Rather, the report determined that the decision to detain Japanese Americans had been based on "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership."

The United Nations Participation Act of 1945, passed after the victory of the Allies, included provisions concerning immigration issues in regards to immigration policy be conducted in a fair manner and non-discriminatory fashion. Executive Order 9981, signed in 1946 by President Truman, ended racial segregation in the Armed Forces. The Luce-Celler Act of 1946 effectively ended statutory discrimination against Filipino Americans and Indian Americans erstwhile deemed 'unassimilable' along with most other Asian Americans.

The McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 (or Immigration and Naturalization Act) “extended the privilege of naturalization to Japanese, Koreans, and other Asians.” “The McCarran-Walter Act revised all previous laws and regulations regarding immigration, naturalization, and nationality, and brought them together into one comprehensive statute.”

The Civil Rights Movement and its aftermath

Legislation enacting racial segregation was overturned in the 1950s-60s under the pressure from the civil rights activists, starting with the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education case. Over the next twenty years, a succession of further court decisions and federal laws, including the 1963 Directive 5120.36 ending racial discrimination in the military, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the 1972 Gates v. Collier case which ended racial segregation in prisons, Home Mortgage Disclosure Act and measure to end mortgage discrimination in 1975, would completely invalidate de jure racial segregation and discrimination in the U.S., although de facto segregation and discrimination have proven more resilient.

The American Indian Religious Freedom Act (AIRFA) of 1978 pledged to protect and preserve the traditional religious rights of American Indians, Eskimos, Aleuts, and Native Hawaiians. Before the AIRFA was passed, certain U.S. federal laws interfered with the traditional religious practices of many American Indians. The Immigration Act of 1965 discontinued quotas based on national origin, while preference given to those who have U.S. relatives remained. For the first time Mexican immigration was restricted.

An executive order of 1961, by President Kennedy, set the basis for affirmative action against racial discrimination, by creating the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Executive Order 11246 of 1965, signed by President Johnson, enforced this policy. In the 1970s and 1980s, this new policy included court-supervised desegregation busing plans.

Demographics

Immigration is now what keeps America growing. According to the UN the typical American woman today bears 1.93 children. That is below the 2.1 "replacement" rate required to keep a population stable over time, absent immigration. The Census Bureau estimates the US population will grow from 281 million in 2000 to 397 mil in 2050 with expected immigration, but only to 328 mil with zero immigration. "If we have zero immigration with today's low birthrates the American population would eventually begin to shrink.

A new report from the Pew Research Center projects that by 2050, non-Hispanic whites will account for 47% of the population, down from the 2005 figure of 67%. Non-Hispanic whites made up 85% of the population in 1960. It foresees the Hispanic population rising from 14% in 2005 to 29% by 2050. The Asian population is expected to more than triple by 2050. Overall, the population of the United States is due to rise from 296 million in 2005 to 438 million, with 82% of the increase coming from immigrants. In 35 of the country's 50 largest cities, non-Hispanic whites were at the last census or are predicted to be in the minority. In California, non-Hispanic whites slipped from 80% of the state's population in 1970 to 43% in 2006.

Economics

At the June 13, 1998, Commencement Address at Portland State University, president Bill Clinton said, "new immigrants are good for America. They are revitalizing our cities...building our new economy...strengthening our ties to the global economy, just as earlier waves of immigrants settled on the new frontier and powered the Industrial Revolution. They are energizing our culture and broadening our vision of the world. They are renewing our most basic values and reminding us all of what it truly means to be an American."

Opinions vary about the economic effects of immigration. Those who find that immigrants produce a negative effect on the U.S. economy often focus on the difference between taxes paid and government services received and wage-lowering effects among low-skilled native workers, while those who find positive economic effects focus on added productivity and lower costs to consumers for certain goods and services.

In a late 1980s study, economists themselves overwhelmingly viewed immigration, including illegal immigration, as a positive trend for the economy. According to James Smith, a senior economist at Santa Monica-based RAND Corporation and lead author of the United States National Research Council's study "The New Americans: Economic, Demographic, and Fiscal Effects of Immigration", immigrants contribute as much as $10 billion to the U.S. economy each year. The NRC report found that although immigrants, especially those from Latin America, were a net cost in terms of taxes paid versus social services received, overall immigration was a net economic gain due to an increase in pay for higher-skilled workers, lower prices for goods and services produced by immigrant labor, and more efficiency and lower wages for some owners of capital.

The report also notes that although immigrant workers compete with domestic workers for some low skilled jobs, some immigrants specialize in activities that otherwise would not exist in an area, and thus are performing services that otherwise would not exist, and thus can be beneficial to all domestic residents. About 21 million immigrants, or about 15 percent of the labor force, hold jobs in the United States. However, the number of unemployed is only seven million, meaning that immigrant workers are not taking jobs from domestic workers. Rather, they are doing jobs that would not have existed had the immigrant workers not been in the United States. U.S. Census Bureau's Survey of Business Owners: Hispanic-Owned Firms: 2002 indicated that the number of Hispanic-owned businesses in the United States grew to nearly 1.6 million in 2002. Those Hispanic-owned businesses generated about $222 billion in revenue. The report notes that the burden of poor immigrants is not born equally among states, and is most heavy in California. Another claim that those supporting current and expanded immigration levels is that immigrants mostly do jobs Americans don't want. A 2006 Pew Hispanic Center report added evidence to support that claim when they found that increasing immigration levels have not hurt employment prospects for American workers.

The Kauffman Foundation’s index of entrepreneurial activity is nearly 40% higher for immigrants than for natives. Immigrants were involved in the founding of many prominent American high-tech companies, such as Google, Yahoo, Sun Microsystems, and eBay.

On the poor end of the spectrum, the "New Americans" report found that low-skill low wage immigration does not aggregate, the lower the wages of most domestic workers. The report also addresses the question of if immigration affects black Americans differently from the population in general: "While some have suspected that blacks suffer disproportionately from the inflow of low-skilled immigrants, none of the available evidence suggests that they have been particularly hard-hit on a national level. Some have lost their jobs, especially in places where immigrants are concentrated. But the majority of blacks live elsewhere, and their economic fortunes are tied to other factors.

Crime

Empirical studies on links between immigration and crime are mixed. Certain studies have suggested that immigrants are underrepresented in criminal statistics. An Op-Ed in The New York Times by Harvard University Professor in Sociology Robert J. Sampson says that immigration of Hispanics may in fact be associated with decreased crime. A 1999 paper by John Hagan and Alberto Palloni estimated that the involvement in crime by Hispanic immigrants is less than that of other citizens. Immigrants, both legal and illegal do not raise the rate of crime in the United States and native born Americans are five times more likely to be incarcerated than immigrants. In a study released by the non-partisan research group The Public Policy Institute of California immigrants (legal and illegal) were ten times less likely to be incarcerated than native born Americans.

In his 1999 book Crime and Immigrant Youth, sociologist Tony Waters writes that immigrants themselves are less likely to be arrested and incarcerated. He also noted, however, that the children of some immigrant groups are more likely to be arrested and incarcerated. This is a by-product of the strains that emerge between immigrant parents living in poor inner city neighborhoods, and their sons. According to Bureau of Justice Statistics, for example, as of 2001, 4% of Hispanic males in their twenties and thirties were in prison or jail, compared with 1.8% of white males. Hispanic men are almost four times as likely to go to prison at some point in their lives as white males, although less likely than African American males. There were an estimated 30,000 street gangs and more than 800,000 gang members active across the U.S. in 2007, up from 731,500 in 2002. New immigrants are susceptible to gang influences and activities because of language barriers, employment difficulties, support, protection, and fear.

U.S. Immigration Acts:

The Naturalization Act of 1790 established the rules for naturalized citizenship, as per Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution.

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first (and only) explicitly race-based immigration act. The Act of 1891 established a Commissioner of Immigration in the Treasury Department.

The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 established national quotas on immigration based on the number of foreign-born residents of each nationality who were living in the United States as of the 1910 census. The Immigration Act of 1924 aimed at freezing the current ethnic distribution in response to rising immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, as well as Asia.

The National Origins Formula was established with the Immigration act of 1924. Total annual immigration was capped at 150,000. Immigrants fit into two categories: those from quota-nations and those from non-quota nations. Immigrant visas from quota-nations were restricted to the same ratio of residents from the country of origin out of 150,000 as the ratio of foreign-born nationals in the United States. The percentage out of 150,000 was the relative number of visas a particular nation received. Non-quota nations, notably those contiguous to the United States only had to prove an immigrant's residence in that country of origin for at least two years prior to emigration to the U.S. Laborers from Asiatic nations were excluded but exceptions existed for professionals, clergy and students to obtain visas.

Operation Wetback was a 1954 project of the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to remove about 1.2 million illegal immigrants from the southwestern United States, with a focus on Mexican nationals. Since the 1920s, the term "wetback" has been a slur referring to Mexicans in general.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 discontinued quotas based on national origin, while preference given to those who have U.S. relatives. For the first time Mexican immigration was restricted.

The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 granted amnesty to illegal immigrants who had been in the United States before 1982 but made it a crime to hire an illegal immigrant.

The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRaIRA) made drastic changes to asylum law, immigration detention, criminal-based immigration, and many forms of immigration relief.

The REAL ID Act (2005) created more restrictions on political asylum, severely curtailed habeas corpus relief for immigrants, increased immigration enforcement mechanisms, altered judicial review, and imposed federal restrictions on the issuance of state driver's licenses to immigrants and others.

The United States–Mexico barrier, also known as the Texas border wall or Texas border fence is actually several separation barriers designed to prevent illegal movement across the U.S.-Mexico border. The barriers were built as part of three larger "Operations" to taper transportation of illegal drugs manufactured in Latin America and illegal immigration: Operation Gatekeeper in California, Operation Hold-the-Line in Texas, and Operation Safeguard in Arizona. The barriers are strategically placed to mitigate the flow of illegal border crossings along the United States-Mexico international border into the geographically vulnerable Southwestern United States. Opponents claim the barriers are a taxpayer boondoggle, an ineffective deterrent and that the barriers inappropriately jeopardize the health and safety of those seeking illegal entry into the United States, as well as destroy animal habitat, prevent animals from reaching water, disturb animal migration patterns and otherwise damage the environment

The 1,952 mile (3,141 km) border between the United States and Mexico traverses a variety of terrains, including urban areas and deserts. The barrier is located on both urban and uninhabited sections of the border, areas where the most concentrated numbers of illegal crossings and drug trafficking have been observed in the past. These urban areas include San Diego, California and El Paso, Texas. As of August 29, 2008, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security had built 190 miles of pedestrian border fence and 154.3 miles of vehicle border fence, for a total of 344.3 miles of fence. The completed fence is mainly in New Mexico, Arizona, and California, with construction under way in Texas. The border fence is not one continuous structure and is actually a grouping of short physical walls that stop and start, secured in between with "virtual fence" which includes a system of sensors and cameras monitored by Border Patrol agents. As a result of the success of the barrier, there has been a marked increase in the number of people trying to illegally cross the Sonoran Desert and crossing over the Baboquivari Mountain in Arizona. Such illegal immigrants must cross 50 miles (80 km) of inhospitable terrain to reach the first road, which is located in the Tohono O'odham Indian Reservation.

There have been around five thousand migrant deaths along the Mexico-U.S. border in the last thirteen years, according to a document created by the Human Rights National Commission of Mexico, also signed by the American Civil Liberties Union Between 43 and 61 people died trying to cross the Sonoran Desert during that same time period; three times that of the same period the previous year. In October 2004 the Border Patrol announced that 325 people had died crossing the entire border during the previous 12 months. Between 1998 and 2004, 1,954 persons are officially reported to have died along the US-Mexico border. Since 2004, the bodies of 1086 migrants have been recovered in the southern Arizona desert.

Between October 1, 2003, and April 30, 2004, 660,390 people were detained by the United States Border Patrol as they tried to cross the border illegally. In recent years people of non-Mexican origin, often from Central America, have also been using the Mexican border to secure access to the USA. (The U.S. Border Patrol refers to those from other countries as "Other Than Mexican").

Six to seven million people reside in the United States after having evaded the Immigration Inspectors or Border Patrol. There are an estimated half a million illegal entries into the United States each year. Often, migrants employ "coyotes", smugglers who promise a safe passage into the United States and are paid thousands of dollars per person they assist in crossing the border. The unfenced rural mountainous and desert border between Arizona and Mexico has become a major entrance area for unlawful migration to the United States, due in part to the increased difficulty of crossing illegally into California. The recent tightening of border enforcement has disrupted the traditional circular movement of many migrant workers from Mexico by increasing the costs and risks of crossing the border, thereby reducing their rate of return migration to Mexico. Each year there are several hundred migrant deaths along the Mexico-U.S. border. The difficulty and expense of the journey has prompted many migrant workers to stay in the United States longer or indefinitely. According to the U.S. Border Patrol, there were 1,954 migrant deaths along the Mexico-U.S. border between 1998 and 2004. In 1993, 283 Chinese migrants attempted illegal entry into the United States via a sea vessel; ten of them arrived dead.