The Wall Street Journal reports that the number of apprehensions of people caught trying to illegally enter the United States has increased for the second straight year.
U.S. Border Patrol agents apprehended 388,422 people trying to enter without documents during the 11 months ending in August. That is already more than the 364,768 caught the year before, with a month still to go in the patrol's current fiscal year, which runs through September.
This is sure to fuel the calls by Republican lawmakers to further secure the border with Mexico before allowing immigrants already in the country illegally to gain access to citizenship under an immigration reform bill.
But the WSJ also points out:
The numbers are still far below the peak, from 1980 to 2005, when the Border Patrol averaged more than one million apprehensions a year. Migration from Mexico, which over the past four decades made up the largest immigration wave into the U.S. in modern times, shows no sign of reaching pre-recession levels, a report Monday by the nonpartisan Pew Hispanic Center said.
Still, among the increases that were recorded in the last year, the most were in Texas, where data shows more than half of the Border Patrol's apprehensions occurred.
