Analyzing the Homeland Security of the U.S.‐Mexico Border

Lawrence M. Wein, Yifan Liu and Arik Motskin

Risk Analysis, 2009, vol. 29, issue 5, 699-713

Abstract: We develop a mathematical optimization model at the intersection of homeland security and immigration, that chooses various immigration enforcement decision variables to minimize the probability that a terrorist can successfully enter the United States across the U.S.‐Mexico border. Included are a discrete choice model for the probability that a potential alien crosser will attempt to cross the U.S.‐Mexico border in terms of the likelihood of success and the U.S. wage for illegal workers, a spatial model that calculates the apprehension probability as a function of the number of crossers, the number of border patrol agents, and the amount of surveillance technology on the border, a queueing model that determines the probability that an apprehended alien will be detained and removed as a function of the number of detention beds, and an equilibrium model for the illegal wage that balances the supply and demand for work and incorporates the impact of worksite enforcement. Our main result is that detention beds are the current system bottleneck (even after the large reduction in detention residence times recently achieved by expedited removal), and increases in border patrol staffing or surveillance technology would not provide any improvements without a large increase in detention capacity. Our model also predicts that surveillance technology is more cost effective than border patrol agents, which in turn are more cost effective than worksite inspectors, but these results are not robust due to the difficulty of predicting human behavior from existing data. Overall, the probability that a terrorist can successfully enter the United States is very high, and it would be extremely costly and difficult to significantly reduce it. We also investigate the alternative objective function of minimizing the flow of illegal aliens across the U.S.‐Mexico border, and obtain qualitatively similar results.

Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1539-6924.2008.01180.x

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:riskan:v:29:y:2009:i:5:p:699-713

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Risk Analysis from John Wiley & Sons
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().