He was a military man who was appointed to head the Immigration and Naturalization Service in 1977 and - not unsurprisingly - adopted a military approach to the job. But it argued that by doing, he created the problems we face today.
What had been a fluid border with labor flowing back and forth became harder, making the movement of labor
- Click here for the Wikipedia entry on him.
Chapman retired from the Marine Corps on January 1, 1972, and became Commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, retiring in 1977.
Malcolm Gladwell has argued that Chapman's efficient and rigorous enforcement of US borders—ironically stemming from Chapman's idealism and military background—inadvertently created a rise in the population of unauthorized immigrants in the United States. (The Mexican border had been a porous border characterized by circular immigration; stricter enforcement raised the cost of crossing the border and incentivized border crossers to stay longer to justify the cost.)
For more: Tighter enforcement along the U.S.-Mexico border backfired, researchers find.
For even more: Why Border Enforcement Backfired.
In this article the authors undertake a systematic analysis of why border enforcement backfired as a strategy of immigration control in the United States. They argue theoretically that border enforcement emerged as a policy response to a moral panic about the perceived threat of Latino immigration to the United States propounded by self-interested bureaucrats, politicians, and pundits who sought to mobilize political and material resources for their own benefit. The end result was a self-perpetuating cycle of rising enforcement and increased apprehensions that resulted in the militarization of the border in a way that was disconnected from the actual size of the undocumented flow. Using an instrumental variable approach, the authors show how border militarization affected the behavior of unauthorized migrants and border outcomes to transform undocumented Mexican migration from a circular flow of male workers going to three states into an 11 million person population of settled families living in 50 states.
