MICHELE NORRIS, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
I'm Melissa Block.
And, Michele, you've been off for a while on a book tour. It's great to have you back here in the studio.
NORRIS: It is great to be back.
BLOCK: And to begin this hour, we are going to talk about immigration: what's going on at the border, and what's likely or unlikely to happen on Capitol Hill. The new Republican leadership in the House has promised an even harder line against illegal immigration. More about Congress in a few minutes.
First, NPR's Ted Robbins tells us about current immigration policies.
TED ROBBINS: One word sums up U.S. policy toward illegal immigration: enforcement.
Ms. DORIS MEISSNER (Former Commissioner, Immigration and Naturalization Service): We're absolutely in enforcement only.
ROBBINS: Doris Meissner is the former head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. She's now with the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute. Some politicians paint the southern border as lawless and out of control. But Meissner says the numbers don't support that conclusion.
Ms. MEISSNER: The trend is that enforcement is making a difference.
ROBBINS: Numbers from the Department of Homeland Security show a drop in apprehensions along the border from more than a million five years ago to less than half a million last fiscal year. Fewer people are crossing because there are fewer jobs available, but the trend began a decade ago, long before the recession began.
Deputy Customs and Border Protection Commissioner David Aguilar.
Mr. DAVID AGUILAR (Deputy Commissioner, Customs and Border Protection): This has been something that took hold when we started resourcing the borders, adding the infrastructure that was required, the technology, and that drop has continued.
ROBBINS: Enforcement away from the border has also picked up. The government removed about 400,000 illegal immigrants from inside the U.S. last year - a small increase.
The biggest shift was a decision made two years ago to go after what the government calls criminal aliens: illegal immigrants who have committed crimes in the U.S. They now make up half of all illegal immigrants removed.
Interior enforcement resources, though, are still small compared with border enforcement, and there's still one place left where relatively large numbers of people cross the border illegally - Arizona.
Mr. AGUILAR: But even those numbers, Ted, compared to what we used to see, are fairly low.
ROBBINS: Two hundred nineteen thousand apprehensions last year in Arizona - less than half the number a decade ago. And despite high-profile incidents like the killing of a Border Patrol agent last month and a southern Arizona rancher last March, the FBI reports that overall violent crime in southern border states is way down from a few years ago.
Yet, as Doris Meissner points out:
Ms. MEISSNER: The concerns and the antipathy is at an absolute high point.
ROBBINS: It's not about the numbers, Meissner says. It's about the real and perceived impact immigrants are having on the country.
Ms. MEISSNER: And underneath it all the kind of cultural issues of how much immigration is changing us, what it means to the identity of communities.
ROBBINS: Take Arizona. State Representative John Kavanagh is targeting illegal immigrants who have children in the U.S. He wants to change the way the Constitution grants those children citizenship.
State Representative JOHN KAVANAGH (Republican, Arizona): We believe that the current policy of giving citizenship based on your GPS presence in the U.S. at birth is a bad interpretation of the 14th Amendment.
ROBBINS: Kavanagh and legislators from 13 other states will announce a plan tomorrow they hope will result in the Supreme Court reviewing the way birthright citizenship is applied.
Ted Robbins, NPR News.