By JULIA PRESTON
Detentions of migrants trying to cross the border illegally dropped to 556,000 in the 2009 fiscal year, a decline of 23 percent over 2008 and the lowest number since the early 1970s, according to official figures released this week.
The number of detentions of illegal border crossers has been falling since 2000, when it reached a peak of 1.6 million. But the especially sharp decline in the 2009 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, was a sign of a steep decrease in the flow of migrant workers from Mexico and Central America, immigration officials and researchers said.
Migrants have been discouraged from coming by soaring unemployment among immigrants in the United States and tighter enforcement along the Southwest border, officials and scholars said.
Obama administration officials have pointed to the decreasing flow as evidence that they have achieved a major improvement in border security. In a speech this month laying out immigration strategy, Janet Napolitano, the homeland security secretary, argued that a “major shift” in enforcement at the Mexican border had created conditions for Congress to embark on an overhaul of immigration policy, including giving legal status to more than 11 million illegal immigrants.
Ms. Napolitano said that heightened enforcement meant that such a program would not unleash a new flood of illegal migrants across the Southwest border.
Republican lawmakers said they were skeptical, because hundreds of miles of the rugged 2,000-mile-long border are still thinly patrolled and have no fencing. As a backup to border enforcement, they called for worker verification measures to block American employers from hiring illegal workers.
“We think it’s a combination of increased border patrol and the economy,” Fritz Chaleff, a spokesman for Representative Brian P. Bilbray, Republican of California, said of the low numbers. “But we need measures to make sure that the jobs that are available go to the workers who are authorized to take them.”
The Border Patrol hired 2,600 agents in the past year, official figures show, bringing the total to more than 20,000.
But the main factor in the slowing movement of immigrants is the country’s deep recession, which has hit immigrants particularly hard — especially illegal ones, researchers say. By the first months of this year, unemployment among immigrant workers was significantly greater than that of native-born American workers, reversing a trend during the boom years, according to a study by the Migration Policy Institute, a research group in Washington.
Some researchers cautioned that border enforcement would not prevent Latino immigrants from returning if the economy picked up.
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