Immigration and Border Control: How Data Driven Management Could Enhance Success

This paper discusses how greater collection, use, and communication of performance data would assist policy makers in formulating immigration policies and effectively developing and managing strategies for the achievement of these policies. It reviews what is quantitatively known about illegal immigration, what performance measures should be developed and systematically reported, and how these data could be used to formulate strategy and manage execution. This paper does not recommend specific goals or strategies; rather, it provides examples of how performance measurement could move politically contentious policy debates forward by focusing discussion on fact-based choices between alternative aims and strategies and increasing the confidence of policy makers and the public through the linking of goals to strategies in transparent, measurable ways that provide greater accountability for results.