If Trump wins the US 2024 election, will immigration at the south west border drop?
I will use numbers for border encounters at the Southwest border from the CBP which you can see here: https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/southwest-land-border-encounters
If the total number for 2025 is lower than the total number for 2024, the market resolves yes. Otherwise no. If Trump doesn’t win it resolves n/a
I will add monthly numbers to compare calendar year 2024 to 2025, not the financial year totals used by CBP (FY starts in October).
Update: We may close this market temporarily around election day to prevent manipulation.
Related:
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/112079753989223875
"My first acts as your next President will be to Close the Border, DRILL, BABY, DRILL, and Free the January 6 Hostages being wrongfully imprisoned!"
This is a great pair of markets, I've got them on the If Trump Wins Dashboard.
I already added some subsidy yesterday, and I'm adding another ten thousand mana right now!
@voodoo Actually he's got got a point in that from the title someone might assume you would use official statistics on total immigration, including legal immigration, from everywhere and not just Mexico.
Maybe we should change the title to "illegal immigration" or "illegal immigrant border crossings"?
@ManifoldPolitics Hard to call it illegal either as some of it turns legal.
Not sure what a more precise but still concise title to use…
Encounters are a measure of enforcement. While they may be a proxy for undocumented immigration, they are by definition “documented”.
I think transparently representing that this market is about “encounters” is better than “undocumented immigration”, since that matches the resolution criteria, but the problem remains that “encounters” also increase or decrease based on the length CPB goes to detain people (I personally think this objection is possible to overcome).
@BlueDragon My intent was for a metric to approximate undocumented immigration and when I looked at the data I saw that indeed it started rising again when Biden took office which I took to mean it correlates well at least directionally.
I’m open to tweaks or incorporating other metrics.