Continuation of the Blogger’s Exchange

We have been engaged with a Blogger’s exchange on immigration with Conor from Beyond Borders Blog (click here).  To this point, the discussion on guest worker programs and immigration reform have been posted there.  We are moving the discussion to our blog.

Here is Conor’s latest installment.

Kevin,

I want to begin by clarifying my arguments about border enforcement. In a past entry, you argued that beefed up border security won’t work, and you cited beefed up enforcement at San Diego and El Paso as evidence.

I think that argument is flawed. It is akin to damning half a river, and concluding that dams don’t work when water continues to flow through the un-dammed section. My point isn’t that El Paso and San Diego are successful in the big picture, only that the measures taken there have significantly reduced immigration, and so maybe the same measures would stop illegal immigration as much everywhere if applied across the whole border.

The fact is that we haven’t ever attempted to fully seal the southern border to illegal immigration. At the very least, that means it’s incorrect to argue that we’ve tried and failed, and so we shouldn’t try anymore. Empirically, what would happen if we walled the whole border is today an unknown.

I think it would reduce illegal immigration: it seems obvious that it would make it harder (though not impossible) to sneak into the United States. When something becomes harder, it is marginally less attractive to attempt, and marginally less easy to do successfully. How could it possibly not reduce illegal immigration given the thousands who walk across entirely unfortified sections of the border each day?

As for humanity to border crossers, our current system – a border wall near urban areas, and the absence of a wall in desert areas – is the least humane of all options, because as immigrants seek the least fortified part of the border they are drawn to the most dangerous terrain.

By your terms isn’t it more humane – though arguably not most humane – to wall the entire border, rather than just the portion we’ve walled now? At least then the most dangerous sections of the desert wouldn’t be the most attractive place to cross.

I’d welcome a border wall—augmented by motion censors and guards—so formidable that no one would bother trying to cross illegally and as a result no one would die trying. That’s an impossible extreme, but approximating it as closely as possible seems worthwhile.

* * *

We agree that workplace enforcement hasn’t really been tried.

You argue that effective workplace enforcement is almost impossible:

Absent a tamper-proof national identification card and complete computer database of citizens and lawful immigrants, any sanctions program would result in big – and legitimate — problems for employers (seeking to comply with the immigration laws, not violate the civil rights laws, and field a work force) and immigrants and some citizens (who may be lawfully entitled to work but assumed to be undocumented because of their national origin). It is difficult to see a tamper-proof card and comprehensive computer database being developed in the near future. Indeed, as the U.S. government acknowledges, our current immigration computer systems are woefully inadequate for tracking lawful immigrants and temporary visitors.</blockquote> I want to focus on that paragraph, and point out three things:

1) Tamper proof cards don’t exist. If you can make it, you can forge it. But surely a card as tamper-resistant as, say, a US passport, would go a long way toward enabling enough workplace enforcement that illegal immigration could be significantly reduced.

2) Even given our current system—absent the card and computer system—we could do a whole lot more workplace enforcement than is done. What effect would that have? I don’t think anyone knows, but it’s at least possible that even if only 15 percent of companies that knowingly hire illegal immigrants were caught and fined, far more companies would conclude that the risk of getting caught is no longer worth the risk of breaking the law. At current levels of enforcement, which we both find disingenuous, the economic incentive to cheat is surely worth it if you’re just talking dollars and cents.

3) What seems easier to you: creating a tamper-resistant document for employees and employers and a functioning computer system to swipe them… or implementing an earned legalization system, as you suggest?

Presumably earned legalization means giving an illegal immigrant citizenship if he or she pays a small fine, proves they’ve been employed for a given amount of time, demonstrates they’ve been in the country for a given amount of time without committing a crime, etc.

If your argument is that we can’t even come up with a system of identifying citizens and legal immigrants, and distinguishing them from illegal immigrants, how on earth can you then argue that we’re going to be able to come up with a system that identifies illegal immigrants and tracks how long they’ve been in the country and whether they’ve paid a fine and whether they’ve ever committed a felony?

Doesn’t it seem obvious that my proposal, whatever you think of its other merits, is a far easier one to implement than yours?

Finally, I’m puzzled by this part of your argument:

I would seriously look at the European Union as a model for regional labor migration. In the EU, workers can cross national boundaries. The fear that a flood of migrants would destroy Europe – for example, by a flood of migrants from Portugal to and Spain or from Poland to Germany –never materialized. The two newest EU members, Bulgaria and Romania, have economies and wage differentials with other EU members that are not very different from those between the United States and Mexico. Some EU members feared a mass migration from the new EU members and agreed to transitional rules, phasing in labor migration from the two newest EU members. Perhaps something like this would work among the three nations party to the North American Free Trade Agreement.

I have several objections:

1) It isn’t at all clear that Europe is better off when it comes to immigration than the United States. The continent is beset by a constant flow of illegal immigrants from outside Europe, some of whom have been radicalized and present a far greater threat to European national security than America’s illegal immigrants present to our national security.

2) The disparity in wealth and living conditions between Guatamala or el Salvador and the United States is quite a bit bigger than the disparity between Portugal and Spain.

3) When Polish plumbers work in Germany, they aren’t citizens. They can’t vote in German elections or receive German welfare. They are, in essence, guest workers, which you oppose.

4) Europe’s economy is very different than ours in ways that impact what happens when you add lots of immigrant workers to the mix. The poorest citizens of Germany and Spain have a social safety net unlike anything we have in the United States, and are thus less threatened by the notion of an immigrant workforce raising the domestic level of unemployment among the poor.

My biggest objection is that the European Union’s member countries seem more analogous the individual states of the United States than to the countries of Latin America. We do a pretty good job integrating the regional economy of the 50 states.

But do you think that Europe does a better job handling immigration from Africa and Asia than the United States does handling immigration from Latin America and Asia?

Cheers,

Conor