Immigration muddle is optimal and inevitable
President Biden's border visit is as futile as shouting at the weather
Long years ago in 1975, I served under President Gerald Ford’s Cabinet Committee on Illegal Aliens. The dynamics and magnitude of illegal immigration has not materially changed in the ensuing 48 years. The single major immigration law enacted in that interval—the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act—made the knowing employment of undocumented aliens unlawful, and three million illegally present in the United States gained legal status. But unauthorized immigration remained undiminished. It has remained so with immaterial variations ever since under both Republican and Democratic administrations.
The explanation is in plain view. On the one hand, employers squint at illegal immigrants. They drive down wages. They are difficult to unionize. The vast majority combine praiseworthy industry with ambition. The sending countries benefit from billions of dollars in remittances.
The United States is a nation of immigrants who arrived seeking a better life. Its first material immigration limitation was the racist Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Americans generally sympathize with immigrants who are fleeing persecution or abject poverty but asking for no hand-outs. No moral opprobrium is attached to undocumented status.
Prohibition laws were anemically enforced because of the absence of a moral consensus frowning on the sale or consumption of alcohol. Our immigration laws similarly are haphazardly enforced because of our moral ambivalence over whether hard working, law abiding, ultra-thrifty illegal aliens are doing anything deplorable.
Our immigration policy of muddle also endures because both major political parties profit by making illegal immigration a perpetual wedge issue. Republicans do not want to solve the problem because it excites their anti-immigrant, semi-xenophobic base that perceive all non-White immigrants as “not-yet-guilty” rapists or murderers. Democrats have some incentive to regularize the undocumented because they believe the majority will join the Democratic Party. But that incentive is countered by keeping illegal immigration as a front-burner political issue for a large number of voters with family members seeking a haven or reunification in the United States.
In any event, as the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 and Prohibition demonstrate, all the legal changes or physical barriers in the world will not dent unauthorized entries because the rewards are great for the unauthorized entrants and employers and the penalties are both small and improbable. An analogy is the multi-trillion-dollar global war on drugs announced by President Richard Nixon in 1971. The illegal drug epidemic persists because the demand is high, the profits are astronomical, and the risk of prosecution is low. Periodic spectacular drug busts are but the tip of the iceberg. They are routinely staged to create a political appearance of success in the drug war and to distract attention from its stupendous failure.
Have you ever met anyone who reported an inability to buy marijuana, cocaine, heroin, or fentanyl?
Our muddled immigration policy is far from perfect. Among other things, it is unfair to the millions of immigrants who are playing by the rules in seeking legal entry and waiting years in the queue. It fosters disrespect for the law and fuels xenophobia.
But the lamp of experience shows muddle is still optimal. There is no alternative approach that is not a cure worse than the disease.
In sum, when it comes to immigration policy, the Serenity Prayer of Reinhold Niebuhr should be our lodestar:
“God, give me the grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, Courage to change the things which should be changed, and the Wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.”
Superbly written by Mr. Fein, as always. His writings are simply masterful.
My personal view on the illegal immigration issue is that it has become somewhat of a modern day slavery.
President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and the adoption of 13th Amendment in 1865 effectively abolished slavery, as in the form of involuntary servitude.
However, there is no law that abolishes what I call “voluntary slavery” of our day. Today’s economic slaves do not need to be loaded on ships wearing a ball and chain. They wall freely across the US-Mexican border, on their own accord. All US administration is doing is keep the doors open and let them in.
US has by far the biggest economy in the world consuming a tremendous amount of resources disproportionately in an unchallenged fashion due its vast military power. This creates a huge wealth accumulation here in the US, while creating vast oceans of poverty everywhere else in the world, which attracts people to US eventually.
Also the ever expansion of service economy which accounts for more than 75% of US GDP creates a huge demand for cheap labor which mostly has to come from outside of US.
How many US citizens (be it white or black folks) do we know who would clean hotel rooms for $6 an hour? Or dig potatoes at a farm for $5 an hour? Not very many. So those jobs are having to being filled by illegal immigrants. Yes, it’s slave wages all right, but the illegal alien doesn’t care because $5/hr is still better than what he gets say, Mexico, for the same job which is like 50 cents/hr.
Employers don’t complain either. Paying slave wages to voluntary slaves maximizes their profits and business returns, minimizes their investment risks.
When the system of global economics does not change and the economic incentives to businesses and foreign workers are there, demand for illegal immigrants will never end. Neither on the supply side, nor on the demand side.
Apart from that, it would be short sighted to think that the illegal immigrants that come to US are all just cheap labor with no skills. There are a lot of skilled tradesmen among them too, which is something our country desperately needs. Even Engineers, doctors, nurses etc. are coming to US claiming asylum because this country offers much better wages and work conditions than what their home countries offer.
I’m an immigrant who has spent thousands of dollars to lawyers and immigration filings to do everything legally, by the book. As much as the current state of illegal influx of immigrants pisses me off (for it is not fair to law abiding folks like me) the situation is not likely to change as long as the supply and demand side incentives are there.
/s/ Emre Serbest