Should US immigration reform focus on amnesty for illegal aliens or tighter enforcement of borders?

Amnesty

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by Bennett Kalafut

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The focus of US immigration reform should be bringing public policy in line with the pubilc good. Tighter enforcement of bad policy doesn't even constitute reform; it constitutes doing the same thing, and harder.

The US's ever-growing economy has created a demand for labor, signaled by relatively high wages and benefits. Of their own accord, immigrants would come-feeling it worthwhile to surmount the barrier-to-entry that is travel expenses-to meet that demand, and in the process grow the economy further through productive labor and, if not prevented from doing so, thorough continuation of the US's long tradition of immigrant entrepeneurship.

Cont rary to the arguments of economically ignorant xenophobes, the economy is not a fixed-sized pie that is divided among residents, with each arrival making our slice smaller. Immigration is a response to a shortage, and like any such response, it makes us better off.

The Federal government, motivated by concerns other than the general welfare, has thrown a monkeywrench into the market's invisible gears. The mess began with 1921's "Emergency Quota Act", but our current dilemma stems more immediately from 1965's Immigration and Nationality Act which, with modifications to its quotas, governs our immigration and visa process. Instead of letting supply and demand determine who comes and how long they stay, the government created an alphabet soup of visas and arbitrary caps on the total per hemisphere and per country. From a thinking man's perspective, this makes as much sense as placing caps on the number of people who may open pizzerias each year. No government official or group of officials knows how to set such a number, nor would the nation's economists, if they all worked at it together; economic central planning does not work!

To top matters off, no visa class exists for unskilled workers! The invisible hand of the market still works nonetheless; immigrants who cannot get visas, most of whom cannot get them under any circumstances, nevertheless find very expensive and sometimes dangerous ways to come and stay; a meager life in the US's underground economy is better opportunity than life at home.

As a result, immigration has moved off the roads and to the deserts. A corps of smugglers, no better than gangsters, that would not exist were legal temporary and permanent immigration practically possible, has developed to help people come to the US illegally. Processes intended to keep dangerous criminals and people with untreated hepatitis or tuberculosis out are of little effect, because in order to come at all, most immigrants must bypass screening. The system of quotas and alphabet-soup visas for skilled workers and family reunification is not meeting society's needs.

A permanent underclass, limited to menial off-the-books jobs and barred from all but petty entrepeneurship, has also developed as a result. Immigration reform must, first and primarily, solve the systematic problems which caused this situation in the first place-amnesty itself cannot be the focus of reform-but even after such reform happens, those twelve million remain.

Rounding them up and deporting them would be cruel, and limiting them to menial jobs and de facto lack of protection of law because they never got visas that our government wasn't offering is perverse. Rounding them up and deporting them would also cause a massive recession, while limiting them to their current underclass status severely limits their ability to contribute to our economy. An amnesty is the only sensible response; current undocumented immigrants must be regularized, checking in with the Department of State and getting screened for contagious diseases and criminal backgrounds, perhaps being charged a modest fee to cover the process.

Since the current policy is so out-of-tune with the market, stricter enforcement would be extremely costly. Show me a twenty-foot fence, and I'll show you a twenty-foot ladder. The marginal cost of each fractional reduction in illegal immigration naturally increases. The first fifty percent may be cheap, but we'll spend the country to ruin stopping the last, craftiest, most determined two. It makes no sense to spend billions enforcing a policy that has obviously failed. Control of borders would be much easier were immigration reformed. Who would cross the Arizona desert who could come on the interstate? How many "coyotes" would still be in business when nobody needed their services? And how many criminals would slip in undetected when reasonable and moral people no longer needed to presume that someone without a visa was a mere victim of a broken system?

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