The President gave a decent speech in El Paso, but as this discussion on the issue of undocumented immigration proceeds, will he keep the focus where it should be, or will he preemptively concede to the angry and irrational on their misguided proposals?
I sure hope it's the former.
More below the jump
My parents are lawful immigrants to this country. My dad came here in 1969 on a work visa and my mother in 1974. Today they are both US citizens.
I recall that in 1987, my dad – who is the oldest of a brood of ten – sponsored green card applications for five of his siblings, all of whom at the time expressed interest in immigrating to the United States. He had heard of some cases where folks brought their relatives to the US on tourist visas. Then, those relatives overstayed the visas, illegally started working somewhere without a permit to do so, and eventually got lawyers and applied for residency and somehow moved to the front of the line. My father is simply not the type of guy that could even think of doing something like that. Further, the thought of hiring a lawyer for any purpose is unfathomable to him.
As such, he filled out the paperwork and sent in the applications for five of my uncles and aunts according to the rules. In 1998, eleven years later (the standard wait time on such applications), four of the applications came through approved (one of my five uncles – the one with a PhD - had his application rejected for some unknown reason).
A lot had changed in the intervening years, and to make a long story short, though my uncles and aunts are all bright and industrious and could have been incredibly productive contributors to the US economy and society, none of them ended up immigrating to the US for myriad reasons.
This is a source of frustration for me. If the processing wait time was 1 year instead of 11, I feel strongly that all of them would be here in the States now and contributing to this society and economy in significant ways. We played by the rules and things didn’t work out – perhaps to some degree because the rules are designed that way. That frustration used to be easily compounded by stories of others who in some way or another disregarded the rules entirely and had things work out for them. It could be said that illegal immigration has the potential to anger legal immigrants more than anyone else.
However, when I assess the discourse on illegal immigration in the US today, I do so without anger or resentment. I try, as much as any impressionable and emotional human being can, to look at the issue objectively and rationally.
I think that’s particularly important because I see so much frothing at the mouth when it comes to this subject that I worry we will simply never get to a rational and well-considered set of policies. I fear that we are allowing the irrational reactions of some folks in our society to frame the debate. I thought the President struck a good tone in his speech today, but I pray that he does not start the serious discussions with a capitulation to that irrationality.
I wanted to address some of the points I hear being made by the more rabid proponents of dramatically increased government action to combat illegal immigration. I’ll state their most common mantras and then provide my reactions.
But…it’s ILLEGAL!...
Any form of amnesty will encourage law-breaking. How can you argue against enforcing the LAW??!!
There are a lot of things that are illegal. In most places it is against the law to cross a street outside of a designated crosswalk. The infraction or crime is called jaywalking, and if you live and work in a major city in America, chances are it’s a crime you’ve committed or at least seen others committing. There’s a good reason why that law is in place. It is in the interest of public safety. However, the truth is that much of the time individual jaywalkers aren’t really a public safety hazard. There are no cars coming, so people go ahead and cross the road wherever they are. The fact still remains…it’s ILLEGAL.
But do you think we should have special police task forces assigned to cracking down on jaywalkers? Should we put shoulder high borders up along all sidewalks to prevent anyone from ever jaywalking? When you see someone jaywalking and not getting busted, do you grit your teeth and clench your fists and say “Dammit, they’re getting away with it! Someone should stop that person because what they’re doing…it’s…well...it’s ILLEGAL!”
Jaywalking, like undocumented entry into the country, is a violation of law, but the mere fact of its illegality does not imply that we should spend inordinate sums of money and dedicate untold resources toward ensuring that it does not happen…ever.
When we speak of illegal immigration, essentially the violation is physically being in a place without the up-to-date government mandated paperwork required to be present there. It’s a documentation violation, like driving with an expired license, or parking someplace without a permit or operating a device without the proper certificate to do so, only I feel that those examples are all more serious violations than the crime of simply being physically present in a vast country without a piece of paper that says you can be there.
In all of those other examples of documentary violations, there is a reasonable expectation of imminent potential harm to the public. For example, a guy who’s operating a crane without a license cannot be guaranteed to have taken the latest safety training course that’s required to obtain the license and might harm someone as a result. A guy who’s parking in a spot without the required permit is basically stealing from those who did get the parking permit.
Is there however, a reasonable assumption of harmful impact to the public that you can make without prejudice about a person who is merely physically present without documents in the 3rd largest country in the world by both land area and population? Most of the facts we have available to us indicate that there really isn’t. Decades of research demonstrates that undocumented aliens are less likely to commit crimes than the native population, but even if they were statistically more likely, would the fact that they do not have documents really be the reason why? Violent and other serious crime is a problem in and of itself. Tying it to illegal immigration is disingenuous. Oh, and if one wants to make the “gateway crime” case – i.e. the logical fallacy that undocumented immigration implies a level of comfort with criminality that will invariably lead to the commission of more serious crimes – then I’ll have to bring back my example of the jaywalker. Jaywalking, speeding, running red lights, etc. could just as easily be identified as gateway crimes. Should we lock away all those who commit these violations, or deport them so as to prevent future murders or robberies?
The association of other criminal activity with illegal immigration is either an emotional reaction to personal experience, or pure xenophobia.
But there is harm…they’re taking our jobs and they’re using our taxpayer services
I’ll tackle these one by one. First jobs…
Jobs
Fundamentally, there is a global market for labor and there is supply in that market. However, the ability of labor supply to physically meet labor demand is impeded by a number of factors. The advent of the internet has limited the impact of some of these barriers in certain fields, but the labor market is still, for the most part, affected by them. These barriers are physical impediments, financial impediments, linguistic and cultural differences, and finally, policy impediments - artificial mechanisms imposed by various governments to deliberately obstruct the function of the market and limit the mobility of laborers.
In the parts of the globe where these elements conspire to put up the greatest resistance to workforce mobility, there will be a strong challenge to the efficient functioning of labor markets. In other regions where workers have the ability to break through the resistance put up by these factors, the labor markets will be more efficient.
The fact is that the ability of laborers from Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean and other parts of the globe to break through whatever resistance may be put up and offer their services as workers in the US makes our economy more efficient and productive.
High levels of unemployment among legal US residents at present may lead some to argue that we should, in the national interest, stop the labor market from functioning in this way – that we should slap back the invisible hand and protect the indigenous labor force in America.
This position assumes at least two things:
(1) The undocumented foreign labor that is serving demand in the US market is taking jobs that would otherwise have been done by legal US residents
(2) If there were no illegal aliens in the US, there would still be at least the same number of jobs
I think both of these assumptions are largely false. It seems to me that by and large, the jobs done by illegal aliens are jobs that most legal residents will not do at the prevailing wages and in many cases these jobs might not even exist at all if not for the supply of labor willing to perform them at a wage rate that made the cost of the associated goods and services attractive to consumers.
Undocumented workers are overcoming cultural and language barriers to dominate labor supply in certain low wage services in the country, from vineyard work to meat packing to construction. It is true that the available supply of undocumented workers does to some extent impact the employment and wage earning opportunities for those in this country without a high school education, but these jobs are generally found unattractive by those with at least a high school diploma, and it is also not at all clear that the standard of living of those in the native population lacking a high school diploma would improve noticeably if we simply sent back all the illegal immigrants. If those in the native population willing to do these jobs were accepting presently offered wages, then they would be hired. If what they are seeking is higher wages, then it is entirely possible that an exodus of undocumented workers combined with native workers demanding higher wages for the same jobs would simply lead to investment in the mechanization of this type of work. Furthermore, we would certainly see an increase in the cost of some basic goods in this country, which would impact the lower socio-economic strata among the native population most starkly.
Undocumented workers are also creating jobs for themselves – through their willingness to perform services at low cost that otherwise would not be available – or would at least not be accessible to most. This is in some important ways improving the quality of life and standard of living for middle class America.
I’ll give an example. During my childhood in the 80s, nobody I knew had a maid or nanny or gardener working at their home. Even middle class people having maids was the stuff of old television shows like The Brady Bunch. If I ever heard of someone who did have a regular maid or gardener, I would presume it was a very wealthy person. People in our socio-economic strata were not “in the market” for such services so to speak. Now however, it has become much more common for middle class folks in America to have nannies helping out with the kids or a maid who comes by to clean every now and then. Only a minority of the residents in the middle class neighborhood where I reside actually mow their own lawns or trim their own hedges. Most have a gardener who comes by periodically and does that for them. Even in the blue collar working class neighborhood where I grew up, it is now common enough for people to employ maids and gardeners that it is not considered anything special.
Similarly, when I was a kid, your options for getting a car wash, other than doing it at home, were to run your car through one of those gas station automated wash systems, to go to one of those self-wash centers where you put coins in the vacuum machine, or to stumble upon a charity car wash. Now, there is an abundant supply of affordable and high quality hand car wash places throughout the metro area where I live. Just about all of them employ workers from Latin America and it is probably a safe assumption that many of these men and women are undocumented. These car washes are so cheap that nearly everyone uses them. Those gas station systems are now used so infrequently that many of them are non-functional and the owners of the stations don’t bother to fix them. That’s right, this is an example of people putting machines – not other people - out of work!
Another point - it strikes me as rather absurd to argue that the presence of 10 million + additional working people in the country does not stimulate the demand side of the economy in a way that ends up creating some additional jobs. These are low wage earning laborers, the kind who tend to have no choice but to spend nearly all of their money. This must boost overall consumer spending, which has been the key driver of economic growth and job creation in America in recent years. In fact, there are multiple examples of towns across the country whose economies were kept alive in recent years primarily by undocumented workers. Overall, there are compelling reasons to believe that zero tolerance toward illegal immigration will have deleterious economic effects for our country.
Services - illegals don’t pay any taxes but they use taxpayer funded public services
Undocumented workers DO pay taxes. Because many of them use ITINs or fake IDs to get jobs, payroll tax is deducted from many of their paychecks, so they are paying into social security and medicare with no claim on any future benefits – a huge plus for the system (how much worse would our impending shortfall in those 2 programs be without the illegals?)
Also they pay sales tax on anything they buy and if they rent or own property they are either indirectly or directly paying property taxes.
The one tax they may not be paying is income tax, but most of these people are not high net income earners. In fact many of them may not even earn enough to draw any income tax liability, so it’s hard to argue that they’re cheating the tax system.
As far as the strain illegal aliens put on public services, any perception that the rolls of the welfare and foodstamp programs are filled with the names of illegal aliens is totally erroneous. Ditto unemployment insurance or workers’ comp, despite a handful of examples that could be pointed toward. Illegal aliens are not officially eligible for federal assistance programs, though they may be eligible for such programs in certain states, particularly if they are the parents of a US –born child. However, the idea that illegal immigrants are a significant drain on the resources of these programs is less a statistical fact and more of a reactionary perception. Further, the climate of hostility toward undocumented workers leads many of them not to seek even those benefits they may be eligible for.
It is true that public schools in certain states are more crowded partially because of the influx of illegal immigrants, but I would make two points here: (1) remember that illegal immigrants by and large DO pay the types of taxes that are usually used to fund schools and (2) some of the states where this is a concern are generally dealing with population increases due to a number of factors and also tend to be characterized by low levels of spending on education infrastructure generally, which leads to crowded classrooms.
Illegal aliens do add to the strain on emergency care services at hospitals and clinics in this country, which is why it is unwise to not give them the option to procure health insurance and why I wish Rep. Joe Wilson had been accurate when he shouted “You lie!” at the Presdient.
On balance, reviewing its direct impacts on the economy and society, “the problem of illegal immigration” as it is so often described in our public discourse isn’t much of a “problem”at all. Even if one believes, despite contrary evidence, that it is a net negative for our society, the overall magnitude of its impact could only be minimal.
The real reasons for the strong opposition to illegal immigration have little to do with economic statistics or crime rates, or anything of the like. They are the same reasons why those already here have decried the different waves of immigration from various parts of Europe throughout this country’s history, in each case presenting emotional arguments that were eerily similar to those being offered today. They come from the same places in people’s hearts and minds that the bizarre speculation over President Obama’s birth came from, which is why it is that much more important for him not to concede an air of legitimacy to their intentions as this debate proceeds.
As he pointed out in the speech, the President has already dramatically increased the level of federal government activity at the border and focused an increased level of resources on preventing border crossings. Let us now focus on the real issue at hand – getting ourselves on a path to recognizing these people as fellow Americans, and in doing so, let us keep alive that spirit which as much as anything else has been the engine of American greatness throughout our history; that spirit captured in the oft recited lines of Emma Lazarus’ poem:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door
Note: I choose to use the term ‘illegal immigrant’ though many are opposed to its use. I do so because I think the debate over semantics is a distraction from the real issues. I think the term should be embraced rather than avoided. Yes, they are doing something ‘illegal’, but so do most people in this country. In fact I would say a pretty high percentage of the American population commits at least one illegal act every day. Further, they are ‘aliens’ but so were the ancestors of almost all present-day Americans. Let’s not act like this term is such a scarlet letter.