Next week New Haven, Connecticut plans on issuing an ID card
that will be available to illegal immigrants. Besides providing a
pass to municipal services like libraries and parks, the card will
work as a debit card for parking meters and be valid identification
to present to police and banks.
What kind of crazy idea is that? Why would a city want to make
life easier for immigration scofflaws? One of the justifications
for the card is that because it’s difficult for illegal immigrants
to open bank accounts, they’re targeted by muggers who know they
carry a lot of cash. One might object that the city is
discriminating against one class of criminals on behalf of another
one.
The truth is, though, that New Haven’s politicians are hardly
the only ones pushing policies that encouraging migrants to violate
immigration laws. There are more than 30 “sanctuary cities” where
it is illegal for police to ask about immigration status. Nine
states currently allow illegal immigrants to receive driver’s
licenses, although that will change when the federal “Real ID” act
goes into effect in 2008. (In two other states, illegal immigrants
can get driving certificates that can’t be used as ID for most
purposes; such certificates are legal under Real ID.)
Then, of course, there’s the dead-for-the-moment campaign for
some sort of amnesty or semi-amnesty, which, besides insulting
immigrants who have played by the rules, would reassure the next
generation of border-jumpers that they have little to fear. Even
guest worker programs can encourage illegal immigration;
agriculture workers on H-2A visas, who are allowed to stay in the
country only seasonally, often bring along family members who
illegally stay year-round.
It isn’t that it’s impossible to stop the flow of illegal
immigration. According to a 2005 report on the Minuteman Project,
volunteers on the Arizona border proved that auxiliary personnel
simply watching the border are highly effective at reducing the
flow of illegal migrants.
It would take tens of thousands of such personnel to plug all
the leaks in the border, but that’s not so daunting a number when
you consider that they can be trained in three days, rather than
the two years that are needed to train the Border Patrol officers
they’d be assisting. A handful of jurisdictions are now allowing
local police officers to assist in enforcing immigration laws — a
job that’s traditionally been left to a relatively small number of
federal agents — and there’s no reason why the IRS can’t make it a
priority for their auditors to look for employers who dodge tax
liabilities by keeping illegal workers off the books. (Enforcement
is at least as important in the interior as it is on the border —
a large percentage of illegal immigrants have overstayed their
visas rather than snuck through the border.)
The problem is that beefed up enforcement by itself, to the
extent that it’s effective, threatens to hamstring an economy with
a demonstrably growing demand for labor. From 2002 to 2006, a
period of consistently low unemployment, the Migration Policy
Institute estimates that 1.8 million new permanent immigrants
entered the U.S. annually — about a half million of them
illegally. As cases of crops that have gone
unpicked following crack-downs on illegal farm workers vividly
illustrate, America has a shortage of legal labor. Raising
immigration quotas by forty to fifty percent would make enforcement
a much easier job; as legal immigrants fill the jobs currently
being filled by their illegal counterparts, many of the latter will
simply leave on their own.
Among the many idiocies of the immigration bill that failed in
the Senate last month was that it barely contemplated the number of
immigrants the country needs or wants. The bill left the actual
quotas basically untouched.
Perhaps, because it’s somewhat counterintuitive to argue that we
must respond to out-of-control immigration by welcoming more
immigrants, the reason that few politicians straightforwardly
advocate increased immigration quotas is that they’re afraid such a
policy won’t fly politically. But the outrage over immigration is
driven not just by the presence of immigrants per se, but by the
widespread lawlessness that the current system has wrought. It’s
rather shortsighted, even cowardly, to facilitate that lawlessness
while shying away from real reform.
