An Enlightened Approach to Illegal Immigration

Why the politics of immigration must be reconciled with reality
Immigration always seems to be a hot-button topic, but despite President Bush’s second-term attempts at comprehensive reform and President Obama’s campaign promises to address the issue, the past two decades have seen little meaningful immigration legislation. While it is convenient to point to the economic recession and to Obama’s health care proposal as roadblocks to immigration reform, those explanations only scratch the surface. When it comes to immigration, politicians have shied away from asking the relevant questions. In order to enact meaningful reform, policymakers must shift the emphasis from border security to the underlying economic cause of illegal immigration, and they must evaluate undocumented workers’ true impact on the job market. Without concrete strategies for addressing those issues, immigration reform will continue to languish in political limbo.
BORDER BUILDUP?

Politicians have historically tackled the immigration issue by emphasizing border security, but this approach obscures the larger questions underlying the debate. As Kim Williams, a professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, explained, “What you find is that we’ve had this balance struck between employer sanctions and border security. Since we haven’t been able to deal with employer sanctions … it’s much easier to talk about cracking down on border enforcement.” But this security-focused approach cannot successfully address the flow of immigrants across the Mexican border, a complex pattern of movements based on economic conditions and even seasonal changes. Douglas Massey, a sociology professor at Princeton and the author of Beyond Smoke and Mirrors, told the HPR that “the paradoxical effect of the border fence … is to make people who are already here not go back because it is so hard to come in.” For immigration reform to go forward, then, policymakers must turn their focus to the economic incentives that bring people to this country in the first place. Poverty in Latin America is at least as important as border insecurity in explaining the influx of immigrants from our south.
Business concerns also factor prominently in the immigration debate. Perhaps the most immediately effective measure for reducing illegal immigration would be to impose a hefty fine on businesses for every undocumented worker they hire. Yet, Williams explained, “Since we have this laissez faire business attitude … at the end of the day what happens is we ratchet up border security.” Employment-related proposals are likely to be poorly received compared with “tough” crackdown measures on the borders. Furthermore, according to Massey, practices like subcontracting have made it harder to hold business accountable and discipline them when they employ illegal immigrants. Katherine Vargas, press secretary of the National Immigration Forum, an immigrant-rights organization, told the HPR that she expects any reform bill “will have an employment verification system, an electronic system matching Social Security numbers with records.” Such a system may be both more effective and more humane than border security.
JOBS AVAILABLE
To enact effective immigration legislation, policymakers must also evaluate the true impact of illegal immigrants on the American jobs market.  Some politicians claim that—especially given our high unemployment rate—undocumented workers are taking up Americans’ jobs. “There are an estimated eight million jobs done by illegal immigrants. … We’ve seen in the past that when they started to do some enforcement, you saw American workers lining up to apply for the jobs,” Ira Mehlman, media director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, told the HPR. Others, however, contend that migrant workers and American citizens occupy fundamentally different job markets.  According to Vargas, “The reality is that [unemployed Americans] are not in direct competition for jobs immigrants are doing. … You can’t expect a middle-class worker in Michigan to move and pick cherries or tomatoes in the California desert.”
At the end of the day, meaningful immigration reform will need to address the economic incentives that motivate hundreds of thousands of people to cross the border illegally each year. Politicians must look past politically palatable measures like border security; they must focus on long-term solutions and ask difficult questions about why immigrants come here, and what effect they have on American workers.
Jimmy Wu ’13 is the Circulation Manager.
Photo Credit: laverrue (Flickr)