GOP the Loser in Primary Fight over Immigration
Over at National Review Online this morning, I ask how the Ronald Reagan of 1980 would have fared in today’s Iowa caucuses given his views on how to tackle illegal immigration (“GOP Candidates Betray the Spirit of Reagan on Immigration”). My conclusion, based on the current mood of many Republicans, is that Reagan would have been the target of a barrage of attack ads:
In April 1980, when Ronald Reagan was competing in the presidential primaries, he rejected the building of a wall between the United States and Mexico: “Rather than talking about putting up a fence, why don’t we work out some recognition of our mutual problems? Make it possible for them to come here legally with a work permit — and then while they’re working and earning here, they pay taxes here. And when they want to go back, they can go back. And open the border both ways by understanding their problems.”
If a Republican presidential candidate said such a thing today, he or she would suffer withering criticism for being soft on illegal immigration. Instead, we hear Reagan’s successors talk about implementing national ID cards, imposing intrusive regulations on the labor market, raiding farms, factories, and restaurants, and harassing small-business owners trying to survive in this tough economy, all in the name of chasing away hard-working immigrants.
The unhealthy competition among the current Republican candidates to sound tough on immigration also risks alienating millions of Hispanic voters who could otherwise be persuaded to support the party. If conservatives want to rediscover the more optimistic, inclusive, reform-minded spirit of Reagan, they should be talking about real immigration reform, not about spending more money and enacting more sweeping regulations to enforce a fundamentally flawed system.
E-Verify and Common Sense
This weekend, New York Times op-ed columnist Ross Douthat wrote a piece full of common sense thinking about immigration control and the E-Verify federal background check system.
“Common sense”—or “what most people think”—is an interesting thing: When generations of direct experience accumulate, common sense becomes one of the soundest guides to action. Think of common law, its source deep in history, molded in tiny increments over hundreds of years. Common law rules against fraud, theft, and violence strike a brilliant balance between harm avoidance and freedom.
When most people lack first-hand knowledge of a topic, though, common sense can go quite wrong. Such is the case with ”common sense” in the immigration area, which is not a product of experience but collective surmise. Douthat, who has the unenviable task of leaping from issue to issue weekly, indulges such surmise and gets it wrong.
Take, for example, the premise that American workers lose when immigration rates are high: “Amnesty,” says Douthat, would “be folly (and a political nonstarter) in this economic climate, which has left Americans without high school diplomas (who tend to lose out from low-skilled immigration) facing a 15 percent unemployment rate.”
On the whole, American workers do not lose out in the face of immigration. To the extent some do, it is penny-wise and pound foolish to retard our economy (in which displaced workers participate) and overall well-being (which affects displaced workers, too) in the name of protecting status quo jobs for a small number of native-borns.
Full immigration reform that includes generous opportunities for new low-skill workers is not folly, whatever its political prospects may be.
But I want to focus on Douthat’s conclusion that E-Verify is the way forward for immigration control. He cites a study finding that Arizona’s adoption of an E-Verify mandate caused the non-citizen Hispanic population of Arizona to fall by roughly 92,000 persons, or 17 percent, over the 2008–2009 period, and concludes:
[M]aybe — just maybe — America’s immigration rate isn’t determined by forces beyond any lawmaker’s control. Maybe public policy can make a difference after all. Maybe we could have an immigration system that looked as if it were designed on purpose, not embraced in a fit of absence of mind.
Though tentative, his implication is that a national E-Verify mandate is the solution. Everything that came before was the product of fevered impulses. Maybe E-Verify is the most practical solution. Douthat’s calm tone sounds like common sense.
Ah, but neither Douhtat or the authors of the study have thought that problem all the way through (and the study doesn’t claim to): The decline in Arizona was not produced simply by moving illegal immigrants from Arizona back to Mexico and Central America. They went to Washington state and other places in the United States that are less inhospitable to immigrants. A national E-Verify mandate would offer no similar refuge, and the move to underground (or “informal”) employment would occur in larger proportion than it did in Arizona.
The report also cautions that the honeymoon in Arizona may not hold:
[T]he initial effects of the legislation are unlikely to persist if actors in the labor market learn that there are no consequences from violating these laws. Hence, for long-term effectiveness, policymakers should also consider the role of employer sanctions, which have not played a large role in Arizona’s results so far. However, policymakers must weigh the sought-after drop in unauthorized employment against the costs associated with shifting workers into informal employment.
That’s antiseptic language for: investigations of employers, raids on workers, heavy penalties on both, and growth in black markets and a criminal underground. “Balmy” is a way of describing the temperature potatoes pass through in a pressure cooker.
It’s hard, on analysis, to see Arizona’s experience being replicated or improved upon by an E-Verify mandate that’s national in scale without a great deal of discomfort and cost. I surveyed the demerits of electronic employment eligibility verification in “Franz Kafka’s Solution to Illegal Immigration.”
Yes, Illegal Immigrants Are Influenced by ID Policies
It is a premise of national identification policy that requiring proof of lawful presence to get an ID, then requiring the use of that ID for many essential functions of life, would make it more difficult to be an illegal immigrant in the United States. The natural result of having a national ID and routine identity checks would be suppression of illegal immigration. The premise is undoubtedly true.
The question is how much influence it would have on illegal immigrants’ decision whether to come to, or remain in, this country. And how much it would cause illegal immigrants to take other steps, such as avoidance of ID checks?
A recent article in the Arizona Republic illustrates that leaving the country isn’t the obvious step for illegal immigrants faced with the lawful presence requirement. “Illegal Immigrants Flocking to 3 States to Obtain Identification” tells the story of how illegal immigrant Carlos Hernandez moved his family to Washington state after the passage of S.B. 1070 in Arizona. The story is illustrated with a picture of Hernandez watching his 2-year-old daughter play on a slide near their apartment in Burien, Washington.
“Hernandez said he knows other illegal immigrants who considered New Mexico because of the ease of getting a license. But he and others thought Washington would be safer.”
One inference from the story is that states with “weak” licensing requirements should tighten things up. But would Hernandez’ young daughter have better prospects if he moved the family to Puebla, Mexico, or would she be better off living in the United States with a father who acquired a false U.S. identification? In many cases, a family man like Hernandez will take the risk of acquiring and using false ID to provide his daughter the stable environment and opportunities the United States has to offer.
A national ID system, and background checks instituted for access to work, housing, and financial services, would suppress illegal immigration some, but it would also drive greater identity fraud and corruption.
The next question is how much inconvenience and tracking the natural-born and naturalized citizens of the country should suffer in order to achieve the marginal gains of presssuring illegal immigrants this way.
On balance, the gains are not worth the costs—especially when the “gains” include making life worse for Carlos Hernandez’ young daughter.
Feds Challenge Arizona Immigration Law
Yesterday, the Obama administration filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Arizona’s recently enacted law that is designed to curb illegal immigration. The Arizona law has not yet taken effect — that will occur on July 29. To generate more discussion and debate, Cato will be hosting a policy forum on the legal challenge and related issues on July 21. If the weather in DC continues to cooperate, it will feel like we are actually in Arizona.
Go here for Cato work related to immigration policy.
President Obama’s Incomplete Speech on Immigration
President Obama spoke this morning at American University on the need for comprehensive immigration reform. The president deserves credit for turning his attention to a thorny problem that desperately needs action from Congress, but the speech failed to hit at least one important note.
While the president called for comprehensive reform, he neglected to advocate the expansion of legal immigration in the future through a temporary or guest worker program for low-skilled immigrants. Even his own Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, has said such a program is the necessary “third leg” of immigration reform, the other two being legalization of undocumented workers already here and vigorous enforcement against those still operating outside the system.
As I’ve pointed out plenty of times, without accommodation for the ongoing labor needs of our country, any reform would repeat the failures of the past. In 1986, Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which legalized 2.7 million workers already here illegally, while beefing up enforcement. But without a new visa program to allow more low-skilled workers to enter legally in future years, illegal immigration just began to climb again to where, two decades later, we are trying once again to solve the same problem.
On the plus side, President Obama reminded his audience of the important role immigrants play in our open and dynamic country. And he rightly linked immigration reform to securing our borders:
“[T]here are those who argue that we should not move forward with any other elements of reform until we have fully sealed our borders. But our borders are just too vast for us to be able to solve the problem only with fences and border patrols. It won’t work. Our borders will not be secure as long as our limited resources are devoted to not only stopping gangs and potential terrorists, but also the hundreds of thousands who attempt to cross each year simply to find work.
Unfortunately, given the political climate in Washington, an election looming only four months away, and the president’s unwillingness to press for an essential element of successful reform, the illegal immigration problem will still be on the agenda when a new Congress comes to town in 2011.
Latest Immigration Reform Bulletin Examines Immigrant Crime Myth
The June issue of Cato’s monthly newsletter on immigration reform, just released, tackles the timely topic of “Immigrants and Crime: Perceptions vs. Reality.” The bulletin finds that, contrary to public perception, immigration has not caused higher crime rates, in Arizona or in the nation as a whole. In fact, one new study even suggests that a rising level of immigration in a city actually leads to lower crime rates.
According to bulletin editor and author Stuart Anderson, a Cato adjunct scholar, “National studies have reached the conclusion that foreign-born (both legal and illegal immigrants) are less likely to commit crimes than the native-born.” It’s an important fact to consider as other states look to copy Arizona’s tough new law against illegal immigration, which was in large part motivated by fears of crime.
The latest bulletin is the third in a series Cato plans to publish through 2010 and into 2011. The May issue analyzed the pluses and minuses of a Senate Democratic proposal to reform U.S. immigration law, and the April issue critiqued efforts to impose a national ID card and the E-Verify system.
You can sign up here to receive the bulletin each month by email.
Feds Propose Forfeiture as Immigration Employer Sanction
As recent posts in this space indicate, advocates of individual liberty have a variety of views on the proper policy response to illegal immigration. Whatever the disagreements, I suspect there’s some degree of consensus that certain proposed remedies are entirely too Draconian. From the California Labor and Employment Law Blog:
The U.S. Attorneys Office in San Diego has recently criminally prosecuted a French bakery for allegedly engaging in an intentional pattern and practice of hiring unauthorized workers. As part of the indictment, the Government is seeking hefty monetary fines, prison time for the owner and management, and asset forfeiture of the entire business to the Government. While the Government does not have experience running a French bakery, they are getting very serious about enforcing I-9 regulations.
More details on the French Gourmet prosecution can be found at the San Diego Union-Tribune and Restaurant Hospitality.
When government began pushing for asset forfeiture powers, some imagined that the formidable power would remain mostly confined to use in, say, illegal drug or money laundering prosecutions. But that’s not how it has worked. And immigration is hardly the only area in which employers should be worried about the expanding bounds of criminalization. Bills pending in Congress would criminalize “misclassification” of employees — which commonly consists of disagreeing with the government or with labor unions as to whether particular employees should count as independent contractors not covered by overtime and similar federal labor laws. Are we far from the day when prosecutors will start proposing forfeitures against employers over such infractions?
Immigration II: On the Substance of the Matter
Responding to my immigration post this morning, my colleagues Dan Griswold and Jason Kuznicki have focused on the single short paragraph that touched on the substance of the matter. (The question before me, posed by Politico Arena, concerned mainly the political implications of the new Arizona law, given the latest Pew Research Center poll on the issue.) I quite agree with both that we’ve never had full control of our southern border (or any border, for that matter), but as Dan has noted elsewhere, when we had a guest-worker program in place, illegal immigration dropped by 95 percent – no small drop. And illegal, not legal, immigration is the issue before us. And Dan is right too that we’ve thrown a lot of enforcement at the problem in recent years, to limited avail, so it’s not true that Congress hasn’t done anything. What it has done, however, hasn’t addressed the real problem, the underlying substantive law, as Dan has often written.
I’m struck, though, by Jason’s unqualified comment that he can’t say he shares my views on immigration.” Really? I did say, I believe, that Congress needs to address the problem, including with a guest-worker program. And I also said that “It hardly needs saying that a welfare state, in the age of terrorism, cannot have open borders.” I can’t imagine anyone disagreeing with that.
Concerning both the welfare state and terrorism, Jason points to “remedies” at the far end of the problem. He writes, for example, that our welfare state is going broke anyway, and “compared to the damage being done by native-born U.S. citizens and their cursedly long lifespans, the immigrants’ overall effects are quite small.” (I won’t take that “cursedly long lifespan” point personally.) True, but in places where the welfare state issues are concentrated, like border-state emergency rooms and schools, that long-term national perspective isn’t the issue. Yes, getting the government out of health care and education might ameliorate those localized problems (that question’s for another day), but we can’t always wait for more remote problems to be solved before we address more immediate ones.
And that goes for Jason’s terrorism point, too. He writes: “Without the black market in drugs, we’d have a lot less to fear from terrorists, particularly on our southern border.” I’m all for legalizing recreational drugs. But I was alluding to Islamic terrorists, not narco-terrorists, when I spoke of getting control of our borders. Legalizing drugs (again, a more remote remedy) might have some effect on the coffers of Islamic terrorists, but it would hardly solve the terrorism problem. As long as that problem exists, we need border control. Let’s remember, for example, that it was an alert border agent who thwarted the would-be LAX bomber.
Arizona Republic Leads the Way on Immigration
In a gutsy display for a newspaper, the Arizona Republic in a front-page editorial yesterday castigated the state’s top politicians for a failure of leadership on immigration.
Prompting the editorial was the passage of Arizona’s tough new law making it a crime to be an illegal immigrant in the state. Under the banner headline, “STOP FAILING ARIZONA; START FIXING IMMIGRATION,” the state’s major newspaper fired with both barrels:
We need leaders.
The federal government is abdicating its duty on the border.
Arizona politicians are pandering to public fear.
The result is a state law that intimidates Latinos while doing nothing to curb illegal immigration.
This represents years of failure. Years of politicians taking the easy way and allowing the debate to descend into chaos.
The Arizona Republic has been calling for comprehensive immigration reform continuously since 2002. For a brief time, our congressional delegation led the nation on
this front. But no more.
Now, it seems our elected officials prefer to serve political expediency instead.
The editorial then named ten prominent political leaders from the state, Republicans and Democrats alike, who have either failed to champion real reform for fear of a political backlash, or who have stoked the backlash with inflammatory rhetoric.
2002 was also the year that the Cato Institute made the case for comprehensive immigration reform with my study, “Willing Workers: Fixing the Problem of Illegal Mexican Migration to the United States.” The study argued that enforcement alone will not solve the problem. Immigration law itself must be changed to accommodate the legitimate labor-force needs of a growing U.S. economy.
The Republic editorial put the argument succinctly:
Reform must create a legal pipeline for future workers that is demand-based and temporary. With a legal framework in place, there will be no reason to be in this country without permission. Foreigners who break our laws will be prosecuted, punished and deported.
Comprehensive reform will make the border safer. When migrant labor is channeled through the legal ports of entry, the Border Patrol can focus on catching drug smugglers and other criminals instead of chasing busboys across the desert.
Real leaders will have the courage to say that.
One real newspaper has shown them how.
Don’t BELIEVE the Hype—Though Unformed, the Democrats’ National ID Plan Is Rife With Threats to Privacy and Civil Liberties
Senate Democrats have solidified and given more definition to their plan to create a biometric national ID, the centerpiece of their immigration reform proposal. (For reasons unrelated to the national ID plan, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has dropped out of the picture for now.) The “Conceptual Proposal for Immigration Reform” they released last week gives much more detail to the sketchy plans I previously reviewed.
In my Cato Policy Analysis, “Electronic Employment Eligibility Verification: Franz Kafka’s Solution for Illegal Immigration,” I wrote about the possibility of a work authorization document limited to that purpose—and my doubts that the government would adopt one.
A credential such as eligibility for employment under [the immigration laws] can be proved without creating a nationwide biometric tracking scheme. In fact, templates already exist. But it is unlikely to see adoption. . . . [I]dentification and tracking . . . shift the risk of error in the card-issuance process from the government to the citizen. . . . [T]racking preserves government power. A work-eligibility and tracking system . . . makes the individual’s employment eligibility subject to revision at a later time, if the government wants to change the rules or adapt the system to new purposes, for example.
Those doubts are validated by this plan, which appears to be a full-fledged national ID and national biometric database. Assurances that it won’t be used for purposes beyond immigration control are not persuasive. This is national identity and surveillance infrastructure that will be “switched on” by later policy changes.
They’re calling it “BELIEVE,” short for “Biometric Enrollment, Locally-stored Information, and Electronic Verification of Employment.” They can call it that. We’ll study it, and give credence to what we learn.
The plan is confusing, disorganized, repetitive, and sometimes contradictory. Summarizing it is a little like trying to piece together the egg when all you have is the omelet, but three themes emerge: First, this summary backs away from an earlier claim that there would not be a biometric national identity database. There will be a national biometric database. Second, repeating the word “fraud-proof” does not make this national ID system fraud proof. Third, this national ID system definitely paves the way for uses beyond work authorization. This is the comprehensive national identity system that people across the ideological and political spectrum oppose.
The national ID part of the Democrats’ proposal begins at the bottom of page eight. It’s a veritable word-cloud, suggesting a violation of the rule of thumb that simple solutions are usually the best. But let’s look at it, line by line.
“Papers, Please” in Arizona
The Arizona legislature recently sent Senate Bill 1070 to the governor.
According to this summary from the Arizona legislature, the bill would require Arizona officials and agencies to determine the immigration status of any person with whom they have “lawful contact” where reasonable suspicion exists regarding the immigration status of the person. Any person arrested in Arizona would also have to have their immigration status established and verified with the federal government before they were released.
The documents that can be used to prove legal immigration status under the bill include a valid Arizona driver license, a valid Arizona nonoperating identification license, a valid tribal enrollment card or other tribal identification, or a valid federal-, state- or local-government-issued identification, if the issuing entity requires proof of legal presence before issuance.
If the governor signs the bill, what creates “reasonable suspicion” about immigration status is a question that will have lawyers busy for years.
I’m interested in how well practiced Arizonans and Arizona government officials will become at checking the papers of people in their state. I have little to worry about, of course, because I’m not an illegal immigrant.
UCSB history professor Harold Marcuse maintains a fascinating web page about Martin Niemöller’s famous quotation. There are many versions of it in its long history, and there may yet be more.
Three Steps to Comprehensive Immigration Reform
Congress can and should pass comprehensive immigration reform in 2010. Any legislation worthy of the name would:
1) offer legalization to undocumented workers who have been here for several years, pass a security check, and pay a reasonable fine and back taxes;
2) create a temporary-visa program sufficient to meet future labor needs of a growing economy; and
3) enforce the law against those who still insist on working outside the system, but in a way that does not restrict the freedom of American citizens.
Reform would reduce illegal immigration by offering a legal alternative. It would tighten border security by allowing U.S. agents to focus on intercepting real criminals and terrorists, not dishwashers and gardeners. And it would expand output, investment, and job opportunities for middle-class Americans. Polls show a majority of Americans will accept the three-fold approach to reform. Recent elections confirm that support for reform is a modest plus with swing voters, and a huge plus with Hispanics.
This is an issue where both major parties can work together to fix our immigration system in a way that boosts the economy, enhances security, and expands liberty.
For more, see Cato’s research on immigration.
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