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IMMIGRATION ISSUES IN THE UNITED STATES

Part I: Illegal Immigration

3/1/04

1. INTRODUCTION

Illegal immigration is a controversial topic. It is hard to say a lot about it without in some way sounding controversial. Nevertheless, it is an important issue to address, because it raises questions about fairness and the sustainability of *real* income in the United States of America (and across the world). 

President Bush recently proposed a so-called "more compassionate" illegal immigration "reform" proposal. I thought this would be an opportune moment for analyzing this issue. Being an immigrant who has gone through all the detailed application process to legally obtain a green card, let me first make some broad comments on my philosophical leanings on this issue and then explore individual aspects in greater detail. 

I would like the U.S. Government to first focus on those who have worked hard and proven their worth to this country, while doing so legally. If immigration policy does little for prospective legal immigrants and blindly opens the floodgates for illegal immigrants and those that hire them, then I would not be pleased. For legal immigrants, it not only takes hard work, it usually takes years of paperwork and proving one's bona fides, reasonable income, etc., to get to the point where the U.S. Government is ready to give you permanent residency. Not to mention the anxiety of going through vagaries of the process, which sometimes leads to innocent mistakes that later places innocent people in trouble with the INS (now BCIS - nope, USCIS). (I wrote about this latter aspect not long ago in an unpleasant context).

At the same time, I am aware that on the issue of illegal immigration there is more than meets the casual eye. At face value, I am against illegal immigration in principle. However, I am amenable to some debate on this because a lot of complexities are hidden behind the raw emotions driving this wedge issue. 

I don't have the luxury of writing a full length book on a topic that easily deserves one. So, I will first briefly explore each of the key aspects relating to this debate, followed by my own recommendations. Here is a summary of the topics I will cover below.

2. Fairness 

3. Indirect Contributions of Illegal Immigrants 

4. Jobs 

5. Crime 

6. Taxes and Economic Impact

7. My overall recommendations

8. Some comments on the Bush administration "reform" proposal

[NOTE (updated 7/19/04): 

Part I-A has an Afterword, where the real world example of the California strawberry industry is covered, largely using extracts from Eric Schlosser's excellent book "Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market".

Part II of my coverage on Immigration includes a response to Samuel Huntington's essay in Foreign Policy magazine titled "The Hispanic Challenge" (via Dan Drezner) - where I refute some of Huntington's flawed arguments on Mexican immigration.]

2. FAIRNESS

I have stated above why it is unfair to provide blanket amnesty or right to legalization for illegal immigrants when even legal (temporary) workers don't get that choice. With respect to citizens, the fairness issue is even more glaring - and clearly, a Government must provide higher priority (in terms of jobs and rights) to citizens than to illegal immigrants. Certainly, advocates for illegal immigration will point out that illegal immigrants also deserve some fairness. Let's talk about that next.

3. INDIRECT CONTRIBUTIONS OF ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS

It is doubtful that anyone would disagree with the fact that illegal immigrants, by virtue of their working for low wages, boost corporate profits (this is the only reason why corporations employ illegal immigrants) and reduce commodity prices for Americans overall. The latter translates not just to direct savings in purchases for individual consumers, it also contributes partly to keeping the lid on inflation, thereby proving more flexibility for the Federal Government to lower interest rates - which in turn allows lower cost home purchases and refinancing. (Of course, I am by no means arguing that illegal immigration is the sole or principal reason for low interest rates in the US - to do so would be laughable! What I am saying is that they contribute a small part to lowering inflation overall.)  

However, hosting illegal immigrants also imposes some costs on the citizens/legal residents of United States  - and broadly speaking there are three categories of direct or indirect costs - jobs, crime, taxes. I will address each of these in turn, to try to get a better understanding of the facts in these categories (rather than resort to prejudice) and use that information to come to conclusions on effective policy.  

4. JOBS

While illegal immigrants contribute positively to the economy via lower product/service costs, one of the problems of course is that for each illegal immigrant that gets employment, a legal worker (citizen or resident) loses a potential job opening. On the one hand, a look at recent American history suggests that the job losses attributable to illegal immigrants is a drop in the ocean of overall jobs available (for example, in the 1990s, the Clinton administration's policies resulted in millions and millions of new jobs with unemployment rates hovering near record lows, in spite of a continuous influx of illegal immigrants). Nevertheless, it is undeniable that every job taken by an illegal immigrant, is one less job available for a legal resident or a citizen. 

5. CRIME

A constant piece of criticism I have heard from those who detest illegal immigrants is that such immigrants are responsible for disproportionately high crime rates. There may be a kernel of truth associated with this claim, but it is instructive to move away from emotional reactions and social prejudices to better understand the facts in question. 

In my quest for research that might offer a balanced perspective on this issue, I came upon this book, published in 1998 by the National Research Council (NRC), called "The Immigration Debate: Studies on the Economic, Demographic, and Fiscal Effects of Immigration, James P. Smith and Barry Edmonston, Editors; Panel on the Demographic and Economic Impacts of Immigration, National Research Council". Note that this book addresses immigration AS A WHOLE, not just illegal immigration, but due to my relative lack of knowledge of reliable scholastic work on illegal immigration and crime rates, I decided to review their findings first. What I discovered was that their findings are relevant in the context of illegal immigration as well. 

First, a few words about the NRC, lifted off the National Academy of Sciences website:

The National Research Council is part of the National Academies, which also comprise the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering and Institute of Medicine. They are private, nonprofit institutions that provide science, technology and health policy advice under a congressional charter. The Research Council was organized by the National Academy of Sciences in 1916 to associate the broad community of science and technology with the Academy's purposes of further knowledge and advising the federal government.
Functioning in accordance with general policies determined by the Academy, the National Research Council has become the principal operating agency of both the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering in providing services to the government, the public and the scientific and engineering communities. The Research Council is administered jointly by both Academies and the Institute of Medicine through the National Research Council Governing Board.

Being a Ph.D. myself, I know that science is not infallible. However, there are logical reasons to better trust work that has a mathematical/scientific basis and has gone through a rigorous peer review process that includes some of the best minds in the scientific community, rather than work from people or groups that have an ideological axe to grind. Given that, and the fact that the above book was specifically written to try and make sense of a rapidly growing collection of research on the impacts of immigration, I am inclined to trust its broad findings. The fact that its final conclusions (discussed below) seem plausible, and the fact that they have highlighted specific limitations in their data and interpretation, without making it seem that they have unambiguous answers to every question, also provide me additional confidence in the book's credibility. Having said that, I will first try to broadly summarize what I believe the book's main conclusions are on the relationship between immigration and crime, and then try to draw my own inferences from those findings in the context of illegal immigration.

Let me start with this leading paragraph from page 368 of the book (with bold text being my emphasis):

...Undoubtedly the most salient questions involve the issue of whether immigration increases crime. Of course, in an absolute sense, it probably does. Immigration brings more people into the country, and unless this process is counterbalanced by emigration, the absolute volume of crime will very likely increase. In addition, immigrants are often disproportionately male and at early ages of labor market entry and advancement. Because young males are disproportionately likely to be involved in crime in all parts of the world that we know about (Hirschi and Gottfredson, 1983), this may also contribute to increases in crime. If our concern is to solely reduce crime, it simply does not make sense to encourage young males to immigrate in large numbers. However, because we also value the labor of young male immigrants, and indeed often rely on this labor in the context of shortages of particular kind of workers, questions about contributions of immigration to crime are more likely to be relative than absolute. In this sense, we will probably want to know whether immigrants who enter the country contribute to crime beyond what we could otherwise expect of citizens of similar numbers, ages, gender, and so on. 
A further complication in assessing the involvement of immigrants in crime is that immigrants may not be treated the same as citizens in the criminal justice system. If immigrants are more or less vulnerable than citizens to arrest, detention, conviction, and imprisonment, their representation in official crime statistics may be correspondingly biased...

With that perspective, let us review a key piece of data from the book looking at the 1980-1990 period - which forms the basis of a key part of their discussion. This is Table 9-1 in page 374 of the book, reproduced below.

The main points made by the authors in relation to the Table (and other data cited in the book) are summarized below (with bold text being my emphasis).

A. On an absolute basis, the State-level imprisonment rates associated with Hispanic or Latino immigrants from some countries is much higher than that associated with U.S. citizens (e.g., Cuba, Dominican Republic). With respect to Mexico, the imprisonment rate is about 2X higher. However, 

(a) [p375]

Recall that the circumstances of immigration from Cuba and the Dominican Republic have been shaped uniquely by political forces that have led many individuals with backgrounds in crime to migrate to the United States: for example, when Castro allowed over 100,000 people, including many prison inmates, to leave Cuba in 1980. A result is that there is considerable variability in Hispanic rates of imprisonment, and it is therefore a mistake to assume that these rates are uniformly high or that there is an undifferentiated relationship between immigration and crime.
...It is important to keep in mind that although the Cuban and Dominican rates are relatively high, in absolute terms these are rather small immigrant population groups, and therefore their contributions to prison populations is limited...

(b) [p375]

Rates of immigrant imprisonment are complicated further by the fact...that immigrants are younger and more often male than are citizens...In the last column of Table 9-1 we have calculated imprisonment ratios using denominators for the compared rates that estimate the male populations of immigrants between 15 and 34 years of age from the various countries. The resulting ratios reveal a greater similarity between immigrants and citizens than was previously apparent.
The adjusted male rate for Mexican immigrants between ages 15 and 34 (47.61) is particularly notable because it is quite similar to the U.S. citizen rate (45.51). By this measure, the image of Mexican immigrants as more criminal than citizens is somewhat misleading...  

(c) [p375]

...there is also the further consideration that imprisonment rates inevitably are a result of several factors: involvement and apprehension for criminal behavior and decisions made about the prosecution and punishment of this behavior. As we further document below, there is reason to believe that Mexican and other immigrants may experience some unique risks of imprisonment for their crimes...
[p376]
...The most detailed recent study of criminal justice processing decisions involving immigrants was undertaken in El Paso and San Diego by Pennell et al. (1989). This study found in both cities that illegal aliens made up the largest proportion of immigrants prosecuted, and that these illegal aliens were much less likely than others to be released from jail prior to trial. For example, in El Paso only 14 percent of illegal immigrants compared with over 50 percent of all others were able to "bailout" prior to trial...When accused persons are unable to obtain release they may have greater difficulty generating resources to defend themselves in court, leaving them more vulnerable to conviction, and ultimately to imprisonment...
...we reanalyzed the Pennell et al. data...These results confirm that...immigrants are at greater risk of conviction and imprisonment because they are more vulnerable to pretrial detention. In addition, immigrants in El Paso and San Diego who are charged with drug offenses are more likely than others to be sentenced to prison. These differences cannot be the result of immigrants having more extensive criminal histories, because Scalia (1996:Table4) demonstrates that noncitizens are much less likely to have a prior known criminal history. A likely implication of these findings is that processing differences result in immigrants being over-represented in prison populations...

B. On the issue of whether illegal immigrants are associated with increased drug related crimes, the authors have this to say: 

[p377]

...Scalia (1996:7) also reports that noncitizen offenders tend more often than citizens to be involved in "minor" and "low-level" drug offenses...
[p378]
...There is further reason to question the impression left by prison statistics that Hispanic offenders are heavily involved with drugs. The research literature indicates that Hispanics compared with other Americans have lower rates of crack cocaine smoking (Wagner-Echeagary et al., 1994) and of drug-related deaths (Hayes-Bautista et al., 1994). These findings are part of a larger pattern indicating that recently arrived Hispanic immigrants are healthier on a variety of measures than other Americans, and that over time these differences diminish, with Hispanic Americans becoming more like other Americans in their health problems (Scribner, 1996)...
[p381]
...arrest records in cities such as El Paso and San Diego [border cities] suggest that illegal immigrants are less likely than citizens to be involved in drug crime, and instead that they are most distinctively involved in property crime. This kind of petty property offense activity is consistent with the picture of offending than Freeman (1996) has suggested in his foraging model of crime. That is, young male illegal immigrants may be most likely to become involved in petty property crime as they attempt to satisfy basic subsistence needs while moving through the early stages of seeking, finding, losing, and regaining employment.

C. The authors also talk about the possible importance of strong cultural and social networks in decreasing crime rates. Here are a couple of extracts from p382.

D. The authors clearly point out that the above facts are not provided as explanations to somehow diminish the importance of the observed crimes or the crime rates. They emphasize clearly that problems exist, but that a better understanding of the nature of the problems is obtained by a more critical and detailed look at the data, thereby allowing us to more effectively tailor the policy solutions.

ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS AND CRIME - MY INFERENCES

Based on the excellent data analysis done by Smith et al. above, I make the following inferences by extension, in the context of illegal immigrants:

(i) There is at best weak evidence, and at worst no evidence that the majority of immigrants are MORE predisposed to crime than Americans of comparable age and gender. An optimistic reading of the data might extend the same conclusion to illegal immigrants - but even a non-optimistic interpretation suggests that the majority of illegal immigrants (largely Mexicans) are probably associated with imprisonment rates not significantly higher than that of American citizens of their same age and gender. 

(ii) Imprisonment rates for illegal immigrants are biased unfavorably in their direction because of lower likelihood of "bailouts", and greater probability of tougher sentencing - quite possibly exacerbated by prejudicial notions regarding crime rates associated with them.

(iii) Illegal immigrants are probably less likely to be associated with drug crimes than American citizens, but more likely to be associated with (petty) property crimes. The latter tendency may be exacerbated by the poor treatment and low wages they receive at the hands of employers within the U.S. (more on this below).

(iv) However, as the proportion of youth in illegal immigrant populations if often higher than in the general population, the overall crime levels attributable to illegal immigrants is likely higher. With higher fertility levels in Hispanic immigrants (also briefly addressed in my following article - Part II), the propensity for them to constitute an increasing proportion of the youth base will increase the probability that such immigrants are over-represented overall in crime and imprisonment statistics over time. Governments and citizens ignore this at their own long-term peril. Lack of extensive communities and/or social support networks for immigrants is likely to increase the probability of criminal acts. 

6. TAX/FISCAL and ECONOMIC IMPACT

The other most common criticism against illegal immigrants is their alleged "sucking-up" of taxpayer dollars (for education/welfare). There have been many studies cited to support these charges and in a topic as controversial as this is, it is very difficult for me, as a reader who is trying to be objective, to find the facts that are trustworthy. 

I believe the book I have referred to above provides, yet again, a balanced perspective on the fiscal impact of immigration, thereby providing me a reference point to evaluate the potential costs attributable to illegal immigrants [I am aware of another book by NAS here, but it seems to fall short of what I am looking for]. As before, I will first highlight some information from the first book and follow that up with my own inferences in the context of illegal immigrants' fiscal impact.

Here is a broad summary of the book's main conclusions on the fiscal impact of immigration.  

A. The net fiscal impact of immigrants depends on how the immigrants are captured in the methodology: namely, immigrants on their own, or with their non-adult children, or along with their adult children and the children's descendants. One may ask why adult children of immigrants must be considered. The answer is obvious. A methodology that simply calculates the costs due to immigrants at a time when they are most expensive to the state, but conveniently ignores the period when they benefit the state is unscientific and flawed. Why? Well, if we were to simply use the current costs/benefits methodology (disregarding the future), most enterprises/companies in their earliest years will seem to be pure fiscal burdens (for example: starting up a new company will seem a pure burden/cost because one sinks money into it without any profitability for a certain period of time, homeowners borrowing huge amounts of money will seem pure burdens to lenders, etc.). 

B. Immigrant households with children typically represent a net cost to state/local Governments (although immigrants considered by themselves without their families usually do not), but in most cases they represent a net fiscal benefit to the country as a whole. This has obvious implications for states and local Governments that have high populations of immigrants.

As stated in page 5 of the book [bold text is my emphasis]: 

As a general rule, those programs in which immigrants receive fewer benefits than native-born households are predominantly at the federal level (e.g., Social Security and Medicare), whereas programs in which immigrants receive proportionately more benefits are at the state and local level (e.g., education)...Although Hispanic immigrants are heavy users of public education, Asian immigrants have much higher take-up rates for Supplemental Security Income..

As stated in page 196 and page 197 of the book [bold text is my emphasis]:

Taxpayers in high-immigration states bear the full increased burden of providing state and local government services to immigrants who reside in their state, whereas they share the federal fiscal benefits of immigration with taxpayers throughout the nation. This substantial discrepancy arises in large part because states and localities fund education and other youth services, whereas the federal government funds Social Security, Medicare, and other services for the elderly...
It is sometimes suggested that the federal government should address these interstate discrepancies through a national policy of compensation to state and local governments...[However] There are many complicated issues regarding such a policy of federal compensation. The presence of immigrants and their descendants may confer nonfiscal economic net gains to the residents of states and local areas, for example through cheaper goods and services or through higher wages of skilled workers and higher returns to nonlabor factors. The federal government does not generally compensate states for other discrepancies; what is special about the case of immigration?...

[Note, above, that economic benefits such as lower product/service costs that immigrants may bring are not captured in the analysis]. 

C. There are different ways to look at the fiscal impact of immigrants and their families, but the most appropriate approach which includes looking at immigrants as well as their adult children (and, as appropriate, their subsequent descendants) shows that they are a net fiscal benefit to the United States. The authors show some estimates using different approaches in pages 198, 199 and 200 of the book. 

The so-called cross-sectional approach yields the kind of numbers shown below in Table 5-5 (page 198), with positive numbers reflecting net benefits and negative numbers reflecting net costs. 

 The so-called longitudinal approach and associated estimates are discussed in page 199 below. 

The authors conclude by stating that if we stick with the cross-sectional approach, the most appropriate thing to do is to include concurrent descendants. However, they state that all cross-sectional approaches are generally inaccurate and the preferred approach is the longitudinal approach.

Since the authors do not specifically provide fiscal impact figures for illegal immigrants in the above, I scoured the web for other references that might provide the same. I came across this article in Education Week in 1997 that refers to an earlier report by Smith et al. The article contains some some useful snippets [bold text is my emphasis]:

The report from the National Research Council, one of the most comprehensive to date on the highly political issue, concludes that immigration creates a net gain for the U.S. economy overall.
But in the short run, it says, immigrants are a drain on state and local governments, a drain that flows largely from one source.
"In state and local budgets, education is the dominant factor driving the cost of immigrants," said James P. Smith, the chairman of the 12-member NRC panel that compiled the report and an economist at the RAND Corp. in Santa Monica, Calif.
...
In the short term, the report says, immigrants generally receive more in services than they pay in taxes because their households tend to have more school-age children than natives do, they tend to be poorer, and they are likely to make less money and have less property. Therefore, they pay less in taxes.
But when looked at over the course of a lifetime, the picture shifts.
Depending on the level of education and the age of immigrants when they enter the country, the study says, the cycle works like this: State and local governments foot the bill early in an immigrant's life.
But as immigrants leave school and become productive workers, they repay most or all of the cost of those services in the form of taxes. However, that payoff does not always go to the same state or town that paid to educate them.
Education is a critical factor in how productive immigrants become as taxpaying adults.
An immigrant with less than a high school education costs the economy about $13,000 over his life span, the study says. But immigrants with more than a high school education produce a net gain of about $198,000.
"Most studies see only the cost of education, they don't see the return," Mr. Smith said. "But I'm not prepared to say that education is the factor that produces the biggest return because we just don't know."
...
The report makes no policy recommendations. It looks at all immigrants and does not distinguish between those who are legal or illegal...

MY INFERENCES ON THE FISCAL IMPACT OF ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS 

Given the estimates mentioned above, it is not unreasonable to surmise that illegal immigrants (who are typically employed as low-wage, unskilled labor, and who typically have a higher probability of being under-educated) - either considered in isolation or along with non-adult children, likely represent a net fiscal cost to the country. At the same time, the one dominating cost they impose is on education budgets, and this is the only investment on the immigrants families that has a high probability of producing a good return to the country over the lifetime of the immigrant's children and/or their descendants. From this, I draw the following qualitative inference: as long as illegal immigration persists, and such immigrants are allowed to remain in the country (with possible medical aid), denying them the ability to send their children to public schools is likely to increase the net cost to the country, rather than the other way around. Thus, on the one hand, rewarding illegal immigrants with free education for their children at taxpayer expense is wrong. On the other hand, without education for their children, they will continue to be net fiscal burdens on the state and country, as long as politicians don't solve the problem of illegal immigration.

A DIFFERENT, EQUALLY IMPORTANT, PERSPECTIVE : THE ECONOMIC IMPACT OF ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS

As stated earlier, the fiscal impact estimates, based as they are on taxes paid and Government spending, do not account for seemingly intangible monetary benefits that illegal immigrants may bring to residents/citizens by way of lower commodity prices. While this may seem small comfort for critics of illegal immigrants, understanding the reasons why illegal immigrants lower costs for consumers reveals why they end up being disproportionate burdens on local and state governments. One of the books that partly covers this issue is Eric Schlosser's superlative tome (if you will) Fast Food Nation, which is one of the eRiposte Recommended Books.

A fact often ignored by critics of illegal immigrants is that illegal immigrants come to this country because there is history of people - usually corporations (including agribusinesses) - hiring them. I am willing to bet that the supply of illegal immigrants into the U.S. would abate significantly (of course it won't disappear entirely) if they were not really needed and used. Expressed in another way, it is a matter of supply and demand. There will be little in the way of supply if real demand did not exist. 

Clearly, if one believes that illegal immigration has to be stopped, merely penalizing those who enter the country illegally will not solve the problem - penalizing those who hire them all the time (mostly businesses/companies) is also a must. This is not simply a matter of punishing companies/businesses for committing an illegal act. Rather, it has more to do with the fact that such companies boost their profit margins by paying illegal immigrants egregiously low salaries with limited or no benefits, thereby forcing the state or local governments to bear much of the costs of living (including education) of the immigrants and their families. As Schlosser points out in his book, some of these (e.g., meatpacking) companies have been brazen enough in the past that they assume that the localities that these immigrants are brought into for work will automatically cover their welfare costs. This is obviously problematic for several reasons, that go well beyond the illegal immigration debate.

If a worker is paid a pittance and yet expected to work with minimal or no healthcare benefits, whose responsibility is it to ensure the worker remains in good enough health to continue working? If the worker's pay is insufficient to pay enough in local/state taxes to support the education of his or her child(ren), whose responsibility is it to ensure that the families of the kids get educated and turn into tax-paying, productive workers that benefit the country in the future? If the living conditions of the worker are below par and he or she is forced to consider crime as a way to meet their basic food or health needs, then who is responsible for preventing or reducing this tendency and to minimize crime? Now, I certainly concede that illegal immigrants come to the U.S. at their own risk/peril and should therefore have no RIGHT to expect a JOB, let alone decent pay or benefits. But, at the same time, even if you ignore the unfairness in the way the illegal immigrant is treated by his or her employer, it would be foolish and irresponsible for legal residents/citizens to ignore the unfairness that this treatment inflicts on *themselves*. "How?", you ask. If the answer is not obvious from the above comments, I will explain it again. 

When companies employ, but refuse to pay decent wages to, illegal immigrants, this is a multiple-whammy to legal residents and citizens.
(i) They have less jobs available as a result.
(ii) Companies are able to depress wages overall, reducing the bargaining power of legal employees - thereby gradually lowering the latter's quality of life.
(iii) By paying illegal immigrants poor wages, they create a poor quality of life for illegal immigrants. This has cascading effects. Local/State Governments may be forced to pay for the welfare or education (usually the latter dominates) of the immigrants' families using taxpayer funds that are disproportionately from legal residents/citizens. In cases where the illegal immigrants' localities are subject to high crime driven by sheer poverty, the State Government is also forced to use taxpayer money (disproportionately from legal residents/citizens) to build more prisons.

All of the above just because some corporate executives or business owners can reap in the big bucks and because the consumer may see somewhat lower costs (assuming the consumer still has his or her job). Get the picture?

7. RECOMMENDATIONS

A. Clearly, I am not in favor of illegal immigration. At the same time, I am also saying that we need to view this whole issue with more balance and not just emotion - and start viewing it from a different perspective than what we might be used to. 

B. As an American citizen or legal resident, if you want to increase the likelihood of keeping your job, you should be voting for those who favor legal immigration with pay/wages based not on race or national origin but purely based on capability and talent. Such policies would neither be unfair nor anti-capitalistic nor anti-free-market for what can possibly be unfair in demanding that there be no discrimination based on race- and country-of-origin? Let "discrimination" in pay be based solely on merit. This way, the country as a whole would benefit not because of "rigged" cheap labor, but because of potential lower or higher labor costs based on fair competition between people with talents/abilities. (Indeed, highly educated legal immigrants, as shown in the above study, make substantial net contributions to America's fiscal and economic strength.)

C. Voting as I suggest would also reduce the problem of people using up Local/State Government funding in a seemingly "unfair" fashion. Of course, this may come at the cost of somewhat higher prices for goods or services. But, if it allows lower taxes at the same time, one can weigh the costs versus the benefits. Ultimately, there are no free lunches in life - you either pay for the REAL cost of that hamburger you bought OR pay more in taxes to:
(a) keep some of the poorest workers and their kids (unhappy/unhealthy/uneducated kids = less time for parents to work) healthy and happy enough to keep sending you those <1$ hamburgers and  
(b) build more prisons to house the minority amongst them that might end up committing crimes to make up for their deep poverty. Thus, Americans have the choice of either using their taxes for imprisoning more people and letting the poorest workers turn to the state to support their health and that of their children -- OR they can be true to what America really stands for and make a conscious choice to pay a little higher for their purchases to ensure a better standard of living for all. 

D. Immigration policy, like all policy, should be aimed at maximizing the benefits to the host nation. It should not primarily be about goodwill - it should be about doing what is in the best interest of the citizens of the host country. Goodwill may be in the best interest of the host country on occasion - and that is fine. But it cannot be an overarching reason for any sustainable policy. So, in principle, the U.S.  should discourage illegal immigration and encourage appropriate legal immigration that benefits the country as a whole. 
Some may ask, "why even encourage legal immigration?" The studies above already answer this question in part - there is net fiscal benefit to the United States from a well-designed immigration policy. Immigrants may have knowledge and skills that are not easy to find in the host nation or they may bring abilities to perform better on certain jobs. An immigrant pool can also increase diversity and bring experience and perspective to the indigenous population - in turn helping the latter identify business opportunities in foreign markets. Either way, the country may directly benefit by gaining a competitive edge over other nations (and the U.S has benefited enormously from immigrants, especially in the 1990s). Needless to say, this may have the impact of also encouraging indigenous people to further improve their own education and skills as a result, thereby providing a greater pool of competitive labor against immigrants. Finally, attracting the best in the world has the attendant benefit that other countries don't get to host those people and reap the rewards of their creativity and productivity!

E. While it is easy to say that the Government should block illegal immigration hereafter, it is less easy to answer the question of what Government should do about the illegal immigrants already in the country today. To answer that question, let me first make a personal remark. As a legal immigrant, I do not assume that somehow this country owes me anything special - whether or not I am busting my butt (which I do of my own volition). I don't assume that I owe this country anything special either. All that I expect of this country is that I am treated fairly and consistent with its constitutional laws - and I will respond by being a good citizen. At the bare minimum, the same must hold true for illegal immigrants that are employed here. I find no reason to make the lives of illegal immigrants special just because they are willing to bust their butt. They came here of their own volition and they stay(ed) here because, all said and done, their have determined that their lives here are still better (monetarily, philosophically, or socio-culturally) than what they would have had in their home countries. What needs to be done is to treat them fairly and not as animals. If there are illegal immigrants who have deep roots in the country (the Government can determine what "deep" constitutes, but one measure could be a certain minimum number of years of service/hard work without a felony criminal record, and established families) then certainly an argument could be made to allow them the possibility of becoming legal immigrants by following a stringent set of requirements that they and their employers must meet. But there should definitely not be a wholesale amnesty or invitation to people to illegally immigrate, by having a blanket open-door policy. That would be a fatal mistake especially if it had no sound basis in policy.

F. Finally, a brief comment on a tangentially related topic - outsourcing of jobs. In some sense, when we discuss foreign labor, the issue goes well beyond illegal immigration. It also gets to the heart of free markets and globalization. Blocking illegal immigrants won't solve the problem of outsourcing jobs to countries which have cheap labor (the same workers who are now legal in their own countries).  This topic is in itself relatively complex and I cannot possibly cover all my thoughts/analysis on it in one paragraph. But, the laissez-faire use of job outsourcing without appropriate and free-market-consistent fiscal policies in Government will likely result in the same kind of downward pressure on jobs and wages as the laissez-faire use of illegal immigrants by companies without appropriate fiscal/social Government policies. More on outsourcing sometime in the future.

8. THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION PROPOSAL TO "REFORM" ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION

In so many ways, the Bush proposal is merely a "more compassionate" sop to the administration's financiers - namely big business executives, since it does nothing more than provide them legalized cheap labor that can be shipped out of the country in 3 years, after an employment period with minimal worker rights. This Press conference with "Senior Administration officials" - posted by Josh Marshall of Talkingpointsmemo - reveals a bit of the farce that this so-called plan is. But, rather than expound at length about why this plan should be killed, I will let Prof. of Law, David Martin, explain (below), as he does here in the Washington Post. 

Migrating Toward Trouble
By David A. Martin
Sunday, January 11, 2004; Page B07

This nation's undocumented population presents real human dilemmas that we need to address. But President Bush's new immigration plan would lead to stunningly broad changes for our laws and our labor market, without being candid about its real-world effects and operations -- much less about how to address them. This lack of seriousness verges on the irresponsible

Worse, this ill-considered plan will make it hard to find our way back to a serious effort to craft a sustainable and humane long-term immigration policy.

The Bush proposal offers legal temporary worker status to all undocumented migrants who can show they are working here -- maybe 8 million people. The plan then promises future temporary visas for new foreign employees to fill any job for which an employer, after undergoing an unspecified "quick and simple" process, cannot find American workers.

The president says that this will improve security and enforcement, because workers will come out of the shadows to identify themselves, and law enforcement can then focus on criminals and terrorists.

A serious plan would have addressed at least the following issues, well before whetting employers' appetites for such a vast new pool of available workers. These are not simple adjustments, easily tweaked as Congress debates the proposals. They present huge questions of policy, resources and sheer administrative capacity.

Processing. How do the undocumented become documented? Apparently they have to prove only that they were employed here as of a certain date and remain employed. The 1986 legalization program triggered tens of thousands of bogus affidavits attesting to 90 days of past farm work. The same temptations will be stronger now, because apparently shorter periods of work -- easier to lie about -- will suffice.

If the idea is that immigration officers will check these filings closely, you have to wonder: Is the White House oblivious to the deep problems that bureaucracy already faces?

The immigration services component of the Department of Homeland Security now receives 7 million applications a year. Bush has promised since 2001 to reduce the multiyear delays in processing, but the backlog has grown from 3.9 million to 6.2 million in the past two years. Adding 8 million new applications has to mean an even slower process for people who have already waited too long.

New workers from other countries. For future admissions, the key is an employer's inability to find a U.S. worker. But at what wage? All the jobs that Americans allegedly won't take now were done overwhelmingly by U.S. workers. Interest dropped because wages declined in real terms, often precisely because undocumented workers were available. Even if the new plan requires "prevailing wages" -- and the president made no such promise -- the new system is bound to retard normal wage growth.

Many employers will be tempted to cut corners on their searches or to find pretexts for rejecting U.S. applicants. The Labor Department now tries to police against such violations and against below-standard wages in the far more limited foreign-worker programs it oversees. Greatly understaffed, it does this badly. The cheating will get worse once every job in every sector is opened to this procedure.

Enforcement. The president's speech made a nod toward enforcement, but it betrays no glimpse of the real challenges here. Temporary workers will be required to leave at the end of their limited admission period, or if they lose their jobs. This latter fact gives employers enormous power to silence any complaints about working conditions. But who is going to check, on either employee departures or employer misbehavior? Deportations resulting from work site enforcement dropped from 17,000 in 1997 to fewer than 500 in 2002, and Labor Department staffing has not grown for years. Nothing portends a real change here.

The plan's explainers talk as though our simply bringing the current 8 million out of the shadows will mean we have records of everyone who is here, and -- voila! -- the illegal migration problem is solved. But that pool is not stagnant, and the Bush plan will ultimately make the problem worse. Migration is a network phenomenon. People already here provide a link making it easier for their friends and cousins to come. A bigger base of legal workers, even if temporary, makes for a wider network.

Also, the incentives to come illegally will grow stronger. How are you going to be the worker for whom an employer will petition once his U.S. job search comes up dry? You're not going to make that connection from San Salvador or Monterrey. All the odds favor sneaking in first and letting the visa catch up later.

Security screening. The delays and backlogs in current immigration processing have grown in part because since Sept. 11, 2001, we have imposed new security screening measures, including checking names against watch lists. After a rocky start, these new systems are just now beginning to cope with existing demands, but they aren't ready for an added load, and anyway they are hardly foolproof.

Much of the rhetoric about this program speaks as if undocumented workers and terrorists are two different species, as easy to distinguish as cattle from fish.

They aren't. The comforting talk about this plan as a way of improving security is hollow. Any "quick and simple" admission system will become a target of opportunity for the entry of terrorists and criminals.

Resources. Finally, since the current immigration staffing can't possibly cope with these new burdens, are we going to hire thousands of new officers to do the processing and beef up enforcement? The needed budgetary commitment is nowhere in sight, and even if it were, overreliance on raw rookies is a recipe for trouble.

It's hard to imagine a less promising way to fix a system the president calls broken than by flooding it with these new demands.

The writer, a law professor at the University of Virginia, was general counsel of the Immigration and Naturalization Service from 1995 to 1998.

UPDATE 2/22/04: 

Atrios has a link to a recent article showing that the Bush administration proposal is being received very poorly in some GOP quarters. A casual browsing of the right-wing blogosphere is likely to reveal similar or more adverse reactions (such as this one to "impeach Bush" by right-wing lunatic, serial liar, fraud and hater Michael Savage).

Also see...

Part II: A response to Samuel Huntington's essay in Foreign Policy magazine titled "The Hispanic Challenge"