The Immigration Reform Package (IRP), predictably, has been catching a lot of flack and critics are up in arms. Godless Capitalist @ GNXP has been particularly prolific (here and here). This is a meaty enough subject that I wanted to post a rebuttal to some of the criticisms that have been raised after my last post.
2 recent articles capture a large part of how I feel about it. Bill Murchison notes the source of the discord:
Why so much perplexity? In large measure, it is because most of us don't like dealing with bothersome and intractable realities.
...Immigration is the thorniest of realities.
Or, as Arnold Kling presciently put it in an article advocating a guest worker program back in December '03:
There is a saying that "the best is the enemy of the good." The truth in that saying is that people will let a problem fester while fighting over what is the ideal solution.
A guest worker program with taxes is probably no one's ideal solution to the immigration issue. However, until the ideal solution lands in our laps, my contention is that it would make things better.
First, let's establish some common ground. Here's where I fundamentally agree with "conservative" critics and avowed centrists like GC:
- Illegal Aliens are a net drain on society. There are hundreds of stats that come to different conclusions but, on balance, most serious economists would agree with this. The big macro stats I fundamentally agree with - healthcare deficits, education deficits, lowering prevailing wages, tax evasion, crime rates, etc. - all have some level of correlation with illegal aliens. My goal is the same as conservatives - reduce the number of illegal aliens in the country.
- Current laws aren't adequately enforced. The cops in Redwood City, CA aren't exactly chomping at the bit to help deport the cluster of day laborers on Veteran's Blvd who are advertising their yard work services.
There are even some laws which are counter-productive (for ex., situations where you can't inquire about immigration status).
BUT where I disagree:
- A purely forceful compliance system can't be 100% effective. Deportations will NOT provide a total solution. The parallels to the War on Drugs are deep and profound -- the tougher you crack down, the tougher & thus more profitable the underground world becomes. The river will find ways to flow past its obstacles. This is capitalism of the most base kind - arbitrage in human capital. With 8-10 million illegal aliens in the country, I actually fear the kind of society / police state that would be necessary to achieve even 50% effectiveness much less a total dam. Consequently, I'm willing to create a system where "non-citizens" are made more benign through reciprocal legal recognition.
- A system with at least one leg in voluntary compliance is easier to enforce all around. IMHO, a fundamental tenet of IRP is that once a person is legally recognized and thus dependent upon the legal system to get a loan on a new car or credit card, it is now FAR cheaper to enforce all other laws on him. I agree that politicians have a hard time enforcing existing laws period, but this new system is incrementally easier to enforce.
- This can't be solved by targetting hiring practices & employers. Illegal labor creates incentives for illegal businesses. A solution that relies on going after employers will bag a few high profile cases, but most cases will be similar to the recent Wal-Mart case where a big, legitimate company either knowingly or unknowingly subcontracted to an illegal company. The chain of least cost subcontractors will simply get deeper and deeper (if not Walmart, then the contracted cleaning crew, or the contracted trucks the cleaning crew is hauled to work in, or the body shop that repairs the trucks, etc. the arbitrage point will just keep moving). And, almost certainly, NO employer-oriented solution will ever reach the 3 man cleaning "company" my old roommates & I used to employ and paid for in cash.
- Chunks of our economy are dependent upon illegal alien labor. I wish it weren't true BUT, we'd do more harm than good if we pulled 10M people (even if you think that 50% of them are unwashed, unemployed indingents, that's still 5M people you have to grant are productively employed). In the long run, the economy could / would adjust if they weren't around - some band of white people somewhere will eventually start picking apples and/or some amount of technology would displace the labor and/or the farms themselves might move south of the border. BUT, that's still an awful lot of economic disruption
to absorb in a short amount of time.
Perhaps most importantly - IRP isn't mutually exclusive with other initiatives. You can pursue IRP in conjunction with stronger enforcement techniques like:
There's no really satisfying end here, is there?
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