Curb illegal immigration by expanding legal alternatives

Voters all across America as well as Arizona are understandably frustrated by the inability of policymakers in Washington to effectively deal with the problem of illegal immigration. Arizona’s tough new law making it a crime to be in the state without proper documentation is drawing cheers, but I predict it will fail to solve the problem and will ultimately only add to the frustration.

More than two decades of “enforcement only” from the federal government have proven an expensive failure. Since 1992, annual spending on the U.S. Border Patrol has soared from $326 million $2.7 billion in fiscal year 2009, while the number of Border Patrol agents assigned to the U.S-Mexican border has grown exponentially from 3,555 to 17,415.

Meanwhile, the federal government has built hundreds of miles of fencing along the border, much of it across private property. Federal agents have raided thousands of work sites. Pilot programs such as E-Verify now require that American citizens receive permission from a government data base before they can begin a new job and support their families. Plans for a National ID card are in the works.

What has this massive ramping up of enforcement achieved? Not much. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, the number of persons living in the United States illegally more than tripled during that same time span, from 3.5 million in 1990 to 11.9 million in 2008. The number of illegal immigrants has dropped by about 1 million in the past two years, but that was more a consequence of the steep recession than yet another boost to enforcement. 

If this were a federal education program, conservatives would accuse the federal government of “throwing money” at the problem without result. Yet for many of our friends on the right who are properly skeptical of expanded federal power and spending, their only answer to illegal immigration is more tax dollars and more intrusion into the workplace.

Any cost-effective solution to illegal immigration must include a change in federal immigration law. We need to remove incentives for illegal immigration by expanding opportunities for legal immigration through a robust temporary worker program.

The illegal immigration of recent decades has been driven by underlying forces of demand and supply. In normal years of growth, the U.S. economy creates hundreds of thousands of net new jobs for lower-skilled workers—in construction, cleaning food preparation, landscaping, and other service sectors. On the supply side, the number of native-born Americans who have traditionally filled those jobs, typically those without a high school diploma, continues to decline. It isn’t that no Americans will do those jobs but that their numbers are insufficient to meet the normal needs of the labor market.

Current immigration law is out of step with this reality. The number of visas available for lower-skilled workers to enter the country even temporarily is woefully inadequate. As a result, workers from Mexico or Central America who know of jobs available in the United States have no legal way to enter, so they pay smugglers to enter illegally.
   
Critics of immigration reform claim that we tried “amnesty” in the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act and that it failed. It’s true that IRCA legalized almost three million immigrants who had been living in the country illegally. It also ramped up enforcement through increased border patrols and sanctions, for the first time in U.S. history, against employers who knowingly hire illegal workers. Yet it contained no provision for expanding legal immigration. This time around any serious reform must make room for expanded legal immigration into the future.
   
We know from our nation’s own experience that expanding opportunities for legal immigration can sharply reduce illegal immigration. In the early 1950s, the U.S. government was making a million apprehensions a year along the southwest border. In response, Congress and the Eisenhower administration increased enforcement while at the same time they dramatically expanded the number of temporary worker visas through the Bracerro program. The result: a 95 percent drop in apprehensions at the border.
   
The crucial lesson of that experience is that if workers from Mexico and Central American know they can enter the country legally to fill jobs that are waiting, they will be far less likely to enter illegally.

A workable temporary visa program would make our border more secure and alleviate many of the problems plaguing Arizona and other border states. If hundreds of thousands of workers could enter the country legally through regular ports of entry instead of sneaking across the border, U.S. agents could concentrate their efforts on intercepting real criminals and terrorists. Arizona ranchers would be far less likely to encounter people crossing their land illegally in the middle of night.
   
A sufficient supply of legal workers would also reduce the temptation to hire illegal workers, in turn reducing the need to raid workplaces and impose national ID cards, employment verification systems, and other burdens on American citizens.
  
Our research at Cato also shows that allowing more legal workers to enter the country would raise the incomes of American households. Legalization would encourage more low-skilled immigrants to upgrade their job and language skills. More legal immigrants would raise the productive capacity of our economy by allowing important sectors to expand, creating more middle-class employment opportunities for Americans.     A 2009 Cato study predicts that a sufficient temporary worker program would boost the real incomes of U.S. households by $180 billion a year.  A January 2010 study by the Center for American Progress came to a similar conclusion. Both studies found that the broader economic gains from legalization more than offset any additional costs to state and local governments for spending on education and health care.
  
Unfortunately, the current political environment in Washington is not promising for real immigration reform. Many Republicans want to placate a noisy minority within their base that is opposed to any expansion of immigration, whether legal or illegal. And many Democrats, equally eager to placate their key constituency of organized labor, oppose the establishment of a meaningful temporary worker program. The result is a lot of talk and demagoguery on both sides of the issue, but no action other than promises to pour ever more resources into enforcing a fundamentally flawed system.
  
Until the two parties come together to pass comprehensive immigration reform, widespread illegal immigration will continue, enforcement efforts will grow more expensive and draconian, and public frustration will just keep building.

Daniel Griswold is the director of the Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute. He has testified before Congress and written extensively on U.S. immigration policy.