March 2006
Tear Down This Wall? Fixing a Broken Immigration System
The United States is home to roughly 12 million undocumented immigrants, and the current immigration system is in desperate need of reform. Last December, the U.S. House of Representatives passed an immigration reform bill focusing solely on border security and interior enforcement. This bill includes the controversial proposal for a 700-mile wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, criminalizes aid for undocumented immigrants, and authorizes local law enforcement to implement federal immigration law. But President George W. Bush has envisioned a three-pronged approach to immigration reform, emphasizing border security and interior enforcement paired with a guest-worker program. When the Senate takes up the bill, should lawmakers adopt a more comprehensive approach to immigration reform that includes the guest-worker proposal? How should this program be defined and enforced? How will this bill affect American relations with our Latin neighbors? These and other questions were the focus of a March 27 AEI event.
Michael Barrera
United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce
Immigrants have a great impact on the economy and growth of the United States. Contrary to popular belief, immigrants are not taking jobs away from native workers: outsourcing, technological innovations, and increased productivity have caused more low-skilled job losses than competition from immigrants. Agricultural production, in fact, is so reliant upon foreign labor that it would be outsourced were sufficient immigrant workers unavailable. Immigrants have a $970 billion-per-year impact on the U.S. economy, not just as workers, but as entrepreneurs, job-creators, and consumers; furthermore, they contribute to the U.S. Social Security and health care systems. Immigration is important not only in what it brings to the United States in cultural and economic diversity, but also in the values those individuals who return home bring back to their countries of origin, for example entrepreneurship and capitalism. Our current enforcement laws can be compared to Prohibition: some of the current bills, including the one passed in the U.S. House of Representatives last December, criminalize the average individual and will ultimately prove as ineffective as Prohibition.
Steven Camarota
Center for Immigration Studies
Our national security is at stake in our discussion over how to reform the immigration process. The current immigration system is already overwhelmed with processing even 1 million permanent legal residents a year, the green card process is backed up, 400,000 illegal immigrants have been deported by court order but have never been forced to leave the country, and the system is not effectively weeding out criminals. Due to the agency’s inability to manage current flows, a new and large influx of people to process and document would only weaken our ability to target criminals and would not enhance our national security.
The fiscal cost of illegal immigrants is not their legal status, nor that they receive welfare benefits, nor that they are unemployed; rather, their costs reflect their educational attainment. As a largely low-skill group, they tend to earn less income and therefore contribute less in taxes while using public services--effectively causing fiscal losses for the government. Legalization will only exacerbate the fiscal problem: while illegal immigrants now consume $10 billion more than they contribute, were they to “perform” similarly to legal residents of the same educational attainment, they would run a $30 billion deficit, in large part because they would take advantage of programs like welfare and the earned income tax credit that they otherwise could not. In addition, immigrants do take jobs away from native-born workers--although largely ignored because it mostly affects low-skilled natives--as exemplified by the fact that unemployment rates in sectors dominated by immigrants (construction, for example) are around 11 percent for native-born Americans, far above the national average of 5.5 percent. Given that both mass roundups and amnesty are impractical, the solution to our undocumented immigrant problem is attrition through serious law enforcement.
Daniel Griswold
Cato Institute
Today, the immigrant share of the population is down from a century ago, and we are comfortably within the norm of immigrants as part of the economy. Immigrants allow the labor force to grow and give the United States an edge over aging countries in the global economy. The illegal immigration challenge is born from an immigration system that ignores important supply and demand factors. Demand for low-skill workers increases each year, and there are not enough native-born workers to fill these jobs. Illegal immigration does affect two groups: other immigrants and native workers lacking a high school diploma.
Enforcement has failed because current statutes are unenforceable and ineffective. Enforcement alone has instead caused perverse effects, such as driving immigrants into the desert without stopping the flow and encouraging immigrants to stay in the country longer. Increased enforcement without reform, as proposed in the bill passed in the House, is doomed to fail. Comprehensive immigration reform must include a temporary worker program and legalize those immigrants who are already here. If we are worried about the fiscal costs of providing welfare services to these immigrants, then the solution is to wall off the welfare state, not our country. Thus, there are three options: muddling through the status quo, redoubling past provisions, or recognizing reality and devising a legal channel to immigration more in tune with our economic needs.
Michael Barone
U.S. News and World Report
The United States passes another round of immigration legislation roughly every twenty years, and each time actual immigration patterns rarely meet our expectations. For example, no one predicted the level of Asian and Latin American immigration we have seen in the past forty years. As such, the government is a clumsy instrument to deal with the flow of immigrants. Because the market has thwarted our best efforts at controlling immigration, laws should be made in tandem with the realities of the labor force. Even with technical advances, the ever-growing importance of our 2,000-mile border in controlling immigration has frustrated the government’s efforts at enforcement. A wall along the entire border is certainly feasible, but the government is not structured to totally patrol the border; therefore, we need some way to be able to legalize the flow. Given that the involved bureaucracies have proven so ineffective, Congress should consider “outsourcing” the employment verification system; if the private system can master the credit card swipe system, someone should be able to better tackle the verification issue. Finally, assimilation is an important component of immigration. Although Congress cannot mandate assimilation, it should encourage the inculcation of American values and the use of the English language.
This summary was prepared by AEI intern David Ribner.
