Immigration Follow-up

If you missed it, read the always interesting Fareed Zakaria's "To Become an American" in yesterday's Washington Post.  Zakaria has a fun little rhetorical gambit, suggesting that the anti-immigration forces in the U.S. are trying to transform American immigration law along European lines.  (That ought to get under the skin of the oh so redder-than thou House Republians.)  According to Zakaria:

Many Americans have become enamored of the European approach to immigration -- perhaps without realizing it. Guest workers, penalties, sanctions and deportation are all a part of Europe's mode of dealing with immigrants. The results of this approach have been on display recently in France, where rioting migrant youths again burned cars last week. Across Europe one sees disaffected, alienated immigrants, ripe for radicalism. The immigrant communities deserve their fair share of blame for this, but there's a cycle at work. European societies exclude the immigrants, who become alienated and reject their societies. . . . . Compared with every other country in the world, America does immigration superbly. Do we really want to junk that for the French approach?

Zakaria also pin point the fundamental contradiction faced by many conservative Republicans who support free trade in goods but not free trade in labor:

The United States has a real problem with flows of illegal immigrants, largely from Mexico (70 percent of illegal immigrants are from that one country). But let us understand the forces at work here. "The income gap between the United States and Mexico is the largest between any two contiguous countries in the world," writes Stanford historian David Kennedy. That huge disparity is producing massive demand in the United States and massive supply from Mexico and Central America. Whenever governments try to come between these two forces -- think of drugs -- simply increasing enforcement does not work. Tighter border control is an excellent idea, but to work, it will have to be coupled with some recognition of the laws of supply and demand -- that is, it will have to include expansion of the legal immigrant pool.

What he said...

Comments

[Ryan Bell]

Nate, I can't help but notice a real flaw in the analogy of the drug market to the labor market. The intense demand for, and the abundant supply of, drugs, are impossible to keep from satisfying each other by regulatory means because they involve millions of individual actors who all live in relative obscurity. But wouldn't a similar regulation on labor (say, prohibiting businesses from hiring undocumented workers) likely be far more effective, if zealously enforced? The difference is that the market for workers is composed of companies, who cannot hide from regulators and are required to document their personnel decisions, etc. Thus, while I won't disagree about the rightness of the policy, I can't imagine that the ability to prevent American employers from hiring undocumented aliens is beyond America's powers, given the right mix of sanctions and oversight.

[Nate Oman]

"I can't imagine that the ability to prevent American employers from hiring undocumented aliens is beyond America's powers, given the right mix of sanctions and oversight."

Ryan, I am skeptical. It seems to me that a serious crackdown against illegal immigration without a simultaneous easing of restrictions on legal immigration would require unacceptably high levels of coercion. One can in theory I suppose supress anything -- although I am skeptical. It seems to me that the real quesiton is whether you can suppress something without creating a police state.

Don't get me wrong. There are elements of illegal immigration that are really nasty and ought to be supressed -- e.g. the cayotes who run people across the border -- but in some ways I suspect that drugs are easier to suppress. Immigrants have brains, while bags of cocaine do not.

[DKL]

I don't think that I buy David Kennedy's statement that, "The income gap between the United States and Mexico is the largest between any two contiguous countries in the world." What about Greece and Albania? Parts of Spain are contiguous with Morocco. Also, North Korea and South Korea are contiguous. What about Afghanistan and Iran?

Milton Friedman said something to the effect that every known instance of price controls in history has created a black market. If we look at immigration regulation as a price on immigration, and look at illegal immigration as a black market, then it seems likely that we will have an illegal immigration problem that correlates nicely with the restrictiveness of the legal immigration problem (other things being equal). But there is no question of completely doing away with illegal immigration so long as there are any practical restrictions at all. We can make the problem manageable by resorting to a Stalinesque level of enforcement or easing restrictions to a workable level. Since a Stalinesque level of enforcement is out of the question, that means easing restrictions. This suits me fine, since I'm a big fan of immigration anyway.

[Stephen M (Ethesis)]

Well, if hiring an illegal could cost you your citizenship (and give it to the illegal) you could easily construct market forces that would make enforcement of the laws much more dramatic than they are now.

It is easy to design regulatory schemes that can work.

It is much, much, much harder to design those that we would find tolerable.

[Clark]

It seems to me though that the only real solution to the illegal immigration problem is to solve the problems of Mexico. I'll give Fox credit for making a dent. But the poor in Mexico simply aren't seeing the benefits that many others are. Part of this is due to the high birth rate but a large part is due to the programs of the Mexican government not to mention the anti-business climate due to corruption and other problems.