February 19, 2012
Illegal Immigration
Illegal Immigration-Becker
I agree with Posner that illegal immigrants are generally productive members of the labor force, and make relatively little use of taxpayer-funded programs, such as Medicaid and other welfare programs. On the other hand, they pay little in taxes since they are frequently paid in cash and often do not pay either social security taxes or income taxes. In effect, they largely receive as take home pay what they add to the output of the country.
It is also abundantly clear that, despite the rhetoric in the Republican campaign debates, the US will never try to ship 11 million illegal immigrants back to Mexico or the other countries they came from. Some form of de facto amnesty may be inevitable for the vast majority of these immigrants. Still, I find it difficult to simply accept wholesale violation of US immigration laws, especially since, as Posner indicates, illegal immigration will pick up again as the American economy continues to recover from the Great Recession. Further immigration from Mexico is surely to be expected as long as typical young Mexican workers can increase their earnings several fold by migrating illegally to the United States.
Beyond amnesty, what can be done to discourage further illegal immigration to America, and reduce the number of illegal immigrants who are already here? Perhaps extending the wall on the Mexican-US border would help a lot, although I anticipate that would-be illegal immigrants and their "mules" would create additional crossing points into the United States where there is no wall.
A more promising approach is to tighten the enforcement of laws against employers who hire illegal immigrants. That is much more efficient than directly hunting down illegal immigrants since the number of employers using illegal migrants is much less than the number of illegal immigrants. Tightening laws against employing illegal immigrants might be effective even without sending more illegal immigrants back to Mexico since the cost of employing them would rise, and that would reduce the earnings and jobs available to illegal immigrants. As a result, fewer immigrants would want to come here illegally, and some of those already here would decide to return voluntarily to the countries they came from. However, employers of illegal immigrants have political clout, and they complain to government officials when enforcement efforts against these employers is stepped up- recently Chipotle Mexican Grill voiced such complaints when they were caught employing many illegal immigrants. This opposition to enforcing the law more diligently against employers of illegal immigrants reduces the political attractiveness of that approach.
Despite the many difficulties they face, some illegal immigrants have done well: they have risen into good jobs, and they are very much committed to staying in the United States. These (and other) illegal immigrants would be willing to pay a lot to change their status to legal residents. Why not accommodate them, and offer all illegal immigrants the opportunity to buy their way into legal residence? A price would be set, say for concreteness $50,000, such that illegal immigrants who pay that price could change their status to that of legal residents.
Allowing illegal residents to buy their way into legal status would reduce the opposition to these residents because of a belief that illegal immigrants get a "free ride" into the various advantages offered by the United States. Yet it could also be attractive to illegal immigrants, especially those who have made commitments to the United States, because it removes the risk that they would be deported, perhaps after many years in America. It would also have the political attraction of adding money to federal revenues that is especially welcome in these days of large federal budget deficits.
To be sure, it could be hard for even successful illegal immigrants to raise $50,000, or any other significant payment to become legal residents. A way to handle such liquidity problems would be to require only a partial payment up front-perhaps 20%, or $10,000 in my example- and start a government loan program that would make the rest available to be paid off over time. In many respects, immigration loans could be modeled after student loans. Such a loan program would be especially attractive to the well established successful immigrants who have been in this country for many years, but do not have much in the way of liquid assets.
I have argued elsewhere (see my monograph "The Challenge of Immigration: A Radical Solution", 2011) that the right to immigrate by paying an "admission fee" should be available to all potential immigrants, not just to those who immigrated illegally. However, even without such a radical change in overall immigration policy, the right to pay for legal residence could apply only to illegal immigrants. In fact, it might be politically much easier to implement such a policy only for illegal immigrants because of the considerable opposition to these immigrants. Many in the US and in other countries with considerable illegal immigration might support a system that requires these immigrants to pay for the right to stay legally.
Amnesty for Illegal Immigrants? Posner
Two of the candidates for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination—Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry (the latter later withdrew from contention)—advocated measures quickly denounced by other conservatives as forms of "amnesty" for illegal immigrants. Neither proposal was spelled out in any detail, and they are no longer receiving any attention at all.
The problem of illegal immigration to the United States remains unsolved. There are some 11 million illegal immigrants, mostly Mexicans, in the United States. The number stabilized for a time after the economic crisis that began in 2008 reduced job opportunities in the U.S., but as the economy improves and violence in Mexico increases, we can expect the number to start growing again. It is neither feasible to deport any substantial fraction of the 11 million—we cannot at present (or in the foreseeable future) afford the necessary enforcement machinery, or the disruption of the economy that would be caused by withdrawing millions of productive workers (they would take a long time to replace)—nor possible to close the border with Mexico (because of the huge amount of lawful crossing of our border with that country) so that no (or very few) Mexicans can immigrate illegally. We are stuck with the 11 million, or something very close to that number. It is almost 4 percent of the population of the United States.
One can imagine measures, short of mass deportation (the official name for "deportation" is now "removal," but I will continue using the older and more familiar term), that would both limit illegal immigration and speed voluntary departure. One would be to make it a crime to be an illegal immigrant. Although an illegal immigrant is a law violator, he is not (except in a few situations, mainly if he has been deported previously and then returned to the United States without authorization) a criminal. He is subject to being deported but not to being imprisoned and then deported. If it were a crime to be an illegal immigrant, this would operate as a significant deterrent, especially if, as in the case of most federal crimes, the punishment were severe. Another effective though costly measure would be to detain anyone found to be an illegal immigrant, pending his deportation. The current practice, unless the immigrant is a criminal, is to order him to depart, and if he doesn't obey the order there is rarely effective follow up; if he keeps a low profile, he probably will never actually be forced to leave the country. Still another effective measure, though it might require a constitutional amendment, would be to deny U.S. citizenship to illegal immigrants' children even though they had been born in this country. And still another measure would be to repeal the law that allows immigrants who have been ordered deported to apply for cancellation of the order on grounds of hardship to their family; this suggestion is related to the immediately preceding suggestion because the family may include U.S.-citizen children who will remain in the U.S. when the illegal immigrant is deported, thus breaking up the family.
I would not myself recommend measures such as these, because I do not think that the presence of millions of illegal immigrants is a problem serious enough to warrant enhanced enforcement measures, which would undoubtedly be costly. Illegal immigrants are not a net burden on the economy. They have some entitlements, notably to Medicaid, but far fewer than citizens and lawful permanent residents. They pay taxes, by and large. They are hard workers (Californians who want to criticize someone for working too hard say "he works like a Mexican"), productively employed, many in jobs that American citizens don't want. It is true that there is a significant criminal element among illegal immigrants, mainly because Spanish speakers have a comparative advantage in the illegal drug trade, but the Administration is rightly focusing its enforcement efforts on them. It has not been shown that illegal immigrants are "taking" jobs from Americans, for many of the jobs they do, particularly in agriculture and domestic service, are unattractive to Americans. And of course illegal immigrants, like all residents, generate jobs by spending their income on consumer goods and services, thus creating demand for workers to provide those goods and services. When one considers the enforcement costs and disruptive economic consequences of deporting large numbers of illegal immigrants, the net benefits of such deportations, other than of criminals, seem negative.
The question then is whether, if we are and should continue (or maybe have no feasible alternative to continuing) to tolerate the presence of millions of illegal immigrants in our midst, some form of amnesty would create net benefits for the society. The simplest amnesty law would be a federal statute authorizing illegal immigrants who had been in this country for say five years before the statute was enacted (to avoid a flood of illegal immigrants drawn by anticipation of the statute's enactment) to apply for lawful permanent residence, which is the first step to obtaining citizenship. The application would be granted if the applicant had proved himself to be a productive member of American society who had developed substantial ties to this nation and was honest and did not have a criminal record, or if the applicant was a spouse, minor son, or daughter of such a person. The statute would sunset after one year.
This would be amnesty, and would encounter the usual objection to amnesty: it encourages violations of law, in this case in the form of illegal immigration by persons who anticipate a future amnesty. That expectation would reduce the expected cost of illegal immigration. But perhaps not by much. The last, and as far as I know also the first, amnesty for illegal immigrants was the Immigration and Control Reform Act (also known as the Simpson-Mazzoli Act, after its sponsors), enacted in 1986. That is more than a quarter of a century ago, and how many foreigners would decide to immigrate illegally to the United States in the hope that a quarter century later there would be another amnesty? Moreover, such slight effect in encouraging illegal immigration as an amnesty would create could probably be offset just by making illegal immigration a crime rather than, as I noted that it is at present, merely a civil offense with the only penalty deportation.
The biggest obstacles to amnesty for illegal immigrants are twofold. The first is political and is the recent surge of hostility toward them, which is puzzling but may be linked to the economic crisis that began in 2008 and is persisting, albeit lessening at last (almost three a half years after the crisis began with the financial collapse of September 2008). The government and the media have done a poor job of explaining the economics of the crisis to the average person, and as a result misconceptions abound, and one is that our economic woes are attributable to a significant extent to illegal immigrants who take jobs away from Americans and grow fat on "safety net" programs, thereby exacerbating the federal budget deficit.
The second obstacle is the perceived failure of the 1986 amnesty. The basic condition of eligibility was continuous residence in the United States since 1982. Some three million illegal immigrants were eligible, and about that number of illegal immigrants obtained amnesty—but apparently fraud in applications was rampant, so that many of the amnestied had been here for a shorter time or were otherwise ineligible. And just as I suggested above, the amnesty was coupled with measures to discourage further illegal immigration—and these failed utterly to stem the tide.
The prospects for a new amnesty are therefore bleak, though I believe we could learn from the failures of the 1986 law and design an amnesty program that would, if not solve, at least measurably alleviate, the problems created by illegal immigration.