When the Obama administration admitted last month that it was studying a request by Texas governor Rick Perry to send National Guard troops to the Mexican border, and was also considering backing an immigration-reform bill this year, immigration returned to the news. But the old answers — enforcement, amnesty, or some “comprehensive” combination of the two — won’t work, at least if “work” is defined to mean “reduce the number of illegal entries.”
Consider enforcement. Last year the federal government scrapped, after just three weeks, a pilot program that urged illegal immigrants to turn themselves in for deportation. And no wonder: Of the 30,000 illegal immigrants targeted in five U.S. cities, just eight took the bait. Operation Scheduled Departure, which may not have been the most plausible idea to begin with, joined an ever-growing list of failed government efforts to stop illegal immigration through enforcement measures alone.
The others include Operation Hold the Line, Operation Gatekeeper, and Operation Blockade in the 1990s. The Clinton administration erected three-tier fences, remote-control cameras, and motion-detection devices along the Rio Grande. It dispatched helicopters and rugged-terrain vehicles. It tripled the number of Border Patrol agents and sealed off several Southwest corridors favored by illegals.
The upshot? In that decade, illegal immigration rose by 5.5 million. Moreover, the additional border security may have exacerbated the problem by reducing so-called circular migration. Some foreign workers who used to come north for the growing season and then return home after harvest instead remained stateside year-round because the journey had become so treacherous.
Electronic verification, or “E-Verify,” is the latest touted solution from the government, but it’s not the answer for two reasons. First, several government information-technology systems, including ones at the FBI and the IRS, have had either poor security controls or serious implementation issues. Why should we expect E-Verify to be better? Second, what guarantee do we have that most employers will use the system, which the government says is “voluntary”?
Amnesty alone won’t solve the problem, either. Amnesty programs have never worked, because they don’t address the market forces that lead to illegal immigration — the future need of the American labor market for additional workers. Amnesties, in addition to undermining the rule of law, merely bring into legal status people whom our labor markets have already absorbed.
President Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which among other things brought some 3 million illegal immigrants into legal status. Border apprehensions (the best measure we have of the rate of illegal immigration) fell between 1987 and 1989, but by 1990 they were rising again, up by 26 percent over the previous year. The illegal population is at least four times larger today than it was in 1986, perhaps fueled in part by hopes for another amnesty.
Illegal immigration to the U.S. is, first and foremost, the result of too many foreigners chasing too few visas. As the economy continued to grow after IRCA, so did the demand for foreign workers. Because legal channels did not expand sufficiently, immigrants once again began coming illegally. Today’s 12 million-plus undocumented workers are the result. So if we want to reduce the number of illegal entries, the best course is to give workers more legal channels.
Fortunately, there’s a way to do just that. In the 1940s, the U.S. faced labor shortages in agriculture stemming from World War II. The government established the bracero program, which allowed hundreds of thousands of Mexican migrants to enter the country as seasonal laborers. The result was a 95 percent drop in illegal border crossings. A 1980 Congressional Research Service report concluded that “without question” the program was “instrumental in ending the illegal alien problem of the mid-1940s and 1950s.”
The program worked because it acknowledged human nature and economic reality. But it was phased out in the 1960s amid opposition from labor unions. And when nothing comparable replaced it, illegal entries began to rise again. A guest-worker program today could have the same beneficial effects, while also serving our homeland-security and economic interests.
This may not seem like an important issue now. It may even seem like the wrong time to promote it, given current anxiety about unemployment. But considering how slowly Washington works, now is the time to start, so that when the economy does recover, a new guest-worker program can solve the problems of employers who need seasonal labor, even as it helps Mexico address its serious economic and social problems.
Also, it would ensure that these workers are treated fairly, rather than exploited, as illegal immigrants too often can be — workers would no longer have to live in fear of deportation, or of violence from those who prey on them. They would be able to earn their livings and return to their families — all legally.
That’s a better way.
– Mallory Factor is a merchant banker and the co-chairman and co-founder of the Monday Meeting, an influential gathering of economic conservatives, journalists, and corporate leaders in New York City.