In “A Costly Debate” — in part a response to a previous letter I wrote — Richard Nadler argues that many Republicans are seeking “mass deportation,” and that such a policy is a “deal breaker” for Hispanic voters. However, no credible voice suggests that the federal government engage in mass deportation. It is not that the deportations could not be carried out — simply that they are unnecessary.

A strategy of “attrition through enforcement” can dramatically reduce the illegal-immigrant population over time. If the federal government were to robustly enforce our immigration laws, especially those that target the employment of illegal immigrants, many aliens would return home voluntarily. Illegal immigrants would no longer find jobs easily, would no longer open bank accounts easily, and could no longer count on local law-enforcement officials being forbidden from reporting them to the Department of Homeland Security [DHS]. In fact, recently invigorated worksite enforcement by DHS has already had this effect to some degree. The overall illegal-immigrant population appears to have declined by over a million in the last year, which according the Center for Immigration Studies is largely attributable to enforcement.

IMMIGRATION POLICY AND VOTING

Is a strategy of attrition through enforcement a “deal breaker” for Hispanics? As I pointed out previously, and as Nadler neither acknowledges nor disputes, a Zogby poll found that four out of ten Hispanic likely voters actually prefer an enforcement-through-attrition strategy. He does cite another Zogby poll finding that 61 percent of Hispanics who voted for Barack Obama did so at least in part because Obama supported amnesty, but neglects to mention the same poll’s finding that only 15 percent of Hispanics who voted for John McCain did so because he supported amnesty.

When two candidates don’t differ on a policy, it’s rather odd to attribute voting patterns to differences on that policy. And even more interesting is that 59 percent of Hispanics who voted for McCain did so despite the fact that they, unlike Senator McCain, opposed amnesty.

Just as attrition through enforcement does not repel Hispanic voters, amnesty does not attract them. Just look at the 1986 election for the U.S. House of Representatives, when Republicans only got 23 percent of the Hispanic vote despite the amnesty earlier that year. And look at how amnesty supporter John McCain fared last year — CNN polling director Keating Holland found that “since 1972, Democratic candidates for president have, on average, won 64 percent of the Hispanic vote. So a 66 percent mark for Obama is pretty much what you would expect a Democratic candidate to get from Latinos.”

Nadler tries to make a case study in supposed Hispanic voter alienation out of the Sensenbrenner-King immigration-reform bill that passed the House of Representatives in 2005, claiming it was responsible for Hispanics going Democrat the next year. Hispanic support for Republican House candidates indeed dropped seven percentage points from 2002, the last midterm election, to 30 percent — but the Republican share of the white vote fell an almost identical six percentage points to 51 percent.

Polling data also supports the notion that the Hispanic shift in 2006 wasn’t due to immigration. The Houston Chronicle reported that “dissatisfaction over the economy and job creation, the war in Iraq and the Bush Administration’s education policies proved more important to Hispanic voters than immigration issues, the William C. Velasquez Institute found in its exit polls of Latinos in Texas and seven other states that account for 82 percent of registered Latino voters.” According to the Velasquez Institute’s exit polls, only 8 percent of Latino voters picked immigration as the issue that mattered most to them in deciding how to vote for Congress.

A similar phenomenon of Hispanics caring about issues besides immigration explains the Republican defeat of 2008: Observers believe that the financial meltdown was the main cause, and that this tsunami overwhelmed every other issue. Even the typically pro-mass-immigration Migration Policy Institute admits that “by mid-September, the economic crisis trumped all other issues as Americans became increasingly concerned with keeping their homes, jobs, and retirement funds.”

IMMIGRATION AND THE ECONOMY

Nadler responds to my points regarding the impact of mass immigration on low-skilled Americans by questioning my interpretation of a study from Harvard economist George Borjas. It’s possible we’re talking about different studies, but I was citing one written by Borjas along with fellow Harvard economist Lawrence Katz and published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in 2005. The study found that “the immigrant influx of the 1980s and 1990s lowered the wage of most native workers, particularly of those workers at the bottom and top of the education distribution. The wage fell by 8.2 percent for high school dropouts and by 3.8 percent for college graduates.”

Nadler mentions the small national economic benefit of immigration reported by some studies — the National Research Council in 1997 estimated it to be around $10 billion annually, about .1 percent of total GDP at the time — but leaves out that said benefit only occurs because immigration reduces the wages of lower-skilled American workers, thus making them cheaper to employ.

Also, I wrote in my original letter that “the negative impact of immigration is spread throughout the country when natives leave high-immigration states.” From this, I reasoned that one can’t just compare — the way Nadler does — the unemployment rates or income levels of persons in high- and low-immigration states. Nadler questions my critique, calling my reading of the economic literature “amusing.”

Amusement is subjective, but my reading is accurate. The National Research Council stated in its 1997 study that “labor, capital, and goods flow across localities and in doing so tend to equalize the price of labor. . . . As long as native workers and firms respond to the entry of immigrants by moving to areas offering better opportunities, there may be no reason to expect much of a correlation between the wages of natives [locally] and the presence of immigrants.”

Nadler rejects this analysis, claiming that “states that attracted high levels of foreign immigrants generally attracted even higher levels of American-citizen migrants.” That’s solid reasoning, but is it based on solid facts? Let me cite preeminent American demographer William Frey’s conclusions from a 2005 paper: “Domestic out-migration from the largely coastal High Immigration metropolitan areas is not only pervasive but also more accentuated in the late 1990s than it was in the 1980s, and still uniquely dominated by persons with less than college educations.” Just last December, the Los Angeles Times reported that “for the fourth year in a row, more residents left [California] than moved here from other states.”

Nadler is quite right that businesses that employ large numbers of illegal immigrants would hate to see their supply of cheap labor disrupted. But he’s wrong to portray such businesses as helpless victims forced by law to accept the fake documentation of illegal-immigrant workers. Any business that wants to employ a legal workforce can volunteer to participate in DHS’s E-Verify program to ensure that they are not being given fraudulent Social Security numbers. In fact, many employers have grown so concerned about the increasing level of worksite-enforcement activity that they are doing just that — this way, they won’t lose the employees they hire. Over 100,000 employers now participate in the program.

The downside to E-Verify being voluntary, though, is that participating puts a business at a great competitive disadvantage. This disadvantage trickles down to the legal workers employed there. At a hearing a few years ago, the House Immigration Subcommittee heard from Matthew Reindl, owner of the Long Island woodworking factory Stylecraft Interiors. He testified that “as my competitors break the law and hire illegal aliens . . . I cannot give my legal employees the raises they deserve. . . . Because of . . . lax enforcement . . . honest employers are paying an unbearable price.”

Still, the net results of DHS’s renewed emphasis on worksite-enforcement operations are more jobs and higher wages for American citizens and other legal workers. In fact, some companies who lost access to illegal-immigrant employees have already significantly raised wages in order to attract a legal workforce. For instance, Crider, Inc., raised wages by more than a dollar an hour and hired 200 legal workers after an enforcement operation. At Michael Bianco, Inc., 400 legal workers applied for the 361 jobs left by deported illegal immigrants. The Wall Street Journal reported that an enforcement action at a poultry plant was an “unexpected opportunity” for local American workers and that “for the first time in years [the company] aggressively sought workers from the area’s state-funded employment office.”

For American workers, this is good news.

Lamar Smith (R., Texas)

Ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee