Working for the (Expensive) Clampdown

Ryan Avent points out that Prince William County is finding that big crackdowns on illegal immigration cost a lot of money, remarking "Prince William would be far better off identifying the people who claim to be harmed by immigration and figuring out how much money it would take to shut them up."

A joke of course, but it illustrate the general shape of things. The evidence suggests that illegal immigration is damaging to the economic prospects of the least-skilled Americans. It also suggests, however, economic benefits to the majority of Americans who don't fall into the "least skilled" category. On top of that, it has large benefits to the immigrants themselves. Crackdowns, meanwhile, have direct financial costs whereas putting illegals on a path to citizenship has direct financial benefits (fines and taxes). Under the circumstances, crackdowns on illegals is an incredibly inefficient way of helping the unskilled. Most crudely, you could just cut them checks and make everything pareto-optimal. More realistically, improved social services, etc.

Comments

"The evidence suggests that illegal immigration is damaging to the economic prospects of the least-skilled Americans."

And we all know they don't count for jack shyt. So why not allow people like Matt to make them the sacrificial lambs he can feel "tolerant" toward (don't ya know) the BROWN people.

Posted by kafka | December 20, 2007 12:19 PM

So why not allow people like Matt to make them the sacrificial lambs he can feel "tolerant" toward (don't ya know) the BROWN people.

We shouldn't allow Matt or anybody else "to make them sacrificial lambs." We should, like any other civilized country, give them free medical care and robust worker retraining. We should also "give" them upward pressure on wages by providing a legal framework for immigrant labor that, by dint of its legality, would make it subject to regulation (superminimum wage laws, etc.) and eligible for union membership.

Posted by Jasper | December 20, 2007 12:30 PM

Uh oh! You used the term "pareto!" Now the wingers will never understand your point. If there's one thing even the most educated winger economist is sure to have missed in Econ 101, it's the concept of pareto-superiority; winger non-economists immediately become hopelessly lost once that subject is injected into a discussion.

Posted by R Johnston | December 20, 2007 12:31 PM

I've often wondered if the costs to round up, lock up and send off illegals was more expensive than just letting them stay. Seriously ... it's something I've posted on several sites.

Good to know I wasn't (totally) insane.

Oh, and super-duper-double bonus points for The Clash reference in the title, something not often seen from the wonky set.

**polite clap**

Posted by Mark D | December 20, 2007 12:40 PM

I think we've already experimented with the idea of paying the least-skilled Americans to prevent them from being poor. The result was a culture of poverty, broken families, illegitimacy, crime, violent and filthy public housing projects, and dangerous dilapidated cities with their attendant costs including suburbanization and resulting global climate catastrophe.

Lower-skilled Americans don't need checks. They need work. And that work needs to be real, valuable, private sector productivity. The cheapest way to create that opportunity is to keep slightly-higher skilled or cheaper foreign labor out.

Compensation checks won't help. Money may be the cheapest way for big business illegal immigration profiteers to pay for their crimes but not everything can be paid for with money.

And that holds even when it forces you to pay an extra quarter for a Big Mac.

Posted by Brian | December 20, 2007 12:40 PM

"The cheapest way to create that opportunity is to keep slightly-higher skilled or cheaper foreign labor out."

There's just one problem: many Americans truly, honestly, and really won't do some jobs.

Ask any meatpacking plant manager and he or she will tell you the same thing: It's nearly impossible to get an American worker to do the incredibly gross and nasty work required. Most don't last two hours.

Granted, other jobs people will do, but the nasty and tough ones they won't. I'm not sure why, but it is a reality these businesses face. It's also why some sort of legit worker program would be quite beneficial.

I also don't think anyone was really suggesting we just hand out checks to every illegal alien. I think the point is that offering job training and a path to citizenship is much better for the economy than rounding them up and shipping them back home, or keeping them out in the first place.

Posted by Mark D | December 20, 2007 12:46 PM

Yes, because large welfare states (See France, Germany) do such a great job of creating an underclass. We have enough culture problems in the poorest neighborhoods now without idiotic ideas like this making it worse.

You know, police cost a lot of money, too. Why not just pay off the criminals in an effort to get them to stop?

Posted by James Robertson | December 20, 2007 12:56 PM

"We should, like any other civilized country, give them free medical care and robust worker retraining. We should also "give" them upward pressure on wages by providing a legal framework for immigrant labor that, by dint of its legality, would make it subject to regulation (superminimum wage laws, etc.) and eligible for union membership."

During the heyday of the New Deal, immigration levels were at the lowest levels in history. But of course that was back in the bad old days when the working men and women of this country actually had some political power. God knows we don't want that to happen again.

Posted by kafka | December 20, 2007 12:56 PM

Well, I'm personally much more on the pro-immigrationist side of the debate, but does it really make sense for the American government to do whatever it can to allow "incredibly gross and nasty work" to continue to be found within the U.S.?

And I'd hardly regard the meatpacking/chicken-plucking industry as a "strategic one," vital to America's technological future or the national defense?

I think the main people who really benefit from all those illegal immigrants working in American meatpacking at currently low wages are the top executives getting all the stock-options...

Posted by RKU | December 20, 2007 12:57 PM

RKU gets this right-- illegal immigration is basically a huge subsidy to companies who specialize in labor-intensive industries that rely on cheap wages.

If you consider that there's a certain amount of capital floating around waiting to be invested in new businesses, what illegal immigration fosters, by providing potential employees for "jobs americans won't do" is making the act of starting companies that provide those low-quality jobs a more attractive investment prospect than starting companies that would provide different, more attractive sorts of jobs.

We don't need a large influx of poor immigrants because there are "jobs americans won't do." We have companies that specialize in "jobs americans won't do" because employers know that they can find non-Americans to do them.

Posted by Tyro | December 20, 2007 1:05 PM

Don't get me wrong here, folks -- I'm not saying we should be sympathetic to the meatpacking industry for paying folks $10 an hour to clean out cow intestines.

I'm just saying that the difficulty in finding American workers to do crappy jobs is a reality these companies face, and they've decided that illegal foreign workers are the solution. And I think most of us here would agree it's a bad one.

Posted by Mark D | December 20, 2007 1:19 PM

SansAClue (aka MattY) really lives up to my new name for him with this.

1. As he's done before, he's "joking" about profiting from illegal activity.

2. His calculations are incorrect, in that he's ignoring major, non-financial costs. For instance, illegal immigration is a strong indicator of PoliticalCorruption. We have so many illegal aliens here because our politicians aren't doing their job due to some sort of benefits they expect to receive from not doing their job. That might be financial, or it might be electoral (youtube.com/watch?v=Z0zfEXqND_s), but in either case they're basically some degree of crook. He also ignores the cost of giving foreign governments PoliticalPower inside the U.S. The MexicanGovernment has even explicitly stated that they're going to use U.S. nonprofits to push their agenda inside the U.S. And, they already have direct or indirect links to several well-known U.S. organizations, like the ACLU.

Bottom line: you can't trust SansAClue on this issue.

Posted by TLB | December 20, 2007 1:23 PM

Let's just set aside the political correctness and be candid for a moment: illegal aliens are supposed to replace black people. If unskilled blacks were willing to work as busboys and meatpackers, black unemployment wouldn't be so high, and our low-wage employers wouldn't need to import unskilled workers from Mexico. Black people don't want to do these jobs though, not when they can make as much or more (taking into account non-cash benefits like food stamps as well as cash benefits) with public assistance.

Here's a real-world example of this, the Crider poultry processing plant in Georgia. Georgia, you may know, has plenty of black residents. And yet none worked at the Crider poultry plant -- until immigration authorities showed up and chased away the 75% of Crider's workforce made up of illegal aliens. So Crider started hiring local blacks. Guess what? The blacks didn't stick around. Plan B? Importing legal Hmong immigrants from Minnesota.

So here's the obvious problem with Jasper's generous welfare state policies: what if they have the same effect on legalized unskilled immigrants from Mexico as they have had on American blacks? What happens when the newly-legalized immigrants start getting picky about these jobs too? Do we need to import a new helot class of illegal 5th grade dropouts to take their places?

Posted by Harry | December 20, 2007 1:29 PM

Crackdowns on illegal immigration may cost "a lot of money", but how much is the county paying now for:

education for the children of illegal aliens

emergency medical care for illegal aliens and their children.

Extra spending on police and jails due to gang activity associated with illegal immigrants and their children.

Does it really cost less to arrest an illegal and send her home than it does to deliver four of her children at the local ER, educate them, and then incarcerate one of them when he grows up to steal cars?

Posted by Glenn | December 20, 2007 1:36 PM

Remember, KellyTheRedAssedXenophobe thinks that this is just StageOne of the forthcoming HispanicUprising, in which chicken-gutters and ditch-diggers will mobilize for the insurgencia on cue, the signal being a particularly cheesy song-and-dance number on ¡Sabado Gigante!.

Let's step back a second, though: for all the attempts to out-Tancredo everyone's second-favorite nth-gen ladder-puller (our fave being the blogwhoring grandson of the sod) has there been, during this primary season, any candidate who has said 'fixing immigration will cost a lot of money, and Americans will have to pay'? Because I haven't heard it.

We have so many illegal aliens here because our politicians aren't doing their job due to some sort of benefits they expect to receive from not doing their job.

This is, of course, precisely wrong. Immigration gets kicked along the road because there's no electoral benefit in putting forward anything but the most facile policies to an electorate that, for the most part, has zero contact with, or understanding of, La Migra. The consequence: the governmental equivalent of a rental car.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | December 20, 2007 1:36 PM

the illegal immigrants in Prince William county have to do more with crime, traffic, home values, failing public schools, and quality of life. Prince William County used to have a shopping mall that was a tourist attraction (Potomac Mills mall). Now that mall is best describe using the Chris Rock joke: the mall that the white people used to go to. The problem is that as more and more of Prince William county becomes the areas that whites "Used to go to" the quality of life of many of the residents goes down and is going down at a time of decreasing home values.

Whites living in Prince William County cannot use the rich white coping strategies that whites used in places like NW DC. There are few private schools, few gated communities, and few elite institutions that whites can used to isolate themselves from minorities. That is why the middle class whites left in Prince William County have decide to resist immigration.

Posted by superdestroyer | December 20, 2007 1:44 PM

"the signal being a particularly cheesy song-and-dance number on ¡Sabado Gigante!."

Pseudomonas,

Nice display of condescension toward the single most popular cultural phenomenon in our Latino immigrant community. Too bad they aren't all piling into theaters to watch the latest snooze-fest by Alejandro González Iñárritu, huh? They leave that to pretentious gringos like you.

Posted by Fred | December 20, 2007 1:45 PM

Oh, and super-duper-double bonus points for The Clash reference in the title, something not often seen from the wonky set.

Don't come here often, do you?

(On the substantive point of course the original post was 100% correct. Of course the usual right-wing trolls and confused liberals are up in arms. Yawn.)

Posted by lemuel pitkin | December 20, 2007 1:52 PM

Glen,

emergency medical care for illegal aliens and their children.

Uh, actually we spend virtually nothing on this. Illegal aliens are one of the groups that pay cash for thier medical services, even the emergency ones. Think about it. If they don't pay cash, they risk being found out and deported. A study by the Kaiser Foundation supports this.

Posted by Edo | December 20, 2007 1:56 PM

With unemployment rates still very low, it's damn near impossible to argue illegal immigrants are taking anyone's jobs. The financial burden gloom simply doesn't pan out. Crime rates are lower than they were 20-30 years ago.

Really, the country is prosperous and the job market healthy. Immigration crackdown will be a huge expenditure to fix a problem that isn't much of a problem. The most pessimistic assessments are, as Matt points out, the the negative effects to citizens on the lowest rung. The cold hard truth of the matter is that if a citizen cannot compete against a non English speaking illegal immigrant with non verifiable work history and education, said citizen needs to spend some effort on improving his skills.

Posted by shecky | December 20, 2007 2:15 PM

"Don't come here often, do you?"

Not nearly enough.

"Of course the usual right-wing trolls and confused liberals are up in arms."

There seem to be more of the latter then the former. Hell, I'm still trying to figure out how anyone could have taken his "you could just cut them checks" crack as some sort of serious policy proposal. Yet here they are.

It makes this a .... unique place -- few other sites have such a strong blend of both the incredibly brilliant and clinically stupid.

Posted by Mark D | December 20, 2007 2:16 PM

"With unemployment rates still very low, it's damn near impossible to argue illegal immigrants are taking anyone's jobs."

Unemployment for black men in America is a ridiculously high 9.5%. That of course doesn't count those who are no longer looking. Either black men don't want to work or low-wage employers don't want to hire them, or some combination of both. Either way you look at it, illegal aliens are being imported to replace them.

Posted by Harry | December 20, 2007 2:23 PM

Uhh, no they aren't.

Posted by DRR | December 20, 2007 2:53 PM

Most of these comments are too idiotic to even respond to.

Posted by m | December 20, 2007 3:42 PM

>Most of these comments are too idiotic to even respond to

Good thing you didn't bother trying, huh m?

Posted by Gallowglass | December 20, 2007 4:44 PM

"Uhh, no they aren't."

Touché.

Millions of black men are out of work and it's just a coincidence that we need to import millions of Mexicans to fill jobs?

Posted by Harry | December 20, 2007 5:06 PM

Americans just won't do some jobs.

To my experience, this blanket statement is false. What I've found to be true is that in areas where there haven't been a great many recent, esl, non-anglo residents, somehow the resident anglos, aa, and other efl individuals have filled various unskilled positions. In areas with more inflow such as southern California, maids, kitchen help, grounds maintenance, et al are almost exclusively the province of recent arrivals.

Over the years, I've seen a lot of published data that suggests the reason behind what I'm seeing is due to recent arrivals, particularly the undocumented, driving down wages for certain lines of work.

As time has gone on, my personal observation is that an increasing number semi-skilled positions are becoming "work Americans won't do" for much the same reason.

I've been acquainted with quite a few recent arrivals and their children over the years, and individually, I've met a lot of folks who are or will make great citizens. As a matter of policy, though, whether coming to the US is good for the great mass of people I don't know or not is immaterial. What matters first is my fellow citizens.

Are my fellows and I benefiting from immigration as a whole? Yes. Are we benefiting from living in a de facto open international labor market and becoming culturally alienated in our own republic from the resulting mass influx? I don't believe so.

The successful integration of vast numbers of non-English immigrants in the previous century was assisted by the periodic breaks in the flow to ethnic ghettos. I maintain that this is the reason that (most of) you or I developed the distance from our forbearers' roots to identify with "here", rather than "there"?

Posted by cmholm | December 20, 2007 7:09 PM

Americans just won't do some jobs.

To my experience, this blanket statement is false. What I've found to be true is that in areas where there haven't been a great many recent, esl, non-anglo residents, somehow the resident anglos, aa, and other efl individuals have filled various unskilled positions. In areas with more inflow such as southern California, maids, kitchen help, grounds maintenance, et al are almost exclusively the province of recent arrivals.

Over the years, I've seen a lot of published data that suggests the reason behind what I'm seeing is due to recent arrivals, particularly the undocumented, driving down wages for certain lines of work.

As time has gone on, my personal observation is that an increasing number semi-skilled positions are becoming "work Americans won't do" for much the same reason.

I've been acquainted with quite a few recent arrivals and their children over the years, and individually, I've met a lot of folks who are or will make great citizens. As a matter of policy, though, whether coming to the US is good for the great mass of people I don't know or not is immaterial. What matters first is my fellow citizens.

Are my fellows and I benefiting from immigration as a whole? Yes. Are we benefiting from living in a de facto open international labor market and becoming culturally alienated in our own republic from the resulting mass influx? I don't believe so.

The successful integration of vast numbers of non-English immigrants in the previous century was assisted by the periodic breaks in the flow to ethnic ghettos. I maintain that this is the reason that (most of) you and I developed the distance from our forbearers' roots to identify with "here", rather than "there".

Posted by cmholm | December 20, 2007 7:10 PM

Damn, I gotta remember that once I click the "submit" button the first time, I can't take it back for more editing.

Posted by cmholm | December 20, 2007 7:15 PM

The very idea that meat-packing is a job Americans will not do is flat-out false. Did you realize that back in the 1960’s, meat packers actually (gassppp) made a middle-class income? Businesses love to sit there, import illegal immigrants which drive down wages to the point where only the desperate poor immigrants are willing to do these jobs.

Well – duh!!! I mean – would you do your white-collar job for 50% less than you make now? I have a feeling many of us would find other work if possible. Meat packing (if you are paying a First World wage) would find American’s willing to do the job. So unless you think that those who are most vulnerable (low-skilled Americans) should have to compete with people willing to live below American living standard (immigrants), then you should NOT believe this load of garbage from businesses and immigration advocates who claim the same claim.

Trust me – if businesses could import millions of white collar workers from India and pay them 50 % less than us, we would all be in the same predicament. I imagine many of your white-collar workers would cry foul if they suddenly decided not to perform the same functions for $20,000 per year versus $45,000 per year. Why do we demand more from our lowest skilled workers?

Oh yeah – I know – a smug sense of superiority mixed with ignorance from the comments section.

Posted by Brad | December 20, 2007 8:24 PM

If meat-packing as a field were anathema to Americans we wouldn't have named an NFL team after meat-packers. For heaven's sake, Tom Arnold was meat-packer before he became famous.

Posted by Where is Steve Sailer? | December 20, 2007 9:58 PM

"The evidence suggests that illegal immigration is damaging to the economic prospects of the least-skilled Americans."

Obviously better and cheaper solution - get rid of the least-skilled Americans - by turning them into higher skilled Americans.

In other words, fix the racism and class warfare in this country and try to get some decent education and training going in this country - which means abolishing the US educational system and firing the incompetent morons we call teachers and administrators in this system.

While we're at it, try to assist neighboring countries like Mexico so their economic prospects get better so their people don't feel a need to come here.

Most of the solutions posters are claiming would work amount to keeping less skilled Americans AS less skilled Americans and letting them do the crap jobs the illegals do.

Way to support your fellow American, guys.

Personally I think the illegals should do the crap jobs nobody else will do. If they're willing, they're willing. If they weren't and had the skills to do more, they would be - just like everybody else. Or they'll go back home.

So it's a red herring issue, like most of the issues surrounding immigration.

Like McMegan's comment about Ron Paul, most people simply are afraid of foreigners.

Christ, my father used to bitch about "foreigners" - by which he meant anybody who was an immigrant from, say, the 1940's or 1950's - fifty years ago. Most of the posters here sound like him.

Are a lot of foreigners fucked up compared to "decent, white, Anglo-Saxon Christian Americans"?

Sure.

So are most of the lower class white Americans from the hillbilly states, let alone ghetto blacks and even second generation Hispanics. And then of course you've got Paris Hilton - a true representative of the "upper classes".

So what?

Another red herring issue.

Start dealing with the problems of the corporate state and states in general and you'll resolve these issues.

As T. H. White said in "Merlyn", if a coolie can bankrupt you by living on a bowl of rice a day, you'd best go to China and live on a bowl of rice a day.

Or as I would say, try to be smarter than a coolie in China - which doesn't appear to be the case here in the US. In the US, we make our living by bitching and moaning about the rest of the world - or trying to steal from it - or bomb it.

Cry me a river over immigration.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | December 20, 2007 10:59 PM

Okay ... here's the deal, folks. Many of you are taking my comment way, way too far.

First things first, though.

My comment about meatpacking plants comes from a fraternity brother who runs one in southern Kansas, and a father who inspects a dozen of them three times a year. So they have a pretty firm grasp of the situation and I'll defer to them.

Now, on to the substance ...

My comment about a legal worker program is not about exploiting workers or keeping wages down or any shit like that. I realize none of you know my posting history at other blogs, so I understand the confusion.

My comment was based on two facts:

Fact one: Not everyone can be an accountant.

There are jobs that suck. I know because I’ve done quite a few of them. The current system, however, encourages under-the-table deals that prevent workers from organizing, keep them from getting benefits, and helps to depress wages.

By setting up a program that is monitored and structured, we can set goals that (in theory, at least) let the first two occur while stopping the third. This will, in turn, lure Americans back into jobs that many feel pay too little, or not enough for the type of work.

I should also note that there's no way in hell a single Republican (and, sadly, quite a few Democrats) should be allowed any near this process. Businesses should be damn near shuttered out of the process, and the Republicans turned a blind eye to this until the xenophobic and racist part of their base started pitching a bitch. Only those with a true commitment to worker's rights should be invited.

Fact two: People from other countries will want to come to the U.S. to work.

While the number one goal should always be getting Americans to work first, there has been, is, and will probably always be people from outside the U.S. who come here looking for work.

The natural solution is what Richard Steven Hack above (and others) have rightfully pointed out: fix the issues in places like Mexico so people have less reason to leave. That’s certainly a long-term goal to which resources should be allocated, but in the mean time we’ve got to find a way to deal with those coming here looking for something better. We can't blame them, and we surely shouldn't be exploiting them.

I could go on, but I just wanted to clarify a few things since some folks apparently take offhand and posted-quickly-at-work comments way, way, waaaayyy out of proportion. I realize that ascribing motives and beliefs nowhere present in a post is a common past time here on the Intratubes, but some folks sure do seem to get on a damned high horse about it.

Posted by Mark D | December 20, 2007 11:46 PM

"Obviously better and cheaper solution - get rid of the least-skilled Americans - by turning them into higher skilled Americans."

After that, can we make everyone above-average in intelligence? Let's make everyone good-looking and thin too afterwards.

Posted by Fred | December 21, 2007 12:13 AM

I'd prefer to start by eliminating morons, Fred.

Care to volunteer to be the first?

Actually, with the right programs, it shouldn't be that hard to get the lower-income Americans up to at least above minimum-wage level. Of course, as I indicated, the first step is to get rid of the US educational system as it stands now.

As for thin, that can be done, too.

Good-looking is another matter, at least until everybody can afford plastic surgery - or nanotech makes plastic surgery easy.

That said, there will always be jobs - until we get really good - and also cheap - robots - that can only be done by humans and can only be economically done by humans at a comparatively low wage but are so stupid that only the lowest educated human will do them. That's just a fact of human existence and technology.

Eventually technology will obsolete most of those jobs. At which point even immigrants will have to have certain basic skills in order to work at all.

I just put the words "meat packing robot" into Google and guess what I found:

Welcome to the Machine (PDF file)
http://www.bizlink.com/foodfiles/PDFs/july2007/machine.pdf

Money quote:

Regardless, American packers are currently looking closer at introducing robots to boost production
yield by eliminating worker inefficiencies and errors. According to Willard, employee efficiency fluctuates through the shift depending on distractions and the redundancy of routines. At the beginning of the shift, employee efficiency may be 100 per cent based on their capacity, but can fluctuate throughout the shift and drop by as much as 50 per cent by the end of the shift. In contrast, when properly programmed with the correct information, robots operate at 100 per cent efficiency 100 per cent of the time. This sort of accuracy and precision are crucial in meatpacking. For example, the initial, belly-to-breast cut opens up the carcass hanging from a hook causing the internal organs to drop out into containers below. If that cut is off-centre, it affects the quality of meat by damaging the entrails and other parts, which in turn reduces carcass yield. So while robots may not necessarily significantly reduce labour cost initially, they will increase the yield to packers by increasing revenue from higher-quality meat.
European meat processing facilities have already established a track record in using robots. “In North America,” says Willard, “we are targeting plants with volumes anywhere from 200 hogs per hour to 1,300 hogs per hour. Our system can handle up to 650 hogs per hour. There should be beta-test sites up and running by the end of 2007.”

And read the part about the robots that lay out slices of meat in packages more precisely than humans can - and may also at some point precisely lay out a sandwich with meat, cheese and condiments.

Bye. bye, McDonald's workers...

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | December 21, 2007 2:50 AM

Richard--
Very interesting. It's also what happened to parts of the auto industry in the late 70s and 80s, when robots started to do the welding, painting and other jobs traditionally done by pretty-well-paid people.

This is why almost all of us have called, at one time or another, for worker re-training to be incorporated more thoroughly and effectively into our social safety nets.

Posted by Mark D | December 21, 2007 11:53 AM

When talking about moving industry out of the US and cheap labor in, it's really easy to roll out the nostrums about buggy whip makers, retraining American wage earners, and making Mexico a place nobody wants to move from.

However, we're in the midst of an economic revolution, and it's leaders for the most part don't know or care if or how their soon-to-be ex-employees are going to adapt to it.

If it was just a matter of moving more and more value added activities offshore, *or* of more low wage workers moving in, and the capital freed by one of these was redeployed to more productive activities within the US, I'd buy the argument that the short term pain leads to long term strength. But, the capital is not being productively redeployed *within* the US. The net effect is that wealth is being transfered out of the country, and that our high net-worth families are taking a cut of the outflow.

An example of missing the point: Penn & Teller's B*ull Sh*t episode about Walmart.

Posted by cmholm | December 21, 2007 11:51 PM

Hey Richard Steven Hack, why don't we find out if your plan for uplifting everyone works before we import an ever larger underclass? Once we find out that it works, then we can resume the massive unskilled immigration. That would be the prudent thing to do.

Posted by pjgoober | December 22, 2007 2:07 AM

Look, people are going to come here whether or not you make it illegal. In the late 19th-early 20th century, the US southern border was little more than a black line on a map as workers would cross the border daily, so this idea that all of a sudden we're experiencing unprecedented Mexicanization in states named New Mexico is just silly. A lot of industrial and agricultural work during WWII was done by Mexican braceros, many of whom were never paid.

Second of all, even authoritarians like Giuliani admit that using crackdowns and restrictions on immigration are unlikely to work in a way that won't affect the freedoms of American citizens as well. China, for instance, has had totalitarian policies for years in place to limit the movement of people from the countryside to the cities, but all this did was create a black market for forged hukou and work papers that the migrant workers' bosses would buy. Today China has a floating population of 20-25 million undocumented workers moving between the cities and the countryside that the government fears could lead to a large social movement. If authoritarian states have trouble controlling the movement of people, we have little chance of cracking down effectively over the long-term. Rolling Stone reported in the late 1990's that the number of people killed crossing the US-Mexican border per year was on average higher than the total number of people killed trying to cross the Berlin Wall during the whole Cold War.

All this does is just create a black market with higher social and economic costs than a freer market that could be effectively regulated would do, similar to the problem with the drug war. With the difficulties inherent in legally obtaining permission to come work in the US when you're a poor Mexican living in a poor village, it is sadly easier to hire a coyote (who may leave you to die in his locked truck) to help you cross the border and then stay under the radar once you get to the US. The life of an illegal immigrant is fucking hard and shouldn't be wished on anybody. If you want to make sure that Mexicans in the US don't speak English, then don't let their kids go to school and let the adults know that if they try to integrate into our society, they will be deported. If you want to make sure that immigrants depress low-skilled wages, make sure that they have to stay under the radar and paid under the table for fear of being deported so that they have to take jobs that are next to nothing. If you want to make sure that Mexico doesn't become rich enough that leaving one's homeland and moving somewhere where you face racism and the threat of deportation becomes the less attractive option for poor Mexicans, then continue to subsidize agricultural goods from the same Southern, Western and Midwestern states where the local population is up in arms over illegal immigration.

Posted by Reality Man | December 22, 2007 10:27 AM

"Look, people are going to come here whether or not you make it illegal."

There are plenty of computer programmers in places like Romania and India who would love to come here and work illegally in tech. They can't. Why? Because employment laws for skilled workers are enforced. If the government were interested in enforcing them for unskilled workers too, the flow of Mexicans coming here to work would slow to a trickle.

Posted by Fred | December 22, 2007 11:43 PM