Illegal Immigration

The dirty little secret of America's border policy is that it isn't meant to keep everyone out. If you're sufficiently determined, sufficiently clever, and sufficiently careful, you can get into the country illegally, stay here illegally, and make a life for yourself illegally, and that's what our border policy is meant to allow.

You'd never know from listening to the Republicans carry on about our "open borders" that it was the Republicans themselves who established our current setup, but it was. Back in 1986 it was a coalition of Republicans and business-friendly Democrats who drew up our current immigration policy, and it was none other than that conservative icon, Saint Ronald Reagan, who signed it into law. (Did you know that the Republicans gained control of the Senate in the 1980 elections, and kept control of it for the first six years of the Reagan era? It's not something they like to admit these days.)

From the point of view of the cheap-labor, anti-union wing of the GOP (and their fellow travelers in the Democratic Leadership Council), having a steady supply of illegal immigrants entering the country with little or no hope of becoming legal is the perfect condition, the sweet spot, the answer to their prayers. Employing an illegal worker is the next best thing to owning a slave -- you don't have to worry about minimum wage laws, employee benefits, or labor unions. If an illegal gives you any trouble, you just tip off the ICE and they haul his ass off to jail and ship him out of the country. And there's always a plentiful supply of new illegals to replace him. There are whole industries in this country that rely on illegal workers to keep their costs down, and our immigration policy is designed to keep them supplied with low-cost, trouble-free labor. An added feature of employing illegal workers is that they keep wages artificially depressed, since there are so many jobs in this country that are performed for sub-minimum wages.

An obvious (though unworkable) solution to illegal immigration is to make it harder for people to enter the United States illegally. The trouble with that idea is that the system we have now is already designed to do just that, and it only slows down the influx of illegal immigrants. There is no way to keep foreigners from entering the United States illegally as long as there are jobs waiting for them here.

Another unworkable solution is to crack down on companies that employ illegal workers. The trouble with this idea is that ferreting out companies that employ illegal workers is a never-ending task. In the unlikely event that one is put out of business, the others just expand to take up the slack.

So what's the solution? Amnesty, plain and simple. Unconditional amnesty for every illegal immigrant who is already in the country, or will enter the country in the future. After all, the whole point of the system is to allow unscrupulous employers to exploit illegal workers. If illegal immigrants are able to get green cards as soon as they enter the country, there won't be any illegal workers to exploit. Companies that rely on illegal workers to maintain their profit margin will either have to adapt or die. The rise in wages will provide a boost to the economy, and the larger pool of legal workers will make it easier for unions to organize. And once the supply of sub-minimum-wage jobs dries up, the economy will be able to support all the immigrants who can make it into the country.

But isn't giving amnesty to illegal immigrants unfair to the legal immigrants? I'd say it's even more unfair to make people who have been living and working here for five, ten, or twenty years jump through a lot of hoops just so they can continue living and working here, or to uproot and deport them until they manage to jump through all those hoops. That is, if we're going to talk about fairness.

But isn't giving amnesty to illegal immigrants rewarding criminal behavior? Yeah, and so what? We Americans love rewarding criminal behavior, as long as the criminal is doing something we approve of. Conservatives swoon in ecstasy when they hear about government officials ignoring inconvenient laws against warrentless wiretapping or torture. They flock to movies and TV shows about cops who are willing to "break the rules". There's nothing as American as rewarding criminal behavior.