Bowing to Reality on Migrant Labor
January 13, 2004
By Tamar Jacoby
PRESIDENT Bush's immigration initiative has not, to say the least, been a big hit on the right. Right-of-center newspapers and talk-show hosts have bitterly denounced it. On the Web, the conservative "blogosphere" has gone ballistic, and angry callers are burning up the phone lines on radio shows across the country. What really seems to stick in their craw is what the critics claim is the injustice of the White House plan: Bush is proposing to reward people who have broken the law - "broken into the country" as Pat Buchanan puts it - at the expense of other would-be immigrants waiting patiently in line back in their home countries.
What are the merits of the charge that Bush's plan rewards law-breakers?
True, illegal immigrants have broken the law. Many literally snuck into the country, evading the armed agents who patrol the border. Others go by false names and carry forged papers. They live a lie - and no conservative wants to reward that.
Yet history teaches that unswerving fidelity to the law can be misleading, and worse, when the measure at issue is bad law. And there is a strong case to be made that our immigration code is bad law - first and foremost because of the way it ignores reality.
The best analogy is Prohibition. The reality we ignored then was drinking. Today, it is the slow, steady integration of American and Mexican labor markets. Mexicans have been coming to do America's hardest, dirtiest jobs for nearly a century now. We need the workers; they need the jobs; huge sectors of our economy would collapse if they stopped coming.
We've managed on occasion to use public policy to shunt the flow from one side of the law to the other. When the guest-worker exchange known as the Bracero program was working most efficiently, in the postwar era, the number of migrants entering illegally decreased significantly. Then, when we shut down that official pipeline in the mid-'60s, the illegal figures shot back up again.
But nothing we have tried since Mexican migrants first started coming has made any appreciable dent in the overall numbers. The army of agents patrolling the southwest border has nearly tripled in the last decade; budgets have multiplied even faster. Yet the influx from Mexico has remained constant and if anything increased somewhat.
Just how unrealistic is our policy? All in all, over the better part of the last decade, some 1.3 million migrants entered the country each year. Yet our annual quotas make provision for only two-thirds of that total, guaranteeing an illegal flow of some 400,000 to 500,000.
Our stubborn refusal to face up to this reality has serious consequences for all Americans. Businesses can't find the labor they need to function at top speed or, more important, grow. Immigrants and their employers conclude that other American laws, too, are hypocritical - meant, like the immigration code, to be winked at when necessary.
No matter how much we spend, we can't get control of the border: After all, as Prohibition teaches, nothing is harder to enforce than an unrealistic law. Border states like Arizona are overrun with Prohibition-like violence: deadly smuggling gangs, some of them linked to international drug cartels, are battling each other with automatic weapons on the highways.
Most dangerous of all, we undermine national security: Instead of devoting their time to hunting terrorists, the Border Patrol is tied up chasing busboys.
The bottom line: We can't turn the spigot off. The realities of the international marketplace make the migrant flow inevitable, and the goal of policy should be to manage that flow, not try futilely to interdict it.
President Bush understands this fundamental fact and is proposing, with admirable realism, that we bring the influx above ground with a temporary worker program. The proposal isn't perfect - it's anything but realistic to insist that immigrants who have been here up to 20 years and raised families should now be forced to go "home" to Mexico. But it is a historic beginning.
Nobody wants to reward lawbreakers, but a bad law like our immigration code doesn't deter criminals - it creates them, making outlaws of determined, hardworking people whose only offense is to fill an empty job. Surely that's not conservative morality.
When the law is wrong, it makes no sense to stand righteously by it. The smart thing to do is to change it and eliminate the problems it causes.
Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Tamar Jacoby is the editor of the new book "Reinventing the Melting Pot: The New Immigrants and What It Means To Be American." ©2004 New York Post About Tamar Jacoby: articles, bio, and photo |
