5 illegal immigration thoughts in advance of Trump’s Big Speech

Last updated on: August 31, 2016 at 8:12 am by Jane the Actuary

5 illegal immigration thoughts in advance of Trump’s Big Speech 2016-08-31T08:12:38-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Two big events today with respect to Trump and immigration: he’s scheduled to meet the President of Mexico, and then, subsequently, give what’s being touted as a Big Policy Speech on illegal immigration. So I thought it’d be a good time to pull together some of what I think on immigration.

First, if the only issue were illegal immigration, we could solve that tomorrow. All that’d be necessary is to open the borders to anyone who wants to come, and, voila, no one would be “illegal.” (OK, there’d still be some smugglers, who would be those with established criminal records who wouldn’t pass any kind of background check.) But it’s fundamentally about how many immigrants we want to take in each year, and especially how many unskilled immigrants.

Second, we are long past the time when the economy was creating unskilled jobs left and right, and we thought we’d be facing labor shortages that could only be remedied by stepped up numbers of immigrants, either acknowledged as such or labeled “guest workers” under the fiction that they and their families would return home. Remember the “blue card“? That was one component of the failed 2006 immigration bill, a guest worker system that essentially promised there would be no more illegal immigration because prospective illegals would be welcomed legally instead — and imagined it would be a win-win by remedying labor shortages.

Third, illegal immigration and globalization are two sides of the same coin. With respect to globalization, may, on average, have seen improvements to their living standards when we can purchase good and services cheaply from overseas, but these averages hide the very real impact that globalization has had on working class Americans, who have indeed seen their real wages decline while that of higher-income Americans has increased. Now, I believe that globalization’s positives outweigh the negatives, that it is a fundamentally good thing for so many people in Third World countries to have been lifted out of extreme poverty when they have been able to sell their goods to the United States and other First World countries, but I’ve always considered restrictions on immigration to the U.S. as a sort of backstop, preserving at least those unskilled jobs which cannot be automated or shipped overseas, for American citizens. (I thought I’d written a long post on this before, but I can’t seem to find it.)

(Pet peeve: people who speak of the “Second World” as if it’s a real thing. Folks, the terminology came about during the Cold War, when the “Second World” were communist countries, and Third World or Nonaligned nations, was the terminology chosen by those countries that wished to define themselves as “neither of those factions,” and must have rued the fact that Third World came to mean “dirt-poor.”)

Fourth, the fundamental issue is much more a matter of work authorization enforcement than it is border control, and that is likewise not a simple matter of e-verify implementation, but the bigger issue of going after individuals who work under the table and the employers who hire them — and this isn’t even just a matter of illegal immigrants, but American citizens who work under the table to avoid taxes and collect welfare benefits, and employers who hire under the table to underpay workers and avoid such costs as worker’s comp. My pet approach has been to allow citizens to sue employers who engage in such practices, following the lawsuit model of the Americans with Disabilities Act. (Yes, like most of my brilliant solutions, it hasn’t really gotten any traction.)

Fifth — well, as I wrote the other day, I think there is recognition among many anti-illegal immigration hawks that there should be some accommodation for long-time residents for whom our failure to enforce immigration laws, and the promises of belonging and amnesty from so many politicians and elected officials, has meant that they have settled here in a manner that means that a return back to their home countries would produce real hardship — not just the loss of the relative wealth of their lives in the U.S., but substantial difficulties re-integrating into their home countries that would make them worse off than if they had never left. At the same time, other residents have lived in isolated immigrant communities and have not integrated into the broader American culture at all, focusing instead on working hard and living cheaply, in order to send money back home, and with the ultimate plan of returning later. The Democratic candidates have moved towards promises of never deporting anyone, regardless of how recently they’ve arrived, except for violent felons. But we need to have a real discussion on who may stay, who must go.

And that’s it. Now we wait to see what the news report bring, and how well Trump’s speechwriters did in crafting a policy that makes any sense to anyone.

image from Wikimedia Commons.

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