Worries over illegal immigration are not unique to the United States. While Congress debated immigration reforms in the past two weeks, another boatload of Africans drowned while trying to reach Spain’s Canary Islands, and undocumented Bolivian workers died in a sweatshop fire in Argentina.
Indeed, illegal immigration occurs on every continent. Every week, hundreds of Africans try to cross the straits from Tunisia and Libya to Malta or Sicily and from Morocco to Spain. Albanians and Montenegrins traverse the Adriatic Sea to Italy. Ukrainians work clandestinely in Poland.
The Mexican government struggles to keep out Guatemalans and Salvadorans even as some Mexican citizens assert their inherent right to work in the United States. Haitians cut cane in the Dominican Republic. Men from Mozambique slip into South Africa for work in mines and construction. North Koreans wade the river into China. Boatloads from Asia and the Middle East strive to reach Australian shores.
Although border fences and patrols diminish the flows of humans, they rarely stop them. As long as there are differences in incomes and in political and economic freedom, people will continue to cross borders. The more extreme the disparities, the greater the risk and expense people are willing to undertake.
Nor is the impulse to migrate for better earnings a new trend limited to the poor from developing countries. Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith, born in 1912, once observed that he and fellow Canadians in Ontario grew up with the idea that “Canadian patriotism should not withstand anything more than a $5-a-month wage differential. Anything more than that and you went to Detroit.”
Technology has increased some incentives. Television and cheap telecommunications have made poor people more aware of better conditions elsewhere. Travel is cheaper. Computer graphics make it easier to forge birth certificates or other documents.
Some policies adopted for humanitarian reasons have the unintended effect of encouraging desperate attempts to migrate. Hundreds of Africans undertake dangerous voyages in open boats across the Straits of Gibraltar or from Mauritania to the Canaries, knowing that if they set foot ashore they are protected from immediate expulsion by international conventions on refugee rights. Discarding all identity documents and stonewalling any interviews provide further protections from deportation.
In nearly all cases, the willingness of employers to hire illegal immigrants is a primary factor in the process. Regardless of the documents presented by applicants, thousands of employers in the U.S. must know that a substantial proportion of their employees did not meet the legal requirements for immigration. Employers know agriculture in southern Spain and Italy — just as in California — would shrink dramatically if all illegal workers somehow were whisked back to their home countries.
Our last major “reform” of U.S. immigration laws came exactly two decades ago with the Simpson-Mazzoli Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986.
Reading the debate surrounding this act gives one a sense of déjà vu. The problem of illegal immigration has changed only in degree. All of the arguments and proposals we hear now were made back then.
Moreover, the main measures proposed now — amnesty for illegal immigrants already here, more spending on border controls and token crackdowns on employers — were all in the 1986 bill. Simpson-Mazzoli was supposed to fix immigration problems. That should tell us something.
Most economists will argue that if we want to limit immigration, we need to spend more resources on limiting demand. In the two decades since the last “reform,” the amount we spent on sanctioning those who employ illegal immigrants is only a small fraction of what we spend patrolling the U.S.-Mexican border and returning the hundreds apprehended daily.
Employers complain — with much justification — that it is impossible for them to challenge well-forged identity papers and that they cannot reject applicants on the basis of physical appearance or accent.
A mandatory, modern work ID, incorporating measures like retina scans, could make employment screening easier. Such a system would be very expensive to implement. To be effective and nondiscriminatory, the initial issue of such IDs would involve enormous verification efforts. Any mandatory ID would arouse the usual civil liberties concerns.
Shifting resources from border controls to employment enforcement would reduce incentives to migrate. But incentives still will exist. Some people always will cross borders to find jobs, whether they come from Mexico or Bangladesh, Mali or Belarus.
© 2006 Edward Lotterman
Chanarambie Consulting, Inc.