Immigration Wars: Forging an American Solution (11 page)

It is likewise important to recognize that some students come here to acquire learning that they intend to put to malevolent ends when they return home, and a rational immigration policy will seek to separate our friends from our enemies. But we simply must
not allow our fear of harm from a small minority of foreign students to force us into isolation, because that isolation itself breeds hostility. The best antidote to anti-Western ideology is exposure to Western ideals. The vast benefits that derive from openness to the talented young people from other countries must be a central driver of immigration policy. We cannot afford to lose our competitive edge in attracting foreign students, but our current immigration policy places us in danger of doing exactly that.

In sum, more than ever before, immigration is our economic lifeblood. New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, himself a wildly successful businessman, says that “reforming a broken immigration system is the single most important step the federal government could take to bolster the economy.”
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Among the many steps we need to take to restore American economic growth and prosperity, none offers a more immediate return than improving our immigration system. “Immigration reform has a great advantage over other changes that can increase human capital,” argues Gary Becker. “It is something that can be done almost immediately. If the federal government changed the relevant laws and admitted highly skilled people into the country, the United States would see those new immigrants contributing to the economy
within a year. That’s a straightforward step toward greater prosperity, and one that will pay dividends for years to come.”
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By contrast, failure to harness the vitality of immigrants will consign our nation to a bleak future. To ensure future American prosperity means continuing to welcome ample numbers of hardworking newcomers into the American family.

O
UR CALL FOR A NATIONAL POLICY
that recognizes the critical importance of immigration is emphatically not a call for open borders. We believe that market forces should be allowed to play a significant role in immigration policy. It is ironic that some of the strongest proponents of an unfettered market in other areas of public policy make an exception for immigration. The number of illegal immigrants sends a strong signal that demand for immigration—both among people who want to come here to work and those wishing to employ them—exceeds supply. Similarly, immigration levels consistently decline in times of economic distress.

But the framers of our Constitution made naturalization a matter of national policy for good reason. Control over immigration and the border is an essential attribute of national sovereignty. Although the vast majority of immigrants come here to work or for family reunification, some come to take advantage of our generosity. Others come to profit from crime. And as became painfully clear on September 11, 2001, still others come to do harm to our nation, our people, and our way of life. We have not only the right but the duty to ensure that those who come here do so for the right reasons.

Similarly, while an adequate supply of hardworking immigrants enriches our nation, we must regulate the flow so as neither to overburden our social services nor inadvertently exacerbate unemployment or depress wages. The latter concern often is overstated: few immigrants are interested in coming to the United States if no economic opportunities are available. But there are many examples of employers hiring illegal immigrants for low wages, creating a black-market economy that eliminates job opportunities for Americans and legal immigrants. Here it is essential that we have an ample supply of workers both for labor-intensive jobs that few Americans want and for highly skilled jobs for which there are inadequate numbers of Americans with the skills
to fill them. But it is equally essential that strong deterrents exist to those who try to game the system.

The failure of the rule of law in American immigration policy is manifested vividly in the estimated 11–12 million illegal immigrants residing in our country.
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Unlike the benefits that flow from legal immigration, the costs of illegal immigration are substantial. Although illegal immigrants are not eligible for welfare, Social Security, or most health-care benefits, they are eligible for emergency medical services, which are costly (especially given that they often are used for routine medical needs). The Federation for American Immigration Reform estimates the cost of illegal immigration from educating children in primary and secondary schools, providing medical services in emergency rooms, and incarceration at $36 billion annually.
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Moreover, children of illegal immigrants born in the United States are citizens and are fully eligible for social services.
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The cost of those services is borne primarily by the states and local governments, many of whose taxpayers are understandably resentful that they must bear the financial burden for failed federal government border enforcement.

By definition, many illegal immigrants live in the shadows of society, often working in the black market, failing to pay their share of taxes, and serving as easy prey for criminals. But in many
cases they would not be here were it not for employers who are willing to hire illegal aliens and in turn often exploit them because they are in no position to complain. Those employers enjoy an unfair advantage over competitors who obey the law. Yet despite the existence of strong federal sanctions dating back more than a quarter century for employers who hire illegal immigrants, little effort has been invested in enforcing them.
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That so many people have flouted our laws to unlawfully enter and remain in our nation demonstrates that both our policies and their enforcement are deeply flawed. Further, an immigration policy that is perceived as lawless undermines public support for legal immigration. That is why it is so important not to reward those who have entered our nation unlawfully. The 1986 immigration reforms, which granted amnesty to millions of people who had entered the country illegally and which never fulfilled promises to control the flow of immigration, continue to haunt the immigration debate today. As a result, comprehensive reform proposals that include anything resembling amnesty provoke widespread skepticism and opposition.

Similarly, the common perception that the federal government neither effectively polices the border nor aggressively enforces immigration laws evokes a strong popular backlash, reflected in
laws enacted by several states seeking to control illegal immigration. Justice Antonin Scalia eloquently voiced that sentiment in his dissenting opinion to the U.S. Supreme Court opinion that struck down several portions of S.B. 1070. “Arizona bears the brunt of the country’s illegal immigration,” Scalia wrote. “Its citizens feel themselves under siege by large numbers of illegal immigrants who invade their property, strain their social services, and even place their lives in jeopardy. Federal officials have been unable to remedy the problem, and indeed have recently shown that they are unwilling to do so.”
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The backlash against perceived failures by the federal government to enforce immigration laws also manifests in popular support for elected officials who take matters into their own hands. Most prominent among them is the sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, Joe Arpaio, who has raised millions of dollars nationally to support his political agenda. Despite his initial position that local law enforcement resources should be focused on serious criminals like human smugglers, Arpaio’s highly publicized immigration sweeps targeted people with broken taillights and netted few illegal immigrants with serious criminal records. At the same time as it was diverting substantial resources to the raids, the sheriff’s office failed to investigate hundreds of sex crimes and
allowed tens of thousands of felony warrants to go unserved.
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Yet although Arpaio won reelection in 2012 with a much smaller majority than usual, he remains one of the most popular politicians in Arizona because voters believe he is one of the few elected officials who seriously enforces immigration laws.

States can and should be valuable partners in enforcing immigration policy—but in some circumstances, their laws and enforcement efforts can frustrate national purposes. The failure of the national government to fully engage the states as essential partners in immigration policy, to effectively enforce immigration laws, and to recognize that states bear a disproportionate share of the cost of illegal immigration, all have contributed to recent efforts by states to deal with immigration themselves. It is vitally important to the success of immigration policy that the federal government foster a cooperative rather than adversarial relationship with the states.

Immigration policies adopted unilaterally by the president also undermine the rule of law and public support for immigration reform. The Constitution vests authority over naturalization in the hands of Congress, not the president. Obviously, the president has wide latitude on how to enforce the law, but the law
must be enacted by Congress, no matter how maddeningly onerous the legislative process may be.

The president, for instance, has the power to determine whether illegal immigrants will be deported on a case-by-case basis. Further, the president can establish law enforcement priorities, as Obama did in prioritizing deportations of illegal immigrants who had committed serious crimes.

In 2012, Obama invoked that executive authority to decree that hundreds of thousands of children who were brought here illegally by their parents could remain here lawfully for a specified period of time under certain prescribed conditions. The policy provided that the government would defer action against immigrants under the age of thirty-one who were brought to the United States under age sixteen; continuously lived here; were not convicted of a felony or a serious misdemeanor; and were students, high school graduates, or GED certificate holders, or were honorably discharged from the military. An estimated 900,000 people, mostly from Latin America and Asia, were eligible.
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As a policy matter, we find much to commend in President Obama’s action. But he elevated ends over means, bypassing Congress and imposing by executive decree a policy that had
been rejected through the legislative branch. In doing so, President Obama inflicted further damage upon prospects for comprehensive immigration reform. “Any long-term solution still has to go through Congress—and it has to be bipartisan,” argues Tamar Jacoby, president and CEO of ImmigrationWorks USA. “And President Obama’s brazenly partisan political act only makes that harder.”
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Indeed, what many perceived as an act of bold leadership actually followed President Obama’s lack of leadership in promoting comprehensive immigration reform—or even the DREAM Act—when he had commanding majorities in both houses of Congress and after he had promised to do exactly that.
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Moreover, executive orders are fleeting. They easily can be repealed by future presidents, undermining the certainty and predictability that are crucial both to individual decision-making and to forging long-term solutions. As the Arizona chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association put it, “there is no guarantee that the policy will not change at a later date and potentially expose individuals to deportation.”
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Unilateral executive action may play well at election time—but enduring and comprehensive reform can come only through the legislative process, and that in turn requires strong presidential leadership.

Given serious demographic challenges and increased competition from other countries, we cannot afford to wait much longer to fundamentally reform our nation’s immigration laws. Fortunately, the opportunity for bipartisan action seems at hand. Both presidential candidates in 2012 pledged that they would make immigration reform a top priority. Toward the end of 2012, members of Congress in both parties began taking steps to increase the number of highly skilled immigrants. And although twenty states introduced bills and five states enacted laws inspired by Arizona’s S.B. 1070 the year after it was signed into law, in 2012 such bills were introduced only in five states and none passed.
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It appears that the decline in the number of people entering the country illegally has eased public pressure for additional enforcement measures, which may help pave the way toward a more comprehensive reform effort at the national level.

The two core principles we advocate—an efficient, workable system that recognizes the vital importance of immigration, coupled with genuine adherence to the rule of law—can form the foundation not only for bipartisan accord, but for sound and enduring
public policy. Those two principles are mutually reinforcing. Advocating increased immigration without enforcing the rules undermines public support for immigration. Likewise, turning a blind eye to illegal immigration consigns those who come here illegally to shadow lives and constant fear, while at the same time fueling widespread backlash and resentment. At the same time, fixing the immigration system so that people who want to come here to work have a reasonable and predictable chance of securing that opportunity through legal channels would be the greatest possible deterrent to illegal immigration.

Indeed, an enforcement-only or a secure-the-border-first policy is self-defeating. Unquestionably, increased border enforcement has contributed, along with economic conditions on both sides of the border, to greatly reduced numbers of illegal immigrants from Mexico. But it has also led to more illegal immigrants staying in the United States rather than risking multiple border crossings. From 1986 to 2006, the probability of illegal immigrants returning to Mexico decreased from 60 percent to around 15 percent. “Undocumented Mexicans are no longer coming to the United States,” writes Princeton University sociologist Douglas S. Massey, “but those already here are increasingly unlikely to leave.”
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