Our Migration Headache

I must say how completely shrewd our anti-immigrant policies have become. Aside from states that can figure out ways to ferret out whose got the “papers” to prove they’re legal, the fact that there’s a well-armed (legal, even with assault weapons and oversized magazines) private militia patrolling the border – NRA volunteers no less – and an unemployment rate that brings PhD’s into the magical world of being Starbucks baristas which is a huge immigration deterrent, fact is we’d rather spend more on federal police agency on immigration enforcement than all other forms of federal law enforcement combined.

Screw the terrorists, the tax cheats and fraudsters, the illegal arms dealers, the interstate sex traffickers, the mega-financial manipulators, more than a few murderers and arsonists, bank robbers, etc…. we have undocumented aliens that need removal, much more important work than more obviously mandated crime-fighting. “[T]he U.S. spent $14.4 billion -- combined -- on its … prime law enforcement agencies: the FBI, Secret Service, Drug Enforcement Administration, U.S. Marshal Service and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives… [But ] nearly $18 billion in the 2012 fiscal year went to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection and US-Visit, a program that helps states and localities identify undocumented immigrants.” Huffington Post, January 8^th. Woo hoo!

Yes, blog fans, according to a just-released study (Immigration Enforcement in the United States: The Rise of a Formidable Machinery) by the Migration Policy Institute, we have built a massive bureaucracy dedicated to limiting our large influx of undocumented aliens (somewhere between 11 and 12 million individuals) by force. The most serious immigration control legislation in our nation’s history actually began fairly recently. In 1986, Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, but as the report’s executive summary notes, “it took until the mid-1990s to mobilize stepped up border enforcement.”  The resulting increase in police-level responses to immigration “reform” suggest that reform is hardly the goal.

As employment verification systems proved to be unreliable and more generalized mechanisms to integrate more productive undocumented aliens into the mainstream became too politically difficult to generate sufficient public support, virtually all major governmental programs redirected their energies almost entirely towards enforcement. “[During the post-1986 era,] there has been strong and sustained bi-partisan support for strengthened immigration enforcement, along with deep skepticism over the federal government’s will or ability to effectively enforce the nation’s immigration laws. Support for enforcement has been heightened by the inability of lawmakers to bridge political and ideological divides over other reforms to the nation’s immigration policy. As a result, a philosophy of ‘enforcement first’ has become de facto the nation’s singular response to illegal immigration, and changes to the immigration system have focused almost entirely on building enforcement programs and improving their performance.” The Report.

Sounds a lot like the country’s “shoot first and invade Iraq and Afghanistan before considering exactly what the long-term ramifications are” response. Our military got a lot bigger. The cost of new weapon systems escalated big time, and even after two wars began to wind down, folks were still figuring on how to keep that military fat and happy. People actually squirmed at the thought that since we were ending two wars, the military budget was actually going to decrease. Fat federal budget stays fat.

Again, our proclivity not to deal with the reality that undocumented workers are irretrievably part of our labor market, people willing to perform the back-breaking stoop labor, low-paid harvesting and bottom-end construction work that Americans are unwilling to do at any price, results in that typical American response: bring in the guys with the guns to deal with it and make sure the bureaucracy that results is huge and likely to get a lot bigger.

Of course we have to control our border, which is pretty well under control according to the MPI report. But what is missing is how to allow undocumented immigrants to function legally in the jobs that, one way or another, they are going to do. It makes for humane working conditions, generates tax revenues for the government and stomps all over those manipulative coyotes and criminal elements that prey on desperate souls willing to risk life and limb to find work here. Why do we always have to pick the most expensive solutions involving the greatest deployment of guns to deal with our biggest issues?

I’m Peter Dekom, and in a country plagued with economic problems, there just has to be a better way to spend our tax dollars to create real solutions to our biggest issues.