A Problem-Solver’s Take on Unlawful Migration

If you really wanted to solve it, how would you tackle the problem of massive unlawful immigration ? It’s not hard to conceive some pretty effective practical means, but they wouldn’t look anything like what’s going on now. Read on.

To solve a problem, the first you must see it clearly. That means looking honestly at real causes and effects.

First, the causes. Once upon a time, our nation was a “shining city on a hill.” Know who said that? It wasn’t some half-forgotten figure from our Founding. It was Ronald Reagan, in 1980, in his pre-election speech.

And then it was true. We had had a little problem with steep inflation, which our Fed eventually solved with ultra-high interest rates. But we were first or near-first in every practical measure of a nation’s success that you could take at that time: GDP, GDP per capita, scientific research (both government-sponsored and private), innovation, new-enterprise formation, farming abundance, and the practical rollout of innovative products for the benefit of the average Joe and Mary. We were even near the top in longevity and health, despite diets heavy in fat and sugar and a whole lot more smokers than we have today. We spent more than double on health care per capita compared to most advanced nations.

Not only was Ronald Reagan right. He was generous. The old Irish charmer wanted to share the benefits of our good life with, in Emma Lazarus’ words, “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free[.]” (That’s part of her poem at the base of our Statute of Liberty.)

Reagan then had the full support of his Republican Party (and it was his, enthusiastically) . Why? The GOP was then, unambiguously, the “party of business.” And business, including big farming, wanted cheap labor.

Who could better provide good, diligent cheap labor than people who had crossed the snake-infested Darien Gap and walked, hitchhiked or rode the rails 1,500 miles to our Southern Borden and then hiked through the burning Sonoran Desert just to get here? Who better than workers who did all that to be free from drug cartels, warring gangs, demagogic and brutal left-wing (and sometimes right-wing) dictators, and corrupt and brutal police? Workers who had done all that just for a shot at a life free from arbitrary violence were not about to complain of low wages, cramped quarters and hard working conditions.

Believe it or not, it was Ronald Reagan, not Joe Biden, who opened the floodgates, and with the full, bipartisan support of Congress. Believe it or not, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (also called the Sampson-Mazzoli Act), which Reagan sponsored and pushed through Congress [start clip timer at 1:17], was the very last federal statute for comprehensive immigration reform. It allowed migrants who could prove they had lived here since before January 1, 1982, to seek temporary legal status and to apply for green cards after eighteen months. And here is how Reagan supported this law against charges that it constituted “amnesty” and defended his goal of holding employers who encourage illegal immigration to account.

Since that time, Congress has never addressed the problem of unlawful immigration seriously. Prominent among many reasons was that the GOP wanted two contradictory things. Business, which was the GOP’s traditional constituency, wanted the cheap, eager, docile labor that immigrants from “shithole” countries bring. But the GOP also wanted to expand its “base” among workers. What better way to do that than to claim, loudly and repeatedly, that the unlawful immigrants were not just breaking the law in entering; they were also taking away your job and lowering your wages by increasing the supply of labor.

Politically, this was a win-win. Business got its cheap labor. And workers got the demagogic promise of more jobs and better pay if only the GOP could stem the flow of cheap immigrant labor that made its oligarchs and rich business patrons richer.

How this happened is just as important. Reagan and Congress had been aware that the “underdeveloped” world was a rough and often cruel place. They were also aware that our global reputation as “the city on a hill” was what would later prove to have been its peak.

So they knew they didn’t have to do anything or spend any of their precious money to attract foreign workers. All they had to do was open the doors a crack, and the poor world’s hopeful, eager, strongest, healthiest and smartest migrants from “shithole” countries would trek thousands of miles to and across our Southern borders and become part of our national cheap-labor force.

That’s exactly what happened. That’s how we got some eleven million undocumented immigrants living among us and doing our toughest, dirtiest, hardest and most dangerous work on the cheap.

Donald Trump has claimed that these eager workers come from foreign jails and insane asylums and are murderers, rapists and violent criminals. Maybe there are a few among them like that. But the vast majority are honest workers, and, if the truth be told, more willing to put up with low wages, substandard housing, and poor working conditions than American citizens.

How do I know? First of all, Ronald Reagan himself, in the video clip linked above, chided employers for exploiting undocumented immigrants as cheap labor and wanted to sanction those that do. Second, if even a large fraction of our millions of undocumented laborers were as Trump lied, the business leaders who control the GOP by their huge donations would have closed the floodgates long ago. Anyway, does the average inmate of a jail or insane-asylum have what it takes to walk across the Darien Gap, then 1,500 miles to the US border, and then through the deadly the Sonoran Desert to a place of steady employment, let alone to get and hold a demanding job? I don’t think so.

Trump’s lies contradict the facts of the case. The bulk of the millions of undocumented immigrants who have come to us since 1986 are and have been working hard and quietly, becoming part of our communities, and raising and educating their children for a better life. Criminals and lunatics, by and large, don’t do that.

So there you have the problem, in its full glory. We have some eleven million undocumented immigrants inside our country, the overwhelming majority of whom have helped build our nation, are closely integrated into our communities, and have children and grandchildren who are lawful citizens by virtue of our Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship. More than that: they work hard and don’t complain, and they can’t organize lest they be deported. Think maybe that’s precisely what the GOP’s business wing wanted and still wants?

But this essay is not about blame. Since 1986, there’s been enough finger-pointing on this issue to last our entire species for several centuries. We need solutions, not blame. If we want to slow or stem the flow of undocumented immigrants—and that’s an entirely reasonable goal—there are practical ways to do it, and the most effective ones don’t rely on violence or cruelty.

We certainly don’t have to leave the floodgates open forever. But how do we close them?

First, we have to make up our minds. Do we really want to close the floodgates entirely, or just weed out the worst?

Trump claims (inconsistently) that his goal is to kick out only the criminals, “the worst of the worst.” But that’s not what he’s done. You don’t identify, let alone deport, criminals by throwing ICE into immigrant communities to pick up, at random, everyone who looks or sounds foreign (especially Hispanic!) and who doesn’t happen to have a green card or passport on his or her person when suddenly nabbed by surprise. That’s cruel and random terror, not effective policing.

It would be easy to deport criminals if that were the GOP’s real goal. Just go through the public databases of convicted, incarcerated or formerly incarcerated criminals in each state. (We might need some supervening federal legislation to countermand privacy laws for this.) Pick out every single name that even looks foreign. Then run that name through the databases of green-card and passport holders, and run it again through every state’s birth records to exclude birthright citizens who don’t have passports. Then, if you are just a tad kind, you can exclude perpetrators of misdemeanors, particularly older ones, and go after only the recent baddies, including perpetrators of violent or otherwise heinous felonies.

This would not be racial or ethnic “profiling.” Why not? None of it would appear on the streets or directly affect the individuals “profiled.” It would have no consequence for anyone who was not a violent or heinous felon. Innocent people would not even know it had been done: the records of the mostly-computerized culling could be kept a deep secret revealed only to high-level federal officials with a need to know.

Voilá. You’ve deported all the worst of the worst, and you’ve nabbed them quietly by surprise, without disrupting innocent homes, workplaces and communities, and without terrorizing a lot of totally innocent people. Why couldn’t anyone in our federal administration think of that? Could it be that their goal was inciting rage and terror among voters, and not solving the problem?

The bigger problem is what to do about the flood of unlawful migrants who are not criminals. For that, we have to have a policy and understand what caused the problem.

The vast majority of unlawful migrants come in initially under our asylum laws. They come in as refugees, with a legal obligation to go to court to review their claims for asylum. Those claims have to be based on facts that show a reasonable fear of harm or persecution in their countries of origin from which they fled.

To apply that standard, an immigration judge has to review the alleged facts and the evidence for them. So a very easy way to “fine tune” the flow of immigrants seeking asylum would be to raise the bar and specify a higher standard for the facts that must be shown. This could be done by fine-tuning our asylum laws, which Congress has failed to do for four decades.

But there’s an even greater problem today. We don’t have nearly enough immigration judges to review and rule on asylum claims in anything like a timely manner. So the average asylum claimant has to wait years to have his or her asylum claim judged. In the meantime, he or she gets a job, secures housing, melts into a working community, and maybe has children, who automatically become birthright citizens. This is precisely how the vast bulk of our unlawful residents have grown to number some eleven million.

It’s hard even to slow the flow by making would-be migrants wait outside our borders to have their asylum claims judged. If they go back to their countries of origin, they are subject to the same “shithole” government (or criminal activity not stopped by it) that made them leave in the first place. And if they wait in a third country (mostly, Mexico) they are preyed upon by criminals and leeches, including those who “help” them on their way for exorbitant fees.

There are many possible solutions to this problem. We could let all present non-criminal unlawful residents stay and shut the door to new refugees entirely. We could slow the flow of new refugees by raising the standards for asylum. We could declare a past cutoff date, require all undocumented residents to declare and prove their actual dates of entry, and deport all those who came after the cutoff date. (This is pretty much what Reagan’s 1986 law did.) Except for the first, each of these solutions would require hiring many more immigration judges, so that we could judge asylum claims promptly, before new refugees migrate internally to communities and become part of them or, for those already here, judge their dates of entry.

All these solutions are “legitimate.” All could be made effective without sending masked ICE agents into the streets of mostly “blue” cities to arrest suspects at random, break their car windows (or their bones!), manhandle them, and generally treat them inhumanely.

The violence and cruelty of Trump’s ICE has become a feature, not a bug, of his immigration regime. But it’s completely unnecessary to realize the goals of any of these reasonable alternatives. As any alternative hit the news and became known worldwide, the incentive to immigrate and the immigration flow would drop accordingly.

How do we know? Even before Trump’s return to office, Joe Biden’s change in asylum policy and a dramatically smaller quota for refugees caused the number of border encounters with undocumented migrants to drop sharply.

Why was this so? The most important question any would-be undocumented migrant ever asks is “What are my chances of getting in?” Migrants ask this question before they start their long journey and at every step along it. Change the answer, and you will change the flow, without resorting to violence or cruelty.

As for the mythical Wall, there is no wall so high or dug so deep that migrants can’t climb over it or tunnel under it. If nothing else, the mechanized tunnels that drug cartels have dug, maintained and sometimes used for years to import illegal drugs show that.

In realistic practice, the best way to slow the flow is to have a restrictive policy, maintain it consistently in practice, and publicize the hell out of it. But that only works if the policy is reasonable and consistently implemented. Cruelty is unnecessary and ineffective. After all, the vast majority of refugees are used to cruelty; that’s why they’re seeking a better life.

So there you have it. In theory, restricting, adjusting and even shutting down the flow of migrants into our country is possible. So is deporting whatever fraction of undocumented migrants already here that we think we want to leave. All we have to do is decide how many of them we want to keep, of what kinds (legitimate asylum, h-1bs, seasonal farm workers, millionaires, high-value specialists, etc.), and under what circumstances. Then we must pass laws, adopt regulations and hire the personnel (including immigration judges, counselors, border guards and detention agents) to implement that policy.

Throwing a bunch of militarized ICE agents into our cities, let alone untrained-for-immigration soldiers or National Guard troops, is a child’s non-solution to a serious problem. And throwing them only into “blue” cities is a deliberate non-solution, if only because “red” states have as many or more low-skilled jobs suitable for migrants than “blue” ones.

So why haven’t we done what it takes? Why haven’t we revised our immigration laws in forty years? I would argue that, in all that time since Reagan, the GOP has never been serious about finding a solution.

Opening the floodgates to cheap labor, docile because undocumented, while demagoguing the migrants to gain the votes of native American workers, may have seemed a fine political solution. After all, it has made the GOP what it is today, a viable political party among the working class, despite its cutting health-care and day care to give tax breaks to billionaires and its increasing tolerance for bigotry among our increasingly diverse work force.

But it’s not a serious practical solution. Self-contradictory “solutions” seldom work. What we need is a rational consensus on how much immigration we should have, who (if any) we should deport, and practical-common sense laws and restrictions to achieve those levels. We are not likely to get them with a major party bent on perpetuating a self-contradictory, partly demagogic policy and a President suffering from malignant narcissism (with overtones of paranoia and fanstasies of retribution) and increasingly obvious senile dementia.

If you crave a kinder, gentler and more rational era, watch the two Reagan clips linked above in full, starting the longer one at 1:17.   Note the esteem, if not love, that Reagan enjoyed from members of both parties, and study his warning employers against promoting unlawful immigration.