Proposed U.S. Immigration Reforms Need to Be Reformed

Brian Young

July 11, 2013

There are so many problems I have with the “immigration reform” passed by the Senate a couple weeks ago that I don’t even know where to begin. While I cannot assert that I’m an expert on the topic, I do know that what is being touted by Congress is not what is really needed. It’s just politicking at its worst and throwing $50 million down the toilet in border security, so that we can make the U.S./Mexican border, as John McCain boasted, the most militarized border since the fall of the Berlin Wall. But border security is not, nor has it ever been, the problem. It’s just a measure to make Congressmen and women look like they are serious about illegal immigration. What is needed is some sensible changes to the process that we have in place to enter the country legally as well an adjustment to the number of people allowed to enter the country legally. The process we have currently has generated 11 million undocumented immigrants who live and work among us. What is proposed will do very little to change that. But before I get to solutions, I want to dispel a few of the arguments against immigration reform.

They are taking our jobs!

The underlying principle of this argument is based on the Malthusian idea that we have a finite number of jobs and if we increase the number of people in the country who can work, then there will be fewer jobs for U.S. citizens. The fact of the matter is, this just isn’t the case. If it were, wouldn’t there have been high unemployment when there was a dramatic increase in women entering the workforce back in the 1960’s? Not only did unemployment remain unchanged, this was also one of the most prosperous periods in the 20th Century. Likewise, the 3.5 immigrants per 1,000 Americans per year that we are currently admitting in the country is far less than the 10.4 per 1,000 at the turn of the 20th Century with very little impact on unemployment. Furthermore, this is far less that what Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Switzerland allow today (8.5 per 1,000) and they have stable employment numbers (Dalmia, 2013).

Immigrants are also competing for vastly different jobs than what most U.S. citizens are after. The lion’s share of immigrants (especially undocumented immigrants) don’t even speak the English language. This makes their employment options limited to jobs that have very little or no contact with customers – like farm laborers, dishwashers, housekeepers, or landscaping workers. Even the high school drop-out has a leg up to these folks just because he speaks English. If he or she were willing to do this arduous work at minimum wage, the job would be their’s. But most of us are able to find better jobs than this, leaving these employers seeking their human resources from non-traditional places.

The logic of finite jobs is also a fallacy. This is not a zero-sum game. Since the dawn of mankind, human ingenuity has always produced new industry. Physical resources that were once viewed as useless suddenly have a use. Just look at shale rock: five years ago, oil and natural gas were impossible to extract from it, and then someone thought of fracking and soon the U.S. will be one of the largest oil and natural gas producers in the world. Grains of sand, once thought only useful for beaches and sand boxes are now used to make solar panels. The point is, when a new industry arrives (and it will), the only thing that will hold our country back is a lack of human resources, not a lack of physical resources. Additionally, given that baby-boomers will soon be retiring en masse in the coming decade, without the same number of young workers to fill their places, this concern over job shortages due to immigration is over-hyped.

What immigration will actually do is grease the wheels of our economy by filling in the gaps of employment shortages in the geographical areas where they happen. Because immigrants haven’t put down roots, they tend to be more mobile than the native population. So long as businesses can continue to grow, more jobs will be available.

Immigrants not only take the risks involved in coming into this country and starting a new life, many also take the risks associated with starting a business. Nationwide, immigrant founded companies produced $52 billion in sales and employed 450,000 workers based on one study done in 2005. 25% of high-tech companies founded between 1995 and 2005 had at least one immigrant founder. Over 40% of companies on the 2010 Fortune 500 list were founded by immigrants or their children. A 2011 American Enterprise Institute study found that between 2000 and 2007, for every additional 100 immigrants with advanced degrees in a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) field from an American university, 262 new native jobs were created (Dalmia, 2012).

Finally, immigration and the labor market is no different than the rest of the free market; it ebbs and flows with demand. In fact, we actually had a reduction in illegal immigration in recent years. This was not because of heightened border security, but because our economy went into recession. Fewer jobs available led to fewer people coming across the border illegally. So no, they are not taking our jobs.

They’re mooching off the system!

The biggest part of “the system” illegal immigrants take advantage of is emergency room care and public education, and these are real and significant costs. However, the net gains often far outweigh their costs. These people, while they are not paying taxes like you and I, do consume the money they earn and, as stated before, help places that have a shrinking labor market. A 2006 analysis by a Texas comptroller found that the costs of illegal immigration in 2005 were $504 million, but had they not been there, the state’s economy would have shrunk by $17.7 billion. Similarly, a 2006 study at the University of North Carolina by the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise found that although Hispanic immigrants imposed a net cost of $61 million to the state’s budget, they contributed $9 billion to the gross state product. So yes, illegal immigration imposes costs; however they contribute more to the economy than they cost because of their labor output and personal consumption. And while there very likely are illegal immigrants who have falsified documents in order to receive welfare benefits, the majority come here not for the perks, but to work. According to one study, the overall labor participation rate of undocumented men is 20% higher than that of native men, while their welfare consumption is much lower (Dalmia, 2012).

Most who come to the U.S. illegally are in their peak working years and probably have at least 20 good working years in them. If they were allowed to come into the country legally as documented temporary workers, they would be paying taxes and contributing to Medicare and Social Security (even though they would not be able to take advantage of it), making these two programs solvent again. Besides, even if this was a real problem, it’s more an argument ending the the welfare state, not ending immigration.

They don’t assimilate!

This has been said about virtually all immigrant groups that come in a wave throughout American history. In fact, Benjamin Franklin had the same concerns about his native Pennsylvania when Germans started moving there. This is also part of the reason why Congress first established quotas into laws to keep Southern and Eastern Europeans and Jews from “overwhelming” the white race (yes, they were at one time considered a separate race than the Anglo-Saxon American). The Irish were described by native-born Americans as “low-browed and savage, groveling and bestial, lazy and wild, simian and sensual” (Bailey, 2012)

However, history has also shown that assimilation happens naturally over the course of a generation or two. For each new immigration group that enters into the country, they do tend to congregate together and sometimes even create their own communities. As farmland became available, a lot of Germans moved into the Midwest, for example, and created little German communities. They spoke their native language and carried on their customs and traditions. But you know what? By the second and third generation, these immigrant families started seeing themselves as Americans. And while you still see Greek festivals, Abelskeiver suppers, Octoberfests, Saint Patrick’s Day parades, and Cinco de Mayo celebrations, that’s about all that’s left of their anti-assimilation ways. This assumption that the immigrants we have today are somehow different is not based on fact. It’s based on fear of this strange group of darker people coming from the south.

If one were to use the races as they were defined at the turn of the 20th Century, the worries that Whites will be the minority in a few years has already come to pass. In fact, “non-whites” as defined at that time, would make up 60% of the population. And by 2050, when whites will be the minority using today’s race standards, Hispanics will be just as assimilated and as much a part of American culture as Irish, Italian, Jewish, and Polish immigrants are today and may even be considered white – considering that Hispanic/White children are already considered by many to be White demonstrates this real possibility. As Ronald Bailey (2012) declared at the end of his article on this topic, America is an ideal, not a tribe.

We need to build a wall to keep them out!

This strategy was first implemented in San Diego, California back in 1994. It concentrated on putting up walls at key crossing areas – primarily border towns in the Southwest – to deter illegal immigrants. The rest of the 2,000 mile border consisted of desert and mountains and was considered a natural barrier. It was assumed that there wouldn’t be that many people who would try to take on these remote areas. They were wrong.

The border fences we have today have not stemmed illegal immigration, they’ve just moved the flow of illegal immigration to remote parts of the border where it’s actually more difficult to capture them. In fact, shortly after 1994, the chances of getting caught crossing the border illegally dropped by 5%. While the chances of apprehension have improved since then, the number of successful entries into the country hasn’t changed a great deal since 1994. It is estimated that we have approximately 500,000 illegal immigrants coming into the U.S. each year. This is in spite of the fact that there are 58,000 U.S. Customs and Border Protection employees – over 21,000 of them are border agents (up from 4,139 in 1992) – and 20,000 employees in the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The budget for the U.S. Customs and Border Protection has nearly doubled between 2003 and 2011, from $5.9 billion to $11.9 billion and the budget for ICE is now more than $5.7 billion, up from $3.3 billion in 2003 (Beato, 2012).

Additionally, the militarized border has had the unintended consequence of lengthening the stay of illegal immigrants. Because of the greater risks involved in smuggling illegal immigrants into the remote countryside, the prices “coyotes” charge has gone up significantly, nearly wiping out some of these illegal immigrant family’s life savings. Beyond this, those entering into the country face the dangers of the desert – dehydration and heat stroke, natural predators, and possible violence from either border agents or drug smugglers. Shockingly, in the last 12 years, we have had over 3,000 crossing-related fatalities; that’s more deadly than the number of deaths associated with crossing the Berlin Wall in the 28 years that it was up! So because of this, once they get into the country, they are less inclined to leave. A study conducted by the Cato Institute in 2005 found that before the militarized border was in place, if 1,000 immigrants were to enter the U.S., 45% of them would return home within five years, staying an average of 1.7 years. But as it is today, only 25% return home and the average length of stay is 3.5 years. Additionally, many are deciding to stay permanently and are bringing their families with them rather than taking the risks of migrating back and forth between the U.S. and Mexico. Ironically, what was originally conceived as a way to keep them out of the country is actually serving as a fence to keep them in (Politzer, 2007).

Preventing them from coming in is one thing, deporting them is even hairier. Each year that the ICE has existed (save for 2002), the agency has reported record numbers of deportations. In 2011, they sent 396,906 illegal immigrants home. Yet the estimated number of illegal immigrants in the country has remained relatively stable, with some peaks and valleys along the way. Since 2007 it has gone down, but this has been mainly attributed to the recession in the U.S. causing fewer to come into the country more than due to higher numbers illegal immigrants removed through deportation (Beato, 2012).

Deportation is also a very expensive and time-consuming action. While illegal immigrants don’t have the same rights to due process as citizens, they are still allowed to appear before an immigration court to argue their case on why they should be allowed to stay in the country. According to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse study in 2011, the number of cases awaiting resolution was at an all-time high of 297,551; and the average wait time to have a case heard was 489 days. Each day an illegal immigrant is kept in detention costs the United States $166. To save space and money, the ICE releases thousands of detained illegal immigrants awaiting trial, who don’t have a criminal past, on their own recognizance until their court date comes. Not surprisingly, most are long gone before the hearing ever happens. According to the study, unexecuted deportation orders have increased from 558,000 in 2008 to 1.1 million in 2011. The number we are currently deporting or taking through the process accounts for less than 4% of the nearly 11 million illegal immigrants we have in the country. According to a study conducted by the Center for American Progress, it would cost us $285 billion to deport all 11 million illegal immigrants in 5 years – that is if they could all be found and accounted for and the border were 100% secure from any new illegal immigrants entering (Beato, 2012).

If they want in the country, they should follow the immigration laws already in place!

I think of all the arguments against immigration reform, this is the one that bothers me the most. I wish you could only walk a mile in an immigrant’s shoes before you say this and then you would understand how the immigration laws that we have today are actually the leading cause for illegal immigration.

Save for the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which put limits on the number of Chinese immigrants allowed to enter the U.S., there have been very few limitations on immigration other than that you had to be healthy upon entry, you couldn’t be an anarchist (Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1901) and had to be able to read (Immigration Act of 1917). Then we had an influx of immigration in New York and other harbor cities on the East Coast following World War I from southern and eastern Europe, and so began our journey of immigration control.

In 1921, we had the Emergency Quota Act, restricting the number of people from a particular nationality to 3% of the population of that nationality who were residing in the U.S. in 1890. Next came the Immigration Act of 1924, which imposed even tighter restrictions on national origin, and set the quota at 2%. During World War II, Franklin Roosevelt and Mexican President Camacho made a diplomatic agreement, known as the Bracero program, between the two countries that allowed for the immigration of temporary workers from Mexico to work in the U.S. due to the demand for manual labor during the war because so many American men were fighting overseas. The program was continued under a number of different laws and the number of Mexicans coming into and out the country ranged from 4,200 in the beginning up to 179,000 by 1964. The Immigration Act of 1965 effectively ended the Bracaro program. National origin quotas were also ended; replaced by limits on the number of people from each hemisphere. This piece of legislation also made family reunification an emphasis. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, for the first time, punished employers for employing illegal immigrants. This act also gave amnesty to 3 million illegal immigrants in the country already (which probably everyone knows by now, as it is mentioned in almost every debate people have on immigration). The Immigration Act of 1990 modified and expanded the Immigration Act of 1965, expanding the number of visas by 40% to 700,000 total. Family reunification remained a primary objective, but there was also a significant increase to employment related immigration. The last major immigration law put in place was the Real ID Act of 2005, which changed some visa limits, tightened asylum requirements, and removed restrictions on building border fences.

Since then there have been attempts at comprehensive immigration reform, but nothing has passed. As of today, immigration visa limits remain at 700,000 – a combination of employment (140,000), refugees (80,000), and family preference (480,000). There is an unlimited number of visas available for immediate family members of U.S. citizens (i.e., minor children, spouses, and parents).

Sounds like big numbers, right? It does until you realize there are 500,000 people who enter the country illegally each year. Most of these people are coming for low-paying/low-skill jobs, which would fall under the H2-A and H2-B visas for temporary workers. There are only 66,000 of these visas each year and they are taken within the first day of being available. As you can see, a big part of the problem we are having with illegal immigration is that we are shy 434,000 visas to make those who enter illegally, legal.

Then there’s this notion of “chain immigration” and “anchor babies.” People believe that once one person enters the country and gets legal status, suddenly they can bring their whole family in. While it’s true that a U.S. citizen can sponsor an immediate family member for their green card, there is very little they can do for family members before becoming a citizen. And depending on one’s circumstances, becoming a citizen is no easy matter: the process takes anywhere from 3 years (if you marry a citizen) to 20 years from start to finish. As far as the “anchor baby” concern, it takes 18 years before that baby becomes an adult and can sponsor his or her parents. This isn’t exactly a quick and easy path to gain legal status by any means.

For those of you who don’t know what a “path to citizenship” looks like through the legal process, here’s a quick synopsis. If you marry a U.S. citizen, you almost immediately are given a green card and are allowed to live and work in the country and after another 3 years, you’re granted citizenship if you prove the marriage was legitimate. For minor children and parents of U.S. citizens, the timeline is a bit longer: 5 years to get a green card and an additional 3 years for citizenship. Adult children of a U.S. citizen have much longer to wait: 6 to 14 years to get a green card and another 6 years for citizenship if you are single; if you are married, it is 7 to 15 years to get a green card and an additional 6 years to gain citizenship. For siblings of U.S. citizens, they have to wait 11 to 22 years to get a green card (depending on the demand for green cards in any given country) and 6 more years to be citizens. So when they say the priority is family reunification, as you can see, this claim is a bit of a stretch. By the time most people are able to get a green card through their family member, they’ve already established their lives in their home country with jobs and families of their own; so most opt-out once they finally become eligible.

Family members of permanent residents have even longer to wait and only spouses and children are allowed to come. The wait-times to get a green card for a spouse or minor child is 6 years; it’s 9 to 14 years for adult children. Once they finally get a green card, they can be citizens 6 years after they apply. If the adult child is married, unfortunately they are out of luck and cannot get a green card or become a citizen, period.

If you don’t have a family member who is either a citizen or permanent resident, you’d better hope you have a skill that is in high demand. Most skilled workers get into the country with an H1-B visa through an employer. But the employer needs to apply for the visa for you quickly, as there are only 85,000 of these visas and they run out within days of their being available. If you’re lucky and get the H1-B temporary work visa, you can then apply for a green card, which generally takes 6 years to get, and then it’s another 6 years for citizenship.

If you don’t have a high demand skill, you’re pretty much up the creek without a paddle. You can only enter the country with an H2-A or H2-B visa temporary work visa. Again, you first have to have a job offer, and even if you do, these visas run out quickly because there are only 66,000 total available – way below the demand for them. Unlike the H1-A, you cannot apply for a green card. The time allowed to remain in the country is also very short-lived because it is for temporary or seasonal work only. So, in essence, if you don’t have a high-demand skill, you are prohibited from ever legally becoming a long-term resident or U.S. citizen, unless you get married to someone who is a U.S. citizen or you happen to win a lottery visa.

So, knowing what you know now, put yourself into the mind of a low-skilled Mexican and consider your options. You can stay in your own country: which is highly corrupt, has a heavily inflated currency, and has low paying jobs to boot. These factors make it very difficult for you and your family to survive, let alone get ahead. Or you can try to get into the United States, which has job opportunities that pay significantly more, and in dollars. Your only problem is that it is next to impossible for you to get in legally.

And here is where illegal immigration begins. For them, it’s simply a cost-benefit analysis and right now the benefits of entering the U.S. illegally far outweighs the costs.

So how should immigration reform be reformed?

For starters, we need to end the absurd argument of “border security first.” It’s an unattainable dream. No matter how many billions of dollars that is poured into it, when there’s a will to cross the border, there will always be a way. As the saying goes, if you build a 20 foot high fence, they’ll bring a 25 foot long ladder. And do we really believe that a 2,000 mile long fence is manageable to build and maintain, let alone guard? Let’s be reasonable! We need to de-fund this nonsense, not double-down on it.

Secondly, real immigration reform has to take into consideration the law of supply and demand and look at the supply of jobs and the demand for immigrants to fill them. The cap on temporary work that we have today is senseless and even the proposed expansion by the “Gang of Eight” legislation has a maximum of 180,000 H1-B visas and 200,000 H2-B visas. While this is better than what we have now, is still too low to get the job done and for the first few years, they want to cut the number of H2-B visas to 20,000 and gradually increase the number when unemployment decreases to a certain threshold. To the casual observer, it seems reasonable, until you understand that the driver of illegal immigration is too few visas in the first place and the jobs that are being filled by these immigrants are not the jobs desired by unemployed – if they were, why do we still have high unemployment?

While it sounds radical, the only way out of this dilemma we’ve created for ourselves is to make a guest worker program that has no limits in place. The number of immigrants will go up and down with the country’s economy. So long as the person applying for the visa has a job to go to, passes a criminal background check, and has a clean bill of health, they are in. We don’t need some bureaucrat to help us find the magic number of visas to permit in a year. Let the market work it out as it would nearly everything else in the economy, if we’d just let it. Placing caps on the number of available work visas only incentivizes people to enter the country illegally if the process to enter legally requires nothing short of a miracle.

Having more people come into the country through a legal process does two things. It reduces the burden we have to put on employers to verify immigration status. Because we would essentially be opening the border, there would be less of a need for a database system like e-Verify and we could stick with the I-9 we are already using, or create an updated electronic version of documentation verification that simply matches immigration numbers to documents the worker provides. If an immigrant doesn’t have the paperwork, he or she cannot work. Secondly, these legal immigrants will now be taxpayers and will contribute to Social Security and Medicare, two programs which they will only benefit from, should they become citizens. That’s the cost of coming to this country to work.

Third, we have to address amnesty…the word no politician will utter. This is really a no-brainer. Let the people who are already here, be here legally, and allow them to get a green card. If they want to be citizens, they’ll have to go through the process getting citizenship like everyone else, waiting the same amount of time others have to when they apply. The only other option is to find them and deport them and we have neither the money, nor the man-power to do this, so why even bother trying?

Finally the process overall should just be easier, less expensive, and less restrictive. The immigration system we have set up is a veritable nightmare for most people wishing to come here: it’s expensive, it’s confusing, and it’s very arbitrary. The hundreds of pages of legislation being debated right now will not fix it. Under the current system, people wishing to immigrate into the U.S. are assumed guilty until proven innocent. I have personally seen this when my wife and I wanted to help my sister-in-law come to the States to study, only to have her student visa application denied because she had the misfortune of having a sister who came before her on a student visa and got married to a U.S. citizen. Because of this fact, the U.S. consulate employee she spoke with made the presumption that she would do the same and in a couple of minutes her fate was sealed. Her opportunity for a better life was denied.

It seems cliche, but this country was built on the backs of immigrants. Skyscrapers and bridges were built, rail tracks were laid, roads were cut through mountains, crops were harvested, fruit was picked, trees were cut, and rivers were tamed, all because our parents, or grand-parents, or great-grand-parents, or great-great-grandparents chose the United States as their new home. And now we’re too full?? If the past teaches us anything, it is that because our ancestors came years ago that we are the country we are today. If we want to continue to have a flourishing economy, we need immigration. If we keep turning people away, others will take them in and we’ll be left behind, proud of our American heritage, but with nothing to show for it.