Illegal Immigration: A Study In Paradox

As someone else wisely wrote, we have dueling signs at our borders with Mexico: "Keep Out" and "Help Wanted."  We spend billions to catch and return "illegals" and billions more to hire and pay "undocumented workers" to labor in our fields, slaughter houses, construction sites, nursing homes, yards and houses.  At least in the latter case some useful work gets done; work most Americans avidly shun in good times and bad.

Neither a justifiable desire to "control our borders" nor a sentimental appeal to our history as a "nation of immigrants" quite cuts through the knot of this problem, overwhelmingly one we share with our southern neighbor.  That it is a crime to cross our borders without permission is a relatively new concept in our history.  Our ancestors were welcomed one and all, especially if young and healthy, although we proundly proclaimed our "open door" to "your tired. your poor, your huddled masses."  What our predecessors did routinely is now a crime.  Perhaps now that is as it should be.
  
For by some measures of sustainability we have too many people already, and census numbers show that we  have become the third most populous country on earth by immigration, not reproduction.  We are not the rich "empty" land of our beginnings.  Yet immigration of the young, productive and able is often posited as the solution to caring for an aging population.  Many "illegals" are doing just that.  Perhaps that is also as we would like -- even need -- it to be.

As we work to curb the visible influx we also dam the largly ignored outward flow.  Workers who once returned at picking season's end to the old village and family hearth instead  put down roots -- and send for their families --  to ensure next season's employment. Thus we trap them behind our barriers to entry, perversely swelling the ranks of the uninvited in a limbo of our choosing as much as of theirs.  Perhaps we should encourage them to come and go rather than come and stay.

According to a civil war era amendment to our constitution, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens. . ."  It's purpose was to make citizens of former slaves.  Today it makes citizens of children born to parents who are here without right or permission.  While the popular belief that pregnant women continually sneak across our porous borders to make citizens of their offspring on our dime is mostly myth, there is a sizeable and growing population of families with both legal and illegal members here long term.  A recent Supreme Court decision holds that it's lawful to break up these families by deporting the illegals.  Usually this leaves children bereft of one or both parents or of the only country and culture they have ever known.  This outcome is hard to defend.

As our border defenses have improved the cost of evading them has risen.  Smugglers, called "coyotes," charge not only what the traffic will bear, but what is required to evade the increased vigilance.  Drug dealers recruit "mules" more easily from these desperate ranks to carry illegal drugs in payment for their precarious passage.  Thus we make erstwhile law abiding people into criminals twice over to feed our craving for drugs and our appetite for cheap docile labor.  This outcome, too, is hard to defend.

But, you might say, these people are criminals who have broken our laws and should be punished, not rewarded.  Technically true enough, but it is hard to view people whose only "crime" is to seek a better life in exactly the same way our ancestors did, as deserving of years behind bars with burglars, armed robbers, embezzelers and the like. 

The current Great Recession has slowed the flow of illegal workers considerably because jobs have dwindled and wages have declined.  Conceivably, illegal immigration would disappear entirely if American wages dropped far enough.  Conversely, if Mexican workers at home were paid US level wages the illegal flow would also dry up.  In time one of these two solutions will prevail.  Which world would we prefer to create?

But even on the day  the cross border flows cease we will have an estimated 11 million uninvited immigrants already inhabiting our farms, cities and jails.  The notion that we could find, let alone deport, them all is laughable, although the idea has its earnest supporters.  If we attempted so draconian a solution we would -- if history is any guide -- cause an epic tragedy.  Other mass expulsions have killed millions, such as when Pol Pot's Kymer Rouge drove Cambodians from the cities and into the killing fields; China attempted a "great leap forward;" India divided into Hundu and Muslem states as the British left after World War II; Stalin rejuggled ethnic populations across Soviet Russia in the 1930's; the Turks expelled the Armenians in the wake of World War I. 

Our much smaller attrocities involved the removal of eastern Indian tribes to "their" territory (now the state of Oklahoma) via the pathetic "trail of tears" and the relocation of American citizens of Japanese ancestry to concentration camps in the wake of Pearl Harbor. These are stains enough on our honor, and  remind us of what we are capable. Loose talk about sending the illegals back home can end horribly if allowed to catch on. We literally have no choice  but to give the bulk of them a path to citizenship.  Perhaps we should acknowledge what they actually are: dual citizens.

To unravel this tangle -- decades in the making -- will require slow, panient experimentation by an impatient nation prone to seeking silver bullet solutions.  It will also require cooperation between Mexico and the United States absent the dictatorial posture we have adopted in the past.  Mexico for its part needs to face squarely the reasons why its citizens flee in such abundant numbers rather than being not so secretly glad that they do. For only an end to the economic disparity between our counties will halt the one sided flow, and perhaps even reverse it.

Fortunately, the necessary experimentation is under way. It is called NAFTA.  The North American Free Trade Agreement, is one of the many underappreciated achievements for which Bill Clinton deserves credit.  But NAFTA is more criticized than studied.  It is viewed as a mechanism for exporting American jobs, not as a way to give Mexican workers reasons to stay home.  Clearly, it potentially does both and will continue to do so until standards of living on both sides of the border are roughly equal.  The question is: do we help Mexico up to our economic level or settle for meeting them half way down?

In theory we should both benefit from free expanded trade, for economics is not a zero sum game.  I do not have to lose in order for you to win.  But in the short run the more wealthy trading partner will always feel some pain; jobs have to be in place and people at work before wealth can be created.  And, in the long run, as John M. Keynes so famously said, we are all dead.

It will take political will, a focus on the long term and abundant Christian compassion, which ought not to be in short supply in this most Christian populated of nations, to steadily alleviate the relative poverty that drives people from their birthright across borders to strange cultures, languages and geography, and bring our two nations into a sufficiently equitable economic balance.

Once that goal is finally achieved we can confidently start on the rest of the world -- having figured out how.