Follow along with the video below to see how to install our site as a web app on your home screen.
Note: This feature may not be available in some browsers.
April 03, 2006
The Face of the 08 Elections?
Speculation is now rampant in the blogosphere over the possibility of a Perot-type independent US Presidential candidacy focusing on the topic of immigration and the security of the Mexican border. If that is the case, and particlarly if such a candidate also has Perot's pocketbook, we have to assume that something like the following photographs, or equivalent video, will appear frequently, nay, incessantly, in the television advertisements for that candidate, whoever he (or she) may be. This would be the Republican National Committee's nightmare, because it wouldn't have to gather too many votes to guarantee a Republican loss throughout their electoral heartland. In fact, it might gather many votes, maybe even enough to throw the election into the House of Representatives for resolution.
At this point, merely symbolic gestures by the Administration, or by the Republicans in Congress, would not satisfy the bulk of this constituency. One of several substantive measures would have to be taken to avoid a large-scale desertion of the Jacksonian element of the GOP. I think the best of these options would be a border barrier, which could take the form of a fence or even a wall on the model of the Israeli security barrier. In fact, I think that none of the other measures could even be debated intelligently until such a barrier had been constructued. There are several reasons why this is so.
Consider. The barrier has, far more than any other proposed action, a finite and visible metric -- the wall is done when the wall is, well, done. This is not the case with any other proposed action, such as a criminalization of employment of illegals. Congress and the Executive tend to have a bad case of confusing passage of a law with actually making anything happen, as can be seen from the history of the Homeland Security Department. Passing a law criminalizing hiring of illegals, although widely advocated, is very far from guaranteeing that even one actually guilty employer will be convicted and punished. Whereas we can all see when the barrier has been constructed.
Consider that effective enforcement would have to create a means of permitting employers to verify the eligibility of a job candidate, which means either a genuinely forgery-proof national ID card and/or an effective, accurate data base of all eligible US nationals (and everybody, even the blondest guëro, would have to present verification). As currently proposed, this would be done by the Department of Homeland Security. Presumably, implementation would be provided by the Effective Government Fairy.
Uh, this is the agency that can't maintain a much smaller No-Fly List database without keeping Ted Kennedy off of it (and consider the urgent public interest in keeping the Senator from behind the wheel of a car any more than absolutely necessary), or to amalgamate the data bases of its various agencies, or even amalgamate the data bases within any of its agencies. And of course the idea of a national ID card assumes that we are going to somehow detect all the errors and forgeries that the current local ID documents contain when they are used to verify IDs for the national card -- when in reality a national card would tend to validate and preserve forever unquestioned the errors that have already exist in current IDs.
If we are going to ask the government to do something, we are wisest when we pick tasks that governments tend to do well, and avoid the tasks governments tend to do poorly. Piling rocks on top of each other is a job governments have been doing splendidly since the days of the Pyramids. Enforcing a ban on hiring illegals within the US, on the other hand, is, in technical law enforcement terms, a victimless crime -- that is to say, an act which, although illegal, leaves neither a complaining victim, nor a body. (Don't bother commenting about all the harm that victimless crimes cause -- the term has to do with the technical fact of how the act comes to the attention of the police, not with the moral status of the action.) This means that the crime can be uncovered only through the use of informers, or the massive review of the actions of a generally innocent public.
Either of these methods are very open to abuse and constitute a substantial intrusion of government into the everyday lives of people -- something I find objectionable as well as degrading to civil society. In actual fact, criminalizing hiring of illegals would probably only provide a handful of high-profile cases for somebdy like Elliot Spitzer to use as a platform for electoral grandstanding -- and we have far too much criminalization of routine business activity as it is. And if the enforcement did start to be effective, its primary result would be to drive a substantial number of small employers futher into the grey-market world of under-the-table cash transactions, something which again erodes civil society.
Enforcement at the border, on the other hand, especially with a barrier that cannot be crossed quickly, is the one point at which the action can be apprehended directly and without much ambiguity. Therefore it makes sense to concentrate government resources at this point. To the extent that enablers are penalized, this enforcement can concentrate on the coyote rather than the employer. For example, a useful tactic might be to give a green card to one, and only one, of a group of apprehended illegals in return for actions leading to the conviction of the coyote, thus making the "prisoner's dilemma" work in our favor. (The one case where I would support active prosecution of employers would be where the employer has knowingly colluded with the border-crosser, for instance by paying the coyote's fees. Turning in such people could also earn a reward, either for the border-crosser, or for the coyote himself.)
Without an effectively secured border, none of the other measures are likely to work well, even if we decide that we can stand them. Particularly programs that require a large force of government agents to be effective day in and day out in the face of a substantial segment of the public that does not want them to succeeed. Without a barrier, we cannot even consider any other form of regularization, and say "but this time we mean it". With a barrier, however, we have a much wider range of options. Of course a barrier won't be cheap, won't be quick, and will never be 100% effective. But it will be cheaper in the long term than a new, massive internal police force, and it doesn't need to be 100% effective -- it just needs to make things substantially more difficult than they are today.
Many people also point out that any amnesty program today would only be an invitation for many more new illegals to come in, in the expectation that this amnesty would not be the last. As things are today, this is true. With a barrier, it would be possible to start discussing seriously the terms and conditions of regularization, increased legal quotas, conditions of entry and residence, and other issues. Since I do not have any objection to immigrants per se, and since I also think that the total number of immigrants the US admits could be quite high, given an active assimilation culture, I would support a generous offer on all counts. But it doesn't make sense to start talking about it when one side of the discussion has no intent to wait before acting, and the other side has no means of preventing it.
If the current administration cannot grasp these simple facts, then it will suffer in 08 and before for it.
Posted by James C. Bennett at April 3, 2006 05:11 PM
