That's a bold title, since a lot of smart people are debating immigration policy once again, and since it's going nowhere. A title like that suggests there is a reasonably simple and straightforward answer. I believe there is. And so it confounds and mystifies me as I listen, courtesy of my good friend C-SPAN radio, to the complexities of a complex bill be fruitlessly debated on the Senate floor.
The current immigration bill and its many ammendments is multi-faceted - "comprehensive" is the word you will hear from U.S. senators - and expensive. I don't know the cost of the current bill, but it is considerable, as the bill provides money for more border patrol, a large fence along some portion of our Mexican border, and so on. The cost is tens of billions if not over one hundred billion. And that's "billions" with a "b", at a time when budget predictions are for continued annual deficits for some years. and China holding an ever greater portion of that debt. The cost of the version defeated last summer was $126 billion.
So what's the grand solution? It's not only my solution, but the solution offered by many sensibly-minded callers into C-SPAN's daily Washington Journal program. They offer the solution with the same incredulity which I do. Their tone implicitly asks the question: Why are our representatives and political leaders not advancing the same solution?
First of all, as I know from software development, no solution makes sense without a clear statement of the problem the solution is intended to solve. This is where you holler at your computer, "The problem is we have a lot of illegal immigrants in this country, you knucklehead!" True enough, but why?
They are here, and continue to come, because they know, the 12 million or so success stories of those who came here illegally and stayed representing compelling empirical evidence, that they can work and make higher wages, receive more state benefits (education, medical treatement, food stamps, school lunches, etc) here than in Mexico such that it combines for a better life. They are coming for that work and those wages because American businessowners have proven for a long time now that they are willing to violate unenforced laws against hiring illegal immigrants in order to reduce their labor costs.
Lettuce growers in California are not hiring illegals because it's been demonstrated that Keynsian laws of labor supply, demand and price have failed in the lettuce industry.
That is just utter hooey. In other words, it's just garbage (possibly bad lettuce) that lettuce growers at some point found themselves with a labor shortage - the ever cliched excuse for hiring illegals, that they couldn't find Americans who would do the work - which they could not solve by increasing worker pay. If they paid $100 / hour, believe me, they'd have tons of help and a backlog of those wanting to help, including MBAs, accountants, lawyers and many others not earning $200,000 / year (about what $100 / hour translates into).
Now, lettuce would also cost more.
But then, of course, I exaggerate, and lettuce growers wouldn't need to raise their labor pay to $100 / hour to fill out their labor force.
Laws of supply, demand and price (i.e. pay) have not been violated. They are true and applicable as ever, and if you can make a compelling case to the contrary, there is a Nobel Prize in economics waiting for you in Stockholm.
Actually what occurred with lettuce growers and similar labor-intensive industries is that certain lettuce growers decided to break our laws by hiring some illegal immigrants from Mexico (mostly Mexico), and took advantage of their illegal circumstance to pay them dramatically less than U.S. minimum wage. When no discovery, fine or other penalty accrued to them, they continued and expanded the practice, which allowed them to lower their price while making the same profit margin. This placed a competitive pressure on lettuce growers who did not hire illegals, but Americans (students, young people, etc) at higher, legal minimum wage rates.
Over a long enough period of time - and it doesn't take long - the lawful could not match the lower price of the law-breakers and faced going out of business if they could not similarly reduce their costs. Eventually, the lawful businesses were forced to abandon their upstanding ways and hire illegal workers as well. And still nothing happened, no penalty accrued to the growers. And the Mexicans now working at wages low by American standards but high by Mexican standards sent word to family and friends that higher pay and a better life were available in America as illegal immigrants. And so more came.
Without enforcement of our labor and immigration laws against the lettuce growers (and I use them, obviously, to represent all businesses who hire illegal workers), you have the very natural, predictable and very Keynsian result that wages will tend steadily downward, and more and more previously lawful employers will become unlawful employers simply to compete with the unlawful ones and remain in business. It is a matter of survival. That's what laws do. They create a legal playing field in place of the law of the jungle, which is what an absence of law quickly devolves to.
At some point, and after a long enough period where the U.S. minimum wage was not increased to keep pace with inflation, businesses which had never sought illegal foreign labor due to the nature of the business (for instance, retail businesses which interact more with the public) now paid substantially higher than minimum wage (like the pharmacy I worked at as a teenager) due to regular Keynsian elements of supply and demand for those businesses. In the meantime, after some public awareness was paid to the practice of substandard pay for migrant workers, our lettuce growers were compelled to take one step toward lawfulness and pay minimum wage, but where that minimum wage now had become depleted significantly relative to the cost of living in America and to the entry-level market wage of other more customer-facing businesses such that, literally, it now did represent a wage rate at which many if not most Americans would not work, since as Americans, they had access to the pharmacies and other businesses paying a higher, market-driven minimum wage.
And so the need, the demand for a substandard labor pool in terms of wages continued. And it continues to continue. This is what the immigration bill seeks to codify as a "guest-worker program."
The solution is simple, and not expensive. Prosecute the businesses who are making all of this possible. Do it like the IRS does. Don't go after everyone in some broad, dramatic sweep. No. Do it in a much more boring way. Each year, the IRS audits very few individuals and businesses. But each year, it is certain they will audit SOME individuals and businesses, and it is that certainty which motivates 99% of us to file and pay our tax as best and as faithfully as we or our accountants can compute it.
Do this with respect to hiring illegal immigrants. But for the very few but certain audits the IRS completes, and penalties it issues, everyone would cheat on their taxes. The pressures are even worse on businesses who wish to be lawful but whose competition has turned to hiring illegals. They literally will be driven out of business at some point relatively soon, because for most businesses and all labor-intensive ones, labor is the single greatest business expense. By not enforcing our labor laws as respects illegal immigrants, we force good businesses to be bad, we enlarge the problem, we bring more illegal immigrants here, and we get ourselves to where we are today. Until an immigration bill addresses that, it's not worth supporting.
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