We’ve generally steered clear of debates over immigration and the so-called wall (as in better cordoning the US southern border) because they typically have a high noise-and-invective to signal ratio, and are often are not great on facts either.
We want to kick around a very narrow question, could a “wall” as in some form of barriers and other means of physically blocking entry, be made to work? And are there less corrosive approaches (including multi-pronged approaches) that would be pretty effective, less costly, and less punitive?
It is telling to see what the action in Congress says about the apparent stakes. It is the Republicans who are surprisingly sticking to their guns and even in the Senate refusing to cut a deal on Ukraine and Israel funding unless they get their apparently very keenly desired “wall” buckeroos. Since politically-perceived-as-important Israel dough is being held hostage, this move can’t be explained as a clever gambit to throw Ukraine under the bus, the better to save the money for China and other fading empire bright shiny objects. Key sections from a Wall Street Journal update:
President Biden’s push to pass tens of billions in new aid for Ukraine stalled in the Senate on Wednesday, but the setback could inject new urgency into bipartisan talks over border-security measures that Republicans have demanded as a condition for their support….
The funds earmarked for Ukraine include nearly $12 billion to keep Kyiv’s government afloat, $15 billion in military-support activities and $2.3 billion for benefits for Ukrainian refugees. The bill also includes more than $14 billion for Israel, including for missile-defense systems, and money to bolster the Indo-Pacific, which the U.S. sees as critical to providing a safeguard for Taiwan against any potential threat from China. It omitted elements of Biden’s original request, such as money for child care, one reason that Sanders voted no.
Republicans said they opposed the national-security package because it omits strict new changes related to asylum and other policies they see as essential to cutting down on illegal border crossings.
Republicans and Democrats have been discussing a change to tighten the initial asylum screening standard, but GOP lawmakers have said that change alone isn’t enough. They have broadened their demands to include a massive expansion of immigration detention for asylum seekers, the ability to send asylum seekers to other countries the U.S. deems are safe and limits on an immigration status known as humanitarian parole. The Biden administration has used parole expansively to let in hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Ukraine war and asylum seekers at the border who sign up in advance….
Late Wednesday, Sens. Rick Scott (R., Fla.), Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) and Mike Lee (R., Utah) proposed that aid to Ukraine be conditioned on meeting metrics for reducing illegal crossings, with money released at a rate of $5 billion a month provided that the number of illegal crossings was reduced by about 20,000 from the prior month’s levels. “We’ve been told that that’s part of the conversation,” Scott said.
Of course, it might be nice if we stopped sowing chaos in countries south of the border so that their citizens didn’t find so hard to earn a living there, or even have adequate personal safety.
It is noteworthy that Republicans, who would be assumed to be all on board with new arrivals so as better to have an easily-exploited pool of labor so as to suppress hourly worker wages, want to cut immigration. Is it because they believe that the Democrats intend to, and will succeed, in increasing their voter base, since the Democrats assume these new arrivals, like all good-thinking people of color, will vote Democrat? Or could there be an element of employer recognizing that many of these immigrants will have very limited employment opportunities? As Aurelien pointed out in a must-read post on why it is verboten in polite company in Europe to question immigration:
Perhaps it helps if we consider the principal explanation put forward for the willingness, even eagerness, of western governments to adopt a policy of mass immigration over the last generation or so in the first place. We don’t need to dwell on all the stuff about aging populations: high unemployment among working-age people means that there are already plenty of workers, and there will be for the foreseeable future. It’s true, of course, that Europeans have historically demanded things like decent wages and working conditions, protection of employment and so forth, and immigrants, who have no choice, can usually be coerced into accepting worse. But the idea that mass immigration was only the search for a pliant and exploitable workforce doesn’t really hold up.
For a start, even if you were a typical greedy, grasping employer trying to save money on staff costs, wouldn’t you at least want a workforce that was capable of doing its job? Let’s say you run a chain of cut-price supermarkets, and you employ a lot of immigrant labour in menial roles. Well, according to French government statistics last month, only about 50% of 14-year olds in French schools can read and write to an acceptable standard. (About 20% are functionally illiterate and this has been true for some years.) Inevitably, these figures are much worse in the poorer areas, and among the immigrant population. Well, perhaps it doesn’t matter if you’re going to be a YouTube influenceur or a rap artist. But what if you are not? If you can’t read and write properly, you can’t work as a cashier, you can’t pass a test to drive a lorry, you can’t even stack goods on the right shelves. Likewise, increasing numbers of immigrants arrive as unaccompanied minors and never learn to speak French properly, because the resources have never been put into language teaching. After which your job prospects are, let’s say, not great. The result is that in many lower middle-class areas, a quarter to a third of a class cannot speak French well enough to follow the lessons properly, which ruins things for everybody. But let’s not talk about that.
Now, no matter how dumb your average employer or right-wing politician is, it must have occurred to them that having a cheap, flexible workforce is of no value if the workers can’t actually do the job. And indeed, it’s common to meet employers who privately deplore the fact that they can’t find staff qualified for the job, no matter how much they pay. Likewise, it’s notorious that most hotels in major European cities employ chambermaids from Eastern Europe who don’t speak the local language and try to get by on a few words of English. (It would have been nice if someone had anticipated such problems a generation ago and put money into resolving them, or even stopping them happening.) So I don’t think economic explanations are sufficient, the more so because there are now more potential cheap and desperate employees than there are jobs, and more are arriving all the time.
Now of course the US has a nominally tight job market so the current conditions are not the same as in Europe.
But how much unmet demand is there for not very skilled day labor on construction crews, or as restaurant busboys, or as cleaning staff or as meatpacking house workers? Recall that when RFK, Jr. spent a few days at the border, he found a surprisingly high number of people waiting to cross had been brought by coyotes from Africa. How many would have adequate English? Keep in mind that mothers hiring nannies generally prefer English proficiency and better yet some level of education, before getting to the issues like a nanny that owed a lot to a coyote might be tempted to steal. Put it another way, the immigrants that have the skills that would enable them to assist in the capitalist labor exploitation project might be a smaller proportion of southern border entrants than most assume.
One condition similar to what Aurelien describes in Europe is too many cases of insufficient assimilation. During the big US immigration waves, we had a lot of land and other resources to exploit, and hence plenty of vaunted opportunity for new migrants. Even so, while some of the first generation might have gotten by by sticking to actual ghettos or support from communities of immigrants from their home country, they also felt it was important that their kids become fluent and even better, educated. In the early 1900s, there was a backlash over immigrants representing a perceived threat to American culture. The National Association of Manufacturers sponsored both a propaganda campaign but also pressed for more formal and informal efforts to assist immigrants in integrating…as well as sponsoring mass “naturalization” celebrations to showcase the idea that immigrants wanted to and were becoming good Americans.
In other words, tightening up entry seems so much easier that more systemic approaches. But how to achieve that?
Gaza demonstrates a border can be secured. Even with lots of military training and planning, only a comparatively small number of Hamas fighters got out. But the total Gaza land border is 37 miles, versus over 1,900 miles for the US and Mexico, The cost of military-level containment would likely be prohibitive. Perhaps it could be supplemented with drones and rapid-response/capture methods. But that seems a big and untested ask. And Lamber argues that this level of policing would be societally corrosive (not that the US is very healthy to begin with).
Reducing demand, as in the attractiveness of getting to the US, could help (or course, that does not mean that coyotes would not say otherwise to the desperate, so changed conditions could take a while to reach the man-on-the-street level in key countries).
One might be to crack down on remittances, as in require an ID card that only citizens or those with a valid visa could obtain. At least in Asia, many immigrants go to a foreign country with a major motive being to send money home. Restricting that could have an impact.
Another is to crack down on employers. The IRS knows both that many people have multiple SSNs and perhaps more important, many SSNs are used multiple times, the latter presumably to pay not-kosher workers, likely immigrants. If the Republican were serious, as opposed to posturing it would be comparatively cheap to authorize the IRS to automatically issue big fines to employers caught submitting W-2s or 1099s with SSNs in use at other employers, as well as contacting people with multiple SSNs issued to them and notifying them that all but one were going to be cancelled (presumably the one with the most wages and hours reported would be preserved).
A third way might be to pay for whistleblower to report employers of illegal immigrants. You could have a minimum reward of say $1000 for a report that proved out (say of a member of the PMC using an illegal nanny) with much bigger rewards for actionable information against bigger employers, like the afore-mentioned meatpacking plants. Remember that even though the idea of causing the loss of immigrant jobs may seem punitive, these relationships are often highly exploitative, with in extreme cases families who brought in immigrants as household workers being convicted of slavery, and industrial employers subjecting illegal workers to dangerous workplace conditions and sub-minimum wages.
Mind you, there are plenty of other ideas that I’m not wild about but readers might want to toss out and debate. For instance, in Thailand, you have to show either a Thailand ID or a passport to get a SIM card. While some Mexican cell phone plans work in the US, I assume most migrants are using prepaid phones so this requirement could create a lot of friction. It might not be much of a deterrent in and of itself, but could raise the specter of much more effective surveillance and ease of removal.
This is a thorny problem and there clearly are no magic bullets. As with Covid, the best answer is likely to be a layered approach.