CONTEMPLATING IMMIGRATION AMNESTY.

There's more action in Congress on an immigration bill, perhaps with more border enforcement, and perhaps without any amnesty. A Time reporter visits Illinois and files a case for amnesty. He sensibly observes that the perceived unfairness of granting immediate amnesty to people who haven't been waiting a long time for legal entry might, just might, be evidence of flaws in the legal procedure.

If people are frustrated, as they should be, by the fact that some eligible immigrants have been waiting for citizenship for as many as 28 years, then by all means, fix that problem. Streamline the process for legal immigration. But don't blame that red-tape nightmare on the millions of low-wage illegals already here, who form a very different (and vastly more populous) group.

The two procedures cannot be tweaked in isolation. The more onerous the legal admission procedures are, the larger is the pool of potential illegal migrants, and under some circumstances that pool will be more skewed toward people with desirable skills. To some extent, that phenomenon appears present in Beardstown.

Economic anxiety animates much of the resistance to amnesty, particularly from the left. Real wages have been stagnant for nearly three decades throughout the U.S., and for a place like working-class Beardstown, having to deal with a huge new influx of Spanish-speaking workers seems like adding insult to economic injury. But if times are tough in rural America, are illegal immigrants to blame? It turns out that the truly good jobs left Beardstown long before the Mexicans came. In the mid-'80s, the Cargill plant was owned by Oscar Mayer. [Beardstown mayor Bob] Walters was the union representative at the plant back then, and he says it offered good jobs and good benefits, but globalization and other corporate pressures caught up with them. The company shuttered and sold the plant in 1987. Five months later, it reopened under a new owner, with lower wages and fewer benefits. "The starting wage went from $11 an hour to $7.50," says Walters. "The meatpacking industry ought to be ashamed of what they did to towns like ours."

The first Hispanics didn't come to work at Cargill en masse until years later. And as Cargill likes to point out, more white workers work at the factory than before. The plant has in fact grown, thanks in large part to hardworking migrants, not just from Mexico but from more than 20 other countries. The business seems robust for the time being. The workforce is unionized again. Salaries are creeping up. A new Wal-Mart Supercenter is on the way. Cargill's strength has turned Beardstown into, if not a boomtown, at least a place that investors are paying attention to. And the town is leading its pitch with the fact that it has a large Hispanic workforce, a bellwether for economic growth. "That's all I need to tell them," says Steve Twaddle, the county's director of economic development. "Businesses understand."

There is some work on the economics of de facto amnesty in Arye Hillman and Avi Weiss's A Theory of Permissible Illegal Immigration in European Journal of Political Economy. I'll quote the abstract at length.

In many countries laws are not enforced against visibly present illegal immigrants. The visibly present illegal immigrants also tend to be concentrated in particular sectors. We explain such permissible illegal immigration in an endogenous-policy model where selective sector-specific illegality transforms illegal immigrants from non-sectorally specialized to sector-specific factors of production. Under initial conditions where no immigrants are present, the median voter opposes immigration. When, however, a population of illegal immigrants has accumulated, ongoing illegal immigration becomes an endogenous equilibrium policy, at the same time that a majority of voters opposes legal immigration and opposes amnesty that would legalize the immigrants' presence. We also establish a basis for domestic voters preferring that illegal immigrants be employed in service rather than traded-goods sectors.

And perhaps the fear of deportation combined with occasional amnesty fine-tunes the mix of workers.

Cargill has long struggled to rid its rolls of illegal workers who are using false documentation. Most notably, a rumor that another raid was imminent swept through the night shift last month. Those workers who had false papers had to make a decision: stay and risk detention and deportation if the rumor were true, or leave and expose themselves as illegal workers. Cargill wouldn't comment on the incident, but locals say that dozens fled the plant that night and were fired or quit after having outed themselves by leaving.

The technical details of a potentially optimal policy that combines sanction with amnesty appear here. The article also raises the possibility that the availability of cheap immigrant labor biases technical change.

It is not easy to replace them. Meatpacking is a hard job at any salary. There's plenty of new technology in the meatpacking industry, but no machine has yet been invented to take over some of the toughest positions, like the role of gut snatcher, whose sole job is to tug the offal out of each freshly killed hog that comes down the line.

Perhaps because there's no incentive to do so? At one time, the job of laying railroad track was very hard, and a form of immigration amnesty made possible the crew of eight Irish rail haulers and several hundred Chinese laborers that still hold the record for track laid in a day. Today, there are machines that will replace the track underneath the repair train. Given the right set of input prices, there well might be a machine that starts with a freshly killed hog and turns out sausage casings, chitlins, and fertilizer. (On the other hand, some of the meatpacking machinery now in use has permitted the replacement of the boner, at one time a skilled trade, with special machine operators possessing fewer specific skills.)

The article also suggests that immigration amnesty is not "rewarding lawbreakers."

U.S. jurisprudence has in fact always been a series of hedged bets, weighing the potential harm of a violation against the costs of enforcement. That's why people get arrested for assault but not for jaywalking. It's time to think seriously about exactly where the act of illegal immigration lies in the spectrum of criminality. Consider the complicity of U.S. employers ranging from multinational corporations to suburbanites looking for gardeners. Factor in the mixed signals that lax law enforcement sent to would-be immigrants throughout the '80s and '90s, and the crime should rank as a misdemeanor, not a felony. Even if we step up border enforcement in the future--as we should--it is true that for a long time, crossing the Rio Grande was akin more to jaywalking than breaking and entering.

Sure, there is a very real national-security threat in having a porous border. But a large--if unquantifiable--percentage of the people crossing that line illegally are not newcomers but rather people who have already established lives in the U.S. and would qualify for amnesty. If they were legalized and free to circulate, we could concentrate on the serious criminals and terrorists crossing the border, not a worker going back to his family.

In Beardstown, amnesty would also help authorities tackle crime. Right now, they spend a lot of their energy sorting out who is who in the community because illegals present local police with a bewildering maze of identities. The illegals of Beardstown work under one name and go to church under another. Parents give their kindergartners fake names to use in school. "We are absolutely unable to identify our own people," says Walters. It sounds counterintuitive, but with immigration, forgiving a crime may be the best way to restore law and order.

There are two different approaches one can take to the use of amnesty. The one that the columnist calls "counterintuitive" is in fact the long-standing tradition of a theft amnesty. (Libraries sometimes recover long-missing items from their collections by declaring a fine amnesty. Many borrowers simply hold onto the book rather than incure an increasing fine, but their sin is one of omitting to pass by the library in time rather than of committing to expand their own library on the cheap.) The second, which Gil Epstein and Avi Weiss address in their "Theory of Immigration Amnesties," (you need calculus to understand it) releases law enforcement officers from disentangling phony papers among the current cohort of gut-snatchers so as better to capture the terrorists and drug-runners endeavoring to sneak in. Whether the 1986 immigration reform failed to commit those additional resources to securing the borders remains an open question.

A popular reading of recent history holds that the amnesty of 1986, which offered a path to citizenship for 3 million illegals, sparked the much larger wave of unlawful immigration that followed. According to that logic, the '86 amnesty showed would-be migrants from around the world that the U.S. was weak-willed and would eventually relent and give citizenship to its illegals. Duly encouraged, Mexicans and others stormed our borders with unprecedented vigor.

Illegal immigration did soar, but that's not why. Studies show that the valleys and peaks in migration have depended far less on changes in policy or policing and far more on the basic economic conditions in the U.S. and Mexico. If you want to truly tamp down illegal immigration, you could induce a recession in the U.S. A better idea might be to help Mexico create more jobs that pay better. A recent Council on Foreign Relations study found that when Mexican wages drop 10% relative to U.S. wages, attempts to cross the border illegally rise 6%. As complex and corrupt as the Mexican economy is, we ignore it at our peril.

While Mexico patches itself up, at least the security options are better today than in 1986. There is both the political will and the technology to make enforcement a serious part of any amnesty plan. National ID cards, real employer verification, high-tech border controls can all aid in making sure that this would be the last amnesty of this size.

Perhaps so. But there's no reason to rule out all future amnesties, as the cheap-labor subsidy and the self-identification of future taxpayers in the underground economy does not go away. And a "national ID card" is not something to be lightly contemplated. Ihre Papieren, bitte.

DO THE RESEARCH.

The political season is upon us, with one spat being whether "comprehensive immigration reform" is a fancy way of saying "amnesty."  That's a topic that has been tackled by a number of researchers over the years (look who's still high in the hit parade!)  The most contested part appears to be the so-called "welfare immigration" (and "anchor babies" and all the rest.)  Donald Boudreaux suggests, pace Milton Friedman, that there's more to the topic than the welfare migration.

The fact that some, or even many, immigrants come to America to bilk U.S. taxpayers does not, standing alone, argue against more-open immigration. Working immigrants' extra private-sector output and contributions to tax revenues might well outweigh the burdens created by other immigrants' use of America's welfare state.

Closely related is the heavy emphasis in U.S. immigration law on preventing immigrants from working.

But that emphasis, and the underground economy that accompanies the policy constraints, can be a coherent policy for managing the welfare migration. "We suggest that border patrols, the apprehension of illegal aliens, and the offering of immigration amnesties may be viewed as different facets of the same policy. A rich country can use this policy mix to attract cheap foreign workers while avoiding low ability migrants, who, once amnestied, become a burden on the public purse."  In fact, a policy that appears internally inconsistent might in fact encourage the more ambitious migrants to self-identify. "Encouraging self-selection is optimal under some, but not all, circumstances, because there are mixes of potential immigrants for which the cost of welfare migration is more than offset by the gains from productive workers enticed by a more lenient immigration policy. Furthermore, under plausible assumptions, the rich country's optimum may require a probabilistic rather than a certain amnesty to fine-tune the mix of migrants. Numerical examples illustrate that probabilistic or certain amnesties, addressed to different partitions of the migrant population, are each optimal as the mix of potential migrants changes." But there are challenges to policy-makers, including what economists refer to as a time-consistency problem, in which amnesty today raises hopes of a future amnesty.  That's a sub-text in a recent Victor Hanson column criticizing sanctuary cities.

Many Americans support a pathway to legal residence for undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States -- if the border is first closed to further illegal immigration, if legal immigration is made ethnically blind and predicated on merit such as education and skills, if undocumented immigrants pay a fine and meet residency requirements, if applicants for legal residence are neither on public assistance nor have committed crimes, and if those with criminal records and without work records are sent back to their countries of origin.

An amnesty concurrent with tighter border enforcement might be allocatively efficient, as well as a way of addressing the time-consistency problem.  There's some heavy mathematics to this point in Arye Hillman and Avi Weiss, "A Theory of Permissible Illegal Immigration."

Under initial conditions where no immigrants are present, the median voter opposes immigration. When, however, a population of illegal immigrants has accumulated, ongoing illegal immigration becomes an endogenous equilibrium policy, at the same time that a majority of voters opposes legal immigration and opposes amnesty that would legalize the immigrants' presence.

In "The Why, When, and How of Immigration Amnesties," Gil Epstein and Avi Weiss take up the resource allocation challenge.

We consider government behavior with respect to allocations on limiting infiltration (border control) and apprehending infiltrators (internal control) and with respect to the granting of amnesties, the timing of amnesties, and limitations on eligibility for those amnesties. We demonstrate the effects of government actions on allocations and the flow of immigrants, and how the interactions between these factors combine to yield an optimal amnesty policy.

Note in all of the research cited that immigration amnesty is not evidence of a failed immigration policy, it is a policy instrument that can be used improperly.  There are still research opportunities in modeling immigration policies where legal and illegal labor force flows coexist, as in the issuance of H-2B visas to circus roustabouts from many of the same countries whose residents board trains for the border.

CONTEMPLATING ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION. Here's another catch-up post, now that grades are in and Ph.D.s have been hooded. (Or is it a jump-start post for another research paper, now that there's a month of thinking time.)

I'll start, however, with recent empirical evidence that illegal immigration provides a cheap labor subsidy.

When hordes of police and immigration officials stormed meatpacking plants in six states this week, the illegal workers arrested may not have been the only victims.

Consumers and the industry itself may be feeling the repercussions in a shortage of meatpackers, higher wage costs and, ultimately, higher prices for the beef that lands on America's tables at home and in restaurants.

I'm not sure what this crackdown says about the model immigration policy makers are using. In my theoretical research, "probabilistic amnesty" refers to illegal immigrants devoting their entire working lives to work in the rich country's underground economy. I suppose the model could refer to periodic and unpredictable raids of employers hiring in that underground economy. In that case, the following paragraphs from the news report make sense.

Some analysts see the current emphasis on enforcement in the meatpacking industry as the precursor to getting an immigration bill through Congress - by demonstrating the government's capability to enforce laws at the work site.

"The meatpacking industry has become dependent on an unauthorized labor force, and it is not good government to destroy an entire industry. In some way, there is going to be a meeting of the minds," said Mark Reed, a former immigration regional director who now runs his own consulting business, Border Management Strategies, in Tucson, Ariz.

We're looking at precisely my modeling efforts. (.pdf) Employer sanctions lower the subjective probability of an amnesty, which reduces the flow of illegal immigration for rich-country welfare benefits. At the same time, the cheap labor subsidy in relatively unpleasant jobs (anybody else remember when beef boning was a skilled trade?) becomes one of the benefits the U.S. government has to consider in defining its immigration policy. But, contrary to what editorial writers at USA Today assert, the policy is a success.

Those who favor a rigid approach argue that the traditional immigration-reform bargain — amnesty for those already here coupled with rigorous enforcement forevermore — has proved to be a lie. And so it has. In 1986, for example, a congressional compromise gave amnesty to 2.7 million illegal immigrants and set up a new enforcement scheme. Today's illegal immigrants are eloquent evidence of its failure.

The reason it failed, however, was not the amnesty. It was Congress' unwillingness to create and fund a viable enforcement system.

No, Congress has to balance the potential burdens on social services against the cheap labor subsidies and the admission of entrepreneurial people who might not possess the verifiable credentials of a university graduate. Representative Mike Pence, offering the counterpoint at USA Today, still has that to learn.

Some argue that putting border security first and asking millions of illegal immigrants to leave the country is unrealistic. I submit that it is unrealistic to assume that another round of amnesty will not result in another wave of illegal immigration in the years ahead. We must address illegal immigration, but we must do so in a way that reasserts the principle that the only way to enter the United States is under the law.

Is it cheaper to build the fence (using the underground economy?) or to revise the laws? The existence of a rich country with both ample opportunities for entrepreneurial people and generous social services is in itself temptation to residents in countries less rich.

That's not to deny the existence of serious tradeoffs in any change in immigration policy, as the concluding paragraph of Heather Mac Donald's "Seeing Today's Immigrants Straight" in City Journal notes.

Many of the costs imposed by Mexican immigrants are a function of their lack of education, their low incomes, and their own and their children’s behavior, not their legal status. Without question, we must balance those costs against the immigrant generation’s admirable work ethic. But immigration reform that institutionalizes the present immigration mix—or, worse, increases its volume by three to five times—is certain to expand the Hispanic underclass. There are many educated foreigners patiently waiting for permission to migrate to the United States. The United States can better honor its immigrant heritage by accelerating their entry rather than by continuing to favor the most low-skilled of our neighboring populations.

Her essay favors a tougher stance on border enforcement; she might also be making the case for instilling the Habits of Highly Effective People, rather than Gang Nation, in immigrant children. The tough part, however, is that nowhere else in the world does a rich country have so long a border with a country relatively much poorer. (There are gradations of poverty as one proceeds from the European Union countries east into Siberia, southeast into the Middle East, and across the Mediterranean Sea.)

Also in City Journal, Steven Malanga suggests that the cheap labor subsidy is relatively small.

America does not have a vast labor shortage that requires waves of low-wage immigrants to alleviate; in fact, unemployment among unskilled workers is high—about 30 percent. Moreover, many of the unskilled, uneducated workers now journeying here labor, like Velasquez, in shrinking industries, where they force out native workers, and many others work in industries where the availability of cheap workers has led businesses to suspend investment in new technologies that would make them less labor-intensive.

That induced-innovation hypothesis is a topic of research in progress. Stick around.

A REPLACEMENT POST. This is a restored post from my saved files. If there's one much like it, stamped one minute earlier, the archives have been fixed.

CONTINUING THE RESEARCH PROJECT. Milt Rosenberg finds Mark Krikorian in The National Interest, advocating serious changes in immigration policy.

President Bush has pledged to expend political capital to pass an immigration plan that would legalize illegal aliens currently in the United States as "temporary workers" and import an unlimited number of new workers from abroad--something he reiterated in his State of the Union address. One of his principal arguments has been that such an initiative would enhance America's security by allowing enforcement authorities to focus their efforts more narrowly, by shrinking the haystack that the terrorist needles are hiding in. To use a different analogy, a guestworker or amnesty program would deny terrorists cover by draining the pool of ten million illegal aliens and ensure that an ongoing flow of foreign workers comes through legal channels.

On the surface, this appears reasonable. Terrorists have indeed benefited from our lawless immigration system. A 2002 study by the Center for Immigration Studies found that the 48 Al-Qaeda-affiliated operatives in the United States from 1993 to 2001 had compromised virtually every facet of the immigration system. Mass illegal immigration creates a large market for fraudulent documents, allowing the 9/11 hijackers, for instance, to amass more than sixty U.S. driver licenses. Mass illegal immigration also overwhelms the resources available to law enforcement...

Yup, resources have opportunity costs. That's this research project, which will be the objective of this progress report. Here's the conundrum according to Krikorian:

So shrinking the number of illegal aliens living in the United States, reducing the flow of new illegals and generally restoring order to our anarchic immigration system are clearly security imperatives. But can a guestworker program achieve these goals? It cannot. Support for such an approach is premised on two basic assumptions that turn out to be false.

The first assumption is that the Department of Homeland Security has the administrative capacity to properly screen and track millions of currently illegal aliens and millions more new foreign workers. Such an assertion is laughable to anyone with even a passing familiarity with our immigration bureaucracy. Even before 9/11, the old Immigration and Naturalization Service was choking on mass immigration.

More careful screening imposes a higher cost per applicant on the taxpayers. On the other hand, to shift the screening costs to the applicant raises the temptation for lawful immigrants to hire smugglers. Everywhere I look I see tradeoffs. That's probably Visual I for Wednesday's workshop. I also see opportunities for future research.

The second claim of those promoting a guestworker program as a security measure is that it will end--or at least radically curtail--illegal immigration. Tamar Jacoby, a high-profile spokesperson for the president's plan, recently instructed: "Think of it as a reservoir or a river we're trying to channel into a pipeline. The problem isn't the flow: We need the water. The problem is that the pipeline isn't big enough." In other words, there is a fixed amount of foreign labor that the American economy demands, and our immigration arrangements accommodate only a portion of that demand, forcing the rest to come in illegally. If only the illegal overflow were legalized, the problem would disappear.

Immigration, however, is very different from what this image suggests. The labor market is not designed for any specific level of immigration, or even a specific number of unskilled jobs. It is not a static system, but rather a dynamic one that responds to price signals and substitutes factors of production when appropriate. Labor is substituted for capital when the price of labor falls (say, through massive importation of foreign workers), and the opposite happens when the price of unskilled labor rises (say, through consistent immigration enforcement). Of course, this is cold comfort to those employers who have relied on the expectation of continued non-enforcement of the immigration law, and they can be expected to fight efforts to restrict the flow of foreign labor. But this is a political problem, not an economic one. The economy would adjust quite easily to a smaller supply of immigrant labor, and the accompanying disruptions would dissipate in short order.

In fact, not only would the guestworker approach not end illegal immigration, it would almost certainly increase it. The largest flow of illegal immigration in our history before the current wave came during the bracero program, which imported Mexican guestworkers during the 1950s and early 1960s. A similar thing happened after the IRCA amnesty of 1986. This shouldn't be a surprise. Immigration always creates more immigration, whether legal or illegal, because it is driven not simply (or even principally) by wage differences but rather by networks--the family and other connections that prospective migrants use to decide where to settle or whether to move at all. Once illegal aliens are anchored here by legal status, and once new workers arrive from abroad, millions of additional people worldwide suddenly will have a connection in the United States, making immigration here a realistic option, independent of their qualification under whatever new rules we impose.

Doggone it, let me finish one paper before I have to start another one. "Accompanying disruptions" to changes in relative prices don't necessarily dissipate quickly. On the other hand, if they do, the economic incentive for extended family members to come to the United States ought to be among the disruptions that dissipate. Which is it?

But if one is going to propose a policy change, one ought to go beyond the Utopian Wonkery^(TM) of this concluding paragraph.

The most responsible approach the president could take toward immigration would be to state unequivocally that the immigration law, whatever it may be, will be enforced across the board, and that those involved in its implementation will no longer be expected to cut corners and look the other way. The result would not be a magical elimination of the illegal immigration problem, but rather a sustained reduction through attrition, as fewer prospective illegals make the trip and more of those already here give up and deport themselves. In this way terrorists would be kept off-balance, their conspiracies interrupted, their sources of cover reduced. A massive amnesty and guestworker program would do the opposite, serving only the interests of our enemies.

To an extent, this sounds like the government reducing the subjective probability of an amnesty, that's the topic of a currently circulating paper of mine. That does not by itself make the smugglers' networks go away, or the yuppies with lots of disposable income for the health club membership but no time to mow the yard stop looking for cheap gardeners.

IMMIGRATION POLICY IS TOO IMPORTANT TO LEAVE TO POLITICIANS.

Now that the electoral dust has settled, continuing Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, still fearful of a primary challenge from his left, hopes to get some sort of immigration amnesty through.  "We have a population that is not reproducing on its own with the same level that it used to. The only way we’re going to have a great future in America is if we welcome … [and] get a path to citizenship for all 11 million, or however many undocumented there are here." That's an argument unlikely to convince anybody, as it reduces (the way economist Richard Thaler put it, en Español) to "We need more immigrants to pay pensions". The Social Security and Medicare trust funds are in trouble, but bringing in more taxpayers to work now to support current pensioners continues the Ponzi scheme, it doesn't fix anything.

ENCOURAGING FAVORABLE SELF-SELECTION?

Our President has issued another ukase, this one intending to bring illegal aliens married to citizens who have generally stayed in work and out of jail into something resembling regular status, if not yet permanent resident visas let alone starting the clock to apply for citizenship.  The first link goes to the full statement.  Two passages are salient for today's post.  First, the policy gets rid of the "go away and reapply" elements of current policy.  "This new process will help certain noncitizen spouses and children apply for lawful permanent residence – status that they are already eligible for – without leaving the country."  Second, the ukase, provided it survives the legislative and legal scrutiny that's probably already under way, is consistent with the underground-economy-as-apprenticeship model of illegal immigration and amnesty that Eli Katz and I once wrote about.  "In order to be eligible, noncitizens must – as of June 17, 2024 – have resided in the United States for 10 or more years and be legally married to a U.S. citizen, while satisfying all applicable legal requirements. On average, those who are eligible for this process have resided in the U.S. for 23 years."

THE BEST OPPORTUNITY TO MAKE A DEAL?

Congressional Democrats would like a clean amnesty for "Dreamers" (and perhaps for their parents as well.)  Congressional Republicans might prefer to bundle the amnesty with appropriations for a stronger border fence, and perhaps additional resources for border enforcement.  Our President appears to favor the bundle.

President Trump promised Tuesday to sign what he called a "bill of love" to extend protections to 800,000 immigrants who entered the United States illegally as children — if Congress can work out the details.

"You folks are going to have to come up with a solution," Trump told 25 lawmakers in a remarkable televised negotiation at the White House. "And if you do, I'm going to sign that solution."

But funding for a wall along the border with Mexico remains a sticking point, as Trump insisted that border security remain a part of any deal.

Lawmakers are under a March 5 deadline — imposed by Trump — to come up with a legal fix to the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. DACA, as it's known, is now the main stumbling block holding up a wide range of other Trump administration immigration priorities.

Conservative Republicans in the House want to link DACA to Trump's request for $18 billion for a border wall. That would give immigration talks even more urgency, as the spending bill must pass by Jan. 19 to prevent a government shutdown.

Newsmax's Michael Stopa suggests this is no time to make a deal, simply for the sake of making a deal.  "The basic problem with trading amnesty for so-called 'Dreamers' (illegal aliens brought to America as children) for increased enforcement of laws against illegal immigration and greater border security is that those aims are fundamentally in contradiction." Perhaps, although we've been here before, and opportunities for additional research remain.  Perhaps it is cheaper to offer regular status to people whose only crime has been to sneak in, and to credibly commit to making it more difficult to sneak in (and to shorten the waiting time for persons legally admitted to attain permanent residency and citizenship?)  Mr Stopa's fear appears to be that Congress, particularly the Democrats and the squishy Republicans, are not bargaining in good faith.

The logical conclusion therefore is that in exchange for amnesty for DACA recipients the negotiators of the bill will give as little as possible in the way of actual immigration law enforcement — a Potemkin wall jazzed up with high tech gizmos, chain migration limited to first cousins (anyone notice that first cousins of first cousins are second cousins?) and an E-Verify provision that will be sieged [c.q.] by the courts for years.

Meanwhile, low-skill native-born workers will continue to be hard done by.

In contrast to this harlequinade of a DACA negotiation process among Congressional knaves it is worth remembering for a moment what the forgotten men and women actually have on their side. By dint of electing Donald Trump, they have a dedicated organization of law enforcement professionals in ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Patrol who recognize that their mission is to enforce the existing immigration laws and who are not seduced by the siren song that says that that mission is impossible so they might as well not even try.

The forgotten men and women have on their side the now demonstrated fact that illegal immigration is fragile; that it is driven by hundreds of millions of daily texts, emails, and skype communications between illegal aliens in the U.S. and family members south of the border, and that the content of those messages becomes decidedly more pessimistic and the human flow palpably abates, when enforcement proceeds apace.

It’s not a lot, what the forgotten men and women have going for them.

What effect will the tightening labor market have? Stay tuned.

In Washington, however, Paul Mirengoff would like the negotiations to play out on the predictable pattern.

Immigration reform deals follow a familiar pattern: Illegal immigrants get some form of legal status in exchange for statutory language that, if implemented, will discourage or prevent future illegal immigration. Unless those who insist on such statutory language can be confident that the language will be adhered to — rather than ignored on humanitarian grounds and/or ad hoc “cost benefit” analysis — these legislators have no reason to make such deals.

As long as there are time inconsistency problems in public policy, there will be people who will risk entry into rich countries in the hope of a subsequent change to legal status. Perhaps there are ways for rich countries to fine-tune the mix of immigrants.

AMNESTY BY ANY OTHER NAME.

President Bush's proposal to provide legal status to illegal immigrants has inspired a number of columns and posts today, with Cal Pundit reserving judgement, Nick Gillespie at Hit and Run favorably disposed toward it, Ronald J. Watkins disappointed, Michelle Malkin angry, Joel Mowbray unaware of existing research, and Mark Krikorian making a call for further research.

Barry Chiswick of the University of Illinois at Chicago has written a summary of the effects of illegal migration on the host country. The Mowbray essay alludes to a phenomenon that makes amnesty, or some other form of regularization, sensible.

In an election year pursuit of Hispanic votes, President Bush is prepared to embark on the ill-advised path to providing some sort of amnesty to 8 million illegal aliens. Perhaps Bush thinks that enhanced scrutiny and enforcement—things the President will combine with his calls for amnesty—can screen out terrorists from those applying for amnesty. The evidence, however, tells a different story.

As it is, our immigration administrators are swamped. The current backlog of cases awaiting adjudication is over 4.5 million. In other words, we can’t even handle the caseload we have now. Throw in 8 million new people, and you have an instant recipe for an administrative fiasco.

Never mind that 8 million new cases will undoubtedly further slow the process for those who played by the rules and are trying to immigrate legally. Never mind that 8 million illegal aliens will, in all likelihood, get to step in front of those decided to follow—and respect—the law. Focusing solely on security, overwhelming an already overwhelmed system means that cracks will turn into fault lines.

Perhaps, but immigration enforcement is not costless, and resources devoted to locating and kicking out illegal immigrants are resources not available to secure the borders. It's that insight that leads to Gil Epstein and Avi Weiss's unpublished "A Theory of Immigration Amnesties." The paper argues that an amnesty, after which now regularized illegal immigrants are subject only to attention from the usual law enforcement authorities, frees up border patrol resources to prevent subsequent entry of illegal immigrants, whose presence is not desired by the host country. The argument does not follow in full, as illegal immigrants might be desired, at least in the U.S., as household servants, packing house workers, and field hands. The broad argument, however, does go through, as the issuance of work permits allows formerly illegal immigrants whose primary purpose is to work to cross the border at Customs checkpoints. Thus, there is a stronger presumption that people attempting to sneak into the country (the plot of The Teeth of the Tiger (details or compare prices) involves terrorists using such a route) are terrorists or drug runners, precisely the individuals the U.S. wants to exclude.

The remaining research problem Mr Krikorian identifies is this:

But it's the second part of the response to a tighter labor market that people just don't get. By holding down natural wage growth in labor-intensive industries, immigration serves as a subsidy for low-wage, low-productivity ways of doing business, retarding technological progress and productivity growth.

There is at least one article lurking in there, as I am quite willing to point out to any graduate student casting about for a dissertation topic.

SECOND SECTION: Milt's File points to John O'Sullivan, who argues,

Two specific groups do benefit substantially from immigration: namely the immigrants themselves and those who employ them at lower wages than Americans would accept. The corollary, however, is that some specific Americans lose out: namely, low-paid workers, often minority Americans, who must either lose their jobs or must accept lower wages to compete with the new arrivals.

The corollary is not necessarily true, if the rich country has sufficiently generous welfare benefits. That's the point of this research. And that an amnesty might lead to expectations of future amnesties is not necessarily bad, but that's work in progress at this writing.

THIRD SECTION: Captain's Quarters gets the Epstein and Weiss argument:

You may ask, what if they don't go home? What's the difference between that and what we have now? For one, the workers would be documented, making them a lot easier to track down, and employers would have no more incentive to hire undocumented workers as the lbor cost would be the same and the risk would be much greater. This eliminates the problems of the coyotes who are little better than slavers, taking people across the border in inhumane conditions and forcing them to live in bondage until their debts are repaid. (If you've lived in the Southwest, you know that more than once a year you read about dozens of people dying from asphyxiation in a truck or van that transported people like cattle across the border.) Documentation greatly increases our national security by making sure we have a paper trail for everyone who crosses into the US. Finally, the border patrol can then focus on true security issues rather than being overwhelmed by people who flood the borders to support our own agricultural industry.

Included among the security issues might be a greater success rate for the border patrols, as a greater proportion of the trade for the smugglers would be of individuals whose purposes were something more nefarious than earning a few bucks cleaning houses.

OF MORE THAN THEORETICAL INTEREST. Today's Breaking Views in the New York Times suggests the tax code keeps liquidity tied up overseas.

On its own, an international tax amnesty won’t resolve the credit crisis or repair the economy. But given the limited effectiveness of some of the more expensive government programs, it’s hard to see how it would hurt.

The basic idea would be for Congress to legislate a window through which American companies could bring home dollars held abroad without paying corporate taxes of some 35 percent.

This would provide a fillip of liquidity to businesses, especially as even some of the most stable and solvent companies have been forced to pay huge premiums to obtain financing. Combined with the tax savings an amnesty would generate, companies would have greater resources to invest in research, development, capital spending and jobs.

That sounds a little like the Talmudic theft amnesty and the offering of a reward for the return of stolen goods, and a little like an immigration amnesty, which regular readers have encountered before.

Referees raise the objection that an amnesty is the source of a time-inconsistency problem, in that the granter of the amnesty is creating an incentive for people to misbehave (library fines and parking tickets come to mind) in anticipation of a future amnesty.

So too, with the tax amnesty.

There’s also the message another tax break would send. If companies believe that American authorities will grant them similar forbearance every few years, they wouldn’t bring money back home during good times. That would not just deprive the government of tax revenues, it would distort corporate behavior.

Distortion is a loaded term. Price signals distort business behavior all the time. But we call it allocative efficiency under some conditions, and in other conditions we evaluate the tradeoffs.

Still, finding a fair and efficient way to repatriate cash during a crisis could foster an economic recovery at relatively low cost to American taxpayers. One compromise might be to offer companies an amnesty if they agree to maintain certain employment levels for a set period of time.

That policy generates a different sort of social waste. But failed companies generate little in the way of jobs or of taxable income for owners and workers.

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF LEGAL RESIDENCY BY DECREE.

The positive theory of immigration amnesties, starting with a maintained hypothesis that the underground economy serves as a sort of apprenticeship, is too crass for Sensitive People.  Thus we get either protracted tussles in successive Congresses over some sort of procedural reform, or presidents issuing ukases.  Those bring a different sort of troubles, as Outside the Beltway's James Joyner, describing "a morally right but politically fraught move," explains.

I’m more of a stickler for the rules than most but it’s really hard to make a good moral argument for deporting people married to American citizens because they didn’t have permission to be in the country at the time of the ceremony. While there are doubtless some small percentage of people who get married to game the immigration system, the overwhelming number of these people are simply building lives together and starting (or have long since started) families. Sending them back to their countries of origin, and thus separating them from their family, for months or even years would be unconscionably cruel.

At the same time, it’s not obvious to me that this is a sound political move. I’m skeptical that the number of “mixed families” in battleground states outweighs the percentage wanting to crack down harder on the border.

Well, yeah, a few high-profile crimes with illegal aliens held as suspects will do that.  Moreover, it is only fitting and proper that if people, whether as establishmentarian political scientists or as Democrats and their court intellectuals, vest all their hopes in a president, that the blame will land in the Oval Office, sooner or later.  "There’s no reason at all to doubt that Americans writ large are frustrated by our border policies and, unfair though it may be, blame Biden as the incumbent President."  Live by the executive order, die by the executive order.  His conclusion, though, suggests that the past century has been the most roundabout journey from Ellis Island to Ellis Island.  "Biden is on the right side of the issue, wanting to toughen border enforcement and end the abuse of the asylum system while treating folks who have been here for years in violation of our immigration laws with some sense of humanity. We’ll see whether that pays off politically."

NEVER MIND COMPREHENSIVE REFORM, LET'S TRY TWO SIMPLE THINGS.

Cato Institute contributor Alex Nowrasteh gets to the heart of the immigration matter.

[W]e hypothesize that many people oppose immigration liberalization because they don’t know how complex and restrictive the immigration system is. Many years ago, I spoke to a conservative audience in Arizona about immigration. Afterward, an elderly woman asked, “I understand the benefits of immigration, but why don’t the illegals just go to the Post Office to register and become legal? What are they hiding?”

Those questions are reasonable if you know nothing about the legal immigration system. Her question was spurred by ignorance, not by malice. As a result, we’ve identified ignorance of the actual laws as a significant problem in liberalizing immigration. Just imagine how hard it would be to talk about tax policy with someone who doesn’t know that the U.S. has an income tax or even what it is. That’s about where we are in terms of the immigration debate.

His interlocutor undoubtedly remembered those public service announcements that used to run on radio and television.  Aliens must report addresses during January.  I'm not sure whether that's still a requirement.  It's been a few years since I did any research on immigration policies.  I fear, though, that we have talk of amnesty or comprehensive reform or the like because the government's protocols for keeping track of aliens aren't working.

HUDDLED MASSES YEARNING TO BREATHE FREE? The Northern Star's coverage of the local immigration amnesty rally (or is it a general strike?) includes this instructive graphic.

Original source unknown.
DeKalb County is in the second row of counties south of the Wisconsin border,
four west (Cook, DuPage, Kane, DeKalb) from Lake Michigan.

Rallies (or general strikes) also took place in Chicago and Milwaukee.

Chicago Sun-Times photo by Rich Hein.

Editorialists for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and Chicago's Sun-Times and Tribune weigh in. All three papers reveal a preference for the Senate version of immigration reform. As the Sun-Times puts it,

This page has supported a bipartisan Senate bill calling for tougher border enforcement while setting up a mechanism for those who are here illegally to become citizens by paying fines and jumping through certain hoops. As President Bush said, it's not realistic to try to force all undocumented workers to leave the United States.

They continue,

Mexicans are drawn to the United States by our thriving economy, creating a political problem for this country. Mexicans then respond to our debate about solving the problem by hurting their own economy.

Indeed, lost in much of the immigration debate is the fact that our problem would be largely solved if Mexico could get its economy on track. Mexican President Vicente Fox recognized that fact when he said that his government must ''generate opportunities here in Mexico.'' That won't happen anytime soon.

Particularly, as I have long maintained, if the current and much-maligned border management policy of the U.S. is eliciting illegal immigration by the most entrepreneurial of Latin America's uncredentialed people. A government cannot "generate opportunities;" about the best it can do is remove impedimenta to opportunity seekers.

The Tribune contemplates another dimension of the problem.

Americans say they primarily want a crackdown on illegal immigration, particularly at the U.S. border with Mexico. They also want stern enforcement measures against employers who flout existing immigration law by hiring illegal immigrants. But for all this concern about the federal government's slipshod enforcement of existing laws, Americans also tell pollsters they're open to a liberalized protocol that would allow some of the people in this country illegally to pursue citizenship. By definition, though, the third of those three pillars of a new immigration scheme creates a fourth question Congress absolutely must answer: Going forward, how will we juxtapose the rights of illegal immigrants with those of law-abiding applicants for citizenship who are waiting overseas to be admitted here?

Particularly if the legal channels are so jammed that illegal entry becomes a tempting alternative. Why not offer more legal permits for sale but at a higher price? Pay more, enter sooner. Or pay a smuggler, take your chance on a subsequent amnesty. (Wait a minute, that's this paper.)

IMMIGRATION AMNESTIES, CONTINUED. Jonathan at Cliopatria provides useful background, noting that the occasional amnesty, or guest worker program, might serve to "keep the mess to a minimum." Tamar Jacoby also notes the attractiveness of the U.S. economy (or the economy of any developed country) to ambitious workers in less developed countries. Whether the amnesty serves to encourage migration by future productive workers or to free resources for enforcement remains to be seen. Mark Steyn suggests, based on past performance, that the Immigration and Naturalization Service is unlikely to be able to cope with the mess, as the illegal immigration problem is a consequence, in his view, of the ineffectiveness of the legal immigration system. (Possibly relevant anecdotal observation: the authorities sure like to mess around with my colleagues when their visas come up for renewal.) This Economist editorial looks at the proposal as a way of redeploying resources to catch the dangerous illegal immigrants, an idea that figures in a previous long post. Lawrence Henry suggests there are other considerations at work, as does David Brooks.

A Wall Street Journal editorial raises a point I wish to return to another day, namely the reward to bad behavior implicit in an amnesty for illegal immigrants. Readers might wish to consider the consequences of not granting an amnesty, while not catching and not deporting illegal immigrants.

For additional links and commentary, or by way of attribution, visit Milt's File, Dynamist, Hit and Run, Betsy's Page, The American Mind, this week's Carnival of the Capitalists, and Patterico's Pontifications.

SECOND SECTION: Econ Log has more on the role of the welfare state in inducing illegal immigration.

SENDING THE RECESSION HOME. Illegal immigrants bring a last shipment of gifts home with them.

These personal dramas will shape the stalled debate over how to treat the 12 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. Although Barack Obama's election has revived hopes of a legalization plan, most experts are skeptical, given that the same economic crisis is battering U.S.-born workers.

Mexican officials, meanwhile, are bracing for more Rafael Garcias [a construction worker rendered redundant by the housing crash] and the strains that might be felt on villages accustomed to sending immigrants and receiving a share of their paychecks in the U.S., a figure that topped $25 billion last year.

The cracks in the system had already been felt in Zinapecuaro, a town in northeast Michoacan, the state that by many estimates sends the most immigrants to Chicago.

The state of Michoacan has seen remittances falling steadily since 2006, a danger because it receives about $2.5 billion a year—about one-sixth of its total revenues—from workers in the U.S.

Here's a possible test of the Hillman and Weiss model of illegal immigration and amnesty. If the purpose of an amnesty is to release resources from searches for illegal immigrants in the workforce in order to strengthen border enforcement, we're unlikely to see much enthusiasm for such an amnesty in the near future, as the most effective policy to prevent illegal immigration with many of the potential illegal immigrants out of the country is to enforce the borders.

On the other hand, if the amnesty is part of a policy to elicit favorable self-selection (perhaps we can call that the Karlson and Katz model of illegal immigration and amnesty) there is no point in changing border enforcement from its current status, but there's no rush to grant the next amnesty either.

TAX AMNESTIES PROLIFERATE. Last week, it's a method of boosting the cash position of U.S. companies. This week, it's a method of boosting the cash positions of state treasuries.

Desperate to bring in revenue in the middle of a recession, states across the country are adopting tax amnesty programs, offering to let people pay their past-due tax bills with little or no penalties or interest.

"Something is better than nothing," said Dino DiCianno, executive director of the Nevada Taxation Department. DiCianno said Nevada gave up more than $14 million in penalties and interest to collect nearly $41 million between July and October.

Oklahoma, like Nevada, generated about twice as much as it expected from its offer of amnesty, raising $82 million through its 90-day Clean Slate program for businesses and individuals.

The tradeoffs, including the time-inconsistency problem, are the same as they are in theft or immigration amnesty.

Many states are reluctant to offer amnesty, arguing that its rewards cheaters, discourages honest taxpayers and poaches revenue the states will collect in the future - especially as they improve the databases they use to catch delinquents. They worry, too, that people will hold back on their taxes and simply wait for the next amnesty.

"If the attitude is we're going to hand out get-out-of-jail-free cards, people's attitudes can change," said Paul Warren of the California Legislative Analyst's Office. "You can have a breakdown in compliance."

And yet, states consider them. Despite the potential time inconsistency problem, or perhaps because of it, tax amnesties, and periodic library fine amnesties, tend to bring in more revenue, or more missing books, than the planners anticipate.

THE POWER OF ARBITRAGE ARGUMENTS.

Tyler "Marginal Revolution" Cowen's latest Bloomberg column, "Immigration Policy Is Hard" is able to rest his entire case on an arbitrage condition. "Basically, more and more people will leave Guatemala until the costs of leaving and staying are roughly equal."  Everything else follows from that, and you really can't talk about solving a problem, about the best you can do is make the least-unpleasant trade-off.

The U.S. could help improve conditions in the nations sending migrants, for instance by decriminalizing the drug trade to lower gang profits and violence. That would be difficult to pull off politically, to put it mildly.

Another alternative is to recognize that America is not facing a major immigration crisis and assimilation is proceeding at acceptable rates, and therefore can afford to take in more people. That is my preferred approach, but I recognize it is likely to result in more mishaps, danger and bad treatment along migration routes.

What about opening up a fully secure route for migrants to use? This also makes sense, but it’s worth thinking through what it actually means. It would be politically infeasible and logistically impractical to force all migrants to take approved routes, not least because it would require some kind of approval process to be set up outside the U.S.

I claim no original insight in a paragraph from a post last week:  there are numerous domestic policy benefits to legalization, as well as the defunding of Central American drug gangs (and Afghan poppy farmers.)

If the cause is persecution, or corruption, or drug kingpin violence back home, there's another policy lever: make the drugs legal (the demand is likely inelastic) and tax their sale such that the legal price is similar to the current street prices: that defunds the drug lords to the south, the runners who this border crackdown is intended to interdict, and the corner boys who can't shoot straight in these United States.

Easier to offer such ideas than to sell them, but perhaps after Our Political Masters have tried everything else and found all else wanting, they'll tackle the harder, but more likely to work, approach.

Making legal entry easier?  That might be something to consider, even at the expense of setting up approval offices outside the States.  (Isn't that what embassies and consulates are supposed to do? -- ed.)  And again, there's an arbitrage condition at work: where there are parallel legal tracks and illegal tracks for entering a country, the cost of obtaining legal entry affects, at the margin, the decision of a potential migrant to sneak in and hope for a future amnesty.  Here's how I wrote about it, twelve years ago.

Is it cheaper to build the fence (using the underground economy?) or to revise the laws? The existence of a rich country with both ample opportunities for entrepreneurial people and generous social services is in itself temptation to residents in countries less rich.

I based that post in part on remarks by people whose names you might know, and in part on this research (the Northern Illinois link to that paper likely long gone into the memory hole.)

Here, though, is where arbitrage comes to the rescue again: the more difficult legal entry is (the anecdotal evidence I have is that Professor Cowen's "can afford to take in more people" is in part driven by "Regularization is too d**n expensive") the more tempting running the risks to sneak in (which might include overstaying tourist visas, this focus on the southern border misses that) becomes.  As I noted, "Congress has to balance the potential burdens on social services against the cheap labor subsidies and the admission of entrepreneurial people who might not possess the verifiable credentials of a university graduate."

Thus, Professor Cowen's summation is straightforward.

Too broad a definition of asylum rights encourages potential migrants to engage in a dangerous kind of “regulatory arbitrage” as they seek the immigration status that gives their claim the maximum chance of being heard. If asylum seekers had their claims approved before they reached America, and made the journey by bus or plane, it would be safer and simpler for all concerned. If the costs of such pre-approval are too high, we can respond by simply taking in more legal immigrants.

So my grand immigration bargain looks like this: much more legal immigration, safe routes of transit, better enforcement at the border and restricted asylum rights. Right now, that seems far away. In the meantime, the problems will fester.

And here's where we were in January.

Congressional Democrats would like a clean amnesty for "Dreamers" (and perhaps for their parents as well.) Congressional Republicans might prefer to bundle the amnesty with appropriations for a stronger border fence, and perhaps additional resources for border enforcement. Our President appears to favor the bundle.

Sigh.

THE FUNDAMENTAL RESEARCH QUESTIONS REMAIN.

Years ago, I participated in a conversation among economists involving immigration policy and immigration amnesties.  Much of that conversation is still relevant, and the ongoing tussle over sanctuary cities is going to provide material for future theoretical and empirical research.  Very little, though, has changed in eighteen years.

United States policy is consistent with the behavior of a rich country facing a somewhat elastic supply of potential providers of cheap labor subsidies to its underground economy. The relatively ineffective border enforcement and the periodic debates about "guest workers" are consistent with a policy of probabilistic amnesty that's sufficiently tempting to keep the cheap labor coming without turning illegal immigration into a net sink of public benefits.

A tougher question that I haven't tackled yet is the role of emigration in fixing the economic conditions in the source countries. Perhaps remittances are a source of funds for such countries, but the onus is on their governments to provide the transparent institutions that might turn the remittances into a source of local income.

Yes, the current vice president is allegedly working with those Central American governments to tackle those root causes, current Republican aspirants to high elective office float proposals to tax those remittances, and the virtue signalling over the years about sanctuary cities, counties, and states has turned illegal immigration, in some jurisdictions into a net sink of public benefits, with some of the current recipients of those public benefits expressing their discontent.

ARE WE STILL HIGGLING OVER THE SAME THINGS?

Fifteen years ago, I wrote,

There's more action in Congress on an immigration bill, perhaps with more border enforcement, and perhaps without any amnesty. A Time reporter visits Illinois and files a case for amnesty. He sensibly observes that the perceived unfairness of granting immediate amnesty to people who haven't been waiting a long time for legal entry might, just might, be evidence of flaws in the legal procedure.

Oh, there were flaws in the legal procedure then, and there still are.  Ask any director of graduate studies about the joys involved in student visas, or any academic personnel officer about the joys of securing work permits or permanent residency for new faculty.  The flaws, though, are interconnected, whether we're dealing with restrictive border enforcement then, or whatever passes for border enforcement now.

The two procedures cannot be tweaked in isolation. The more onerous the legal admission procedures are, the larger is the pool of potential illegal migrants, and under some circumstances that pool will be more skewed toward people with desirable skills.

That post continued, by developing the technical details of the argument, and if you want more technical details, I've got more.  There's a lengthy Cato Institute policy analysis looking at the effects of changing temporary worker status for Mexican nationals on border apprehensions in the United States, which concludes

This analysis shows that guest worker visas can provide an important avenue for reducing border apprehensions by driving would‐be illegal border crossers into legal temporary visas. The periods during which Bracero and H‑2 visas were issued in higher numbers provide critical lessons for the administration and Congress to understand how best to use guest worker visas to further reduce apprehensions—both for Mexicans and non-Mexicans—at a low cost to taxpayers. Perhaps the most crucial insight is that discretion matters. Top officials must tell lower officials that an important goal of these programs is to reduce illegal immigration, as INS officials did in the 1950s and again in the 1980s.

Much of the current foot traffic at the southern border, the authors argue, is a consequence of labor shortages in some United States labor markets.

Politics, alas, gets in the way of the logic.

On the surface, this is a win for both parties.  The Democrats will have 2 million new voters in the form of DREAMers and new asylum-seekers, who are likely to be future Democrats voters.  The Republicans will have border security, the removal of migrants, and the continuation of COVID-19-based restrictions.

The Democrats are claiming that the lame-duck session is the last opportunity to pass immigration legislation.  They could also claim that 3 out of the 5 points of the deal are in favor of the GOP; hence, the GOP should sign on.

I grow weary of that "importing Democrat voters" talk.  Democrats give the impression, much of the time, that they don't like their country, and it should be straightforward for Republicans to flip some of those DREAMers, who might have earned citizenship in the military or helped establish a family business, thus making such a proposal even more favorable to Republicans.  If you're a polemicist, you engage in polemics.

The WaPo laments that President Donald Trump, his adviser Stephen Miller, and "right-wing media propagandists" such as Tucker Carlson "amplify that toxic message to enrage the base" — i.e., it scares GOP lawmakers from compromising on their principles and giving Democrats easy victories.

Yes, it is ironic that propagandists such as the WaPo have the audacity to attack others as propagandists, but the sanctimonious rarely have any self-awareness.

The WaPo was unknowingly highlighting the importance of the MAGA movement. Trump, Miller, and Carlson are the few standing not only against the Democrats, but also against establishment Republicans, who readily capitulate before the Democrats.

I don't know, a president who defeated an even less appealing opponent, and an amen corner that hasn't fared so well in the 2018, 2020, and 2022 elections might want to rethink its message.

Amusingly, deep in that essay comes -- recognition of the flaws in the legal procedure.

The presence of illegal aliens is a burden on the taxpayers and the facilities and infrastructure meant for citizens. If illegal migrants work for less than minimum wage and without benefits, once again, the citizen could see a drop in wage or be rendered unemployed. If the illegal migrants are of the criminal variety, once again the victims of these crimes will be citizens. Usually, it is the working class who suffers from this.

In the end, every country has laws that have to be followed, and immigration laws are not at all different.

The only way to enter or temporarily work in the U.S. is to apply for a visa and undergo a thorough background check and an interview. If the applicant clears all of these phases, he can enter or temporarily work in the U.S. The duration of stay and work also depends upon the visa permits.

The only path to citizenship is by naturalization, by marriage, through your parents, or through the military. Each route has its own set of specific requirements that must be followed.

I have to wonder how many lawful residents and citizens willingly participate in the underground economy that first paragraph suggests.  I also wonder whether the difficulties, whether as a legal or illegal immigrant, in achieving that status are so trivial as to make people go through all that trouble at the border simply to go on welfare.  The third paragraph, though, is the key to my argument, and the Cato analysis appears to bear it out: more expeditious vetting and receipt of work permits reduces the illegal or hope-for-the best entry.  I suspect more expeditious vetting would be welcomed by those graduate studies directors and personnel managers.

CONTEMPLATING IMMIGRATION. The immigrants-rights protests and assorted commentary have not slipped my mind. First I get the technical papers off to the journals and then I sit down and attempt to make sense out of some of that commentary. For today, a few observations on a Northern Star article.

"The major problem the current U.S. immigration policy [has] is its lack of clarity. The policy is not very clear, and it's not enforced. To begin the process of solving immigration, we will need to first solve our own policy deficiencies," said Michael Gonzales, director of the NIU Latin American Studies. "Plus, border security is not the answer to decrease immigration. To solve this problem we need to fix the economic conditions in the countries that are experiencing massive emigration and make them better for the people."

There is concern the immigration system as a whole needs some reworking.

"The immigration system is broken," said Gabriella Lemus of League of Latin American Citizens.

I disagree. United States policy is consistent with the behavior of a rich country facing a somewhat elastic supply of potential providers of cheap labor subsidies to its underground economy. The relatively ineffective border enforcement and the periodic debates about "guest workers" are consistent with a policy of probabilistic amnesty that's sufficiently tempting to keep the cheap labor coming without turning illegal immigration into a net sink of public benefits.

A tougher question that I haven't tackled yet is the role of emigration in fixing the economic conditions in the source countries. Perhaps remittances are a source of funds for such countries, but the onus is on their governments to provide the transparent institutions that might turn the remittances into a source of local income. Perhaps sufficient out-migration of people will induce local employers to offer workers more. But "we need to fix?" Send Winfield Scott and Ulysses Grant back into Mexico City for another bout of nation building?

YES, THAT CHEAP LABOR SUBSIDY IS REAL.

In two published papers, Eliakim Katz and I analyzed immigration amnesties as a way of screening the pool of illegal immigrants by subjecting them to exploitation in the underground economy and confronting a positive but not certain prospect of an amnesty, in order to induce favorable self-selection, meaning it wouldn't pay to sneak into a rich country in the hopes of going on welfare later.

Yes, that sounds cynical, and yes, we did get some grief for characterizing the underground economy as a sort of apprenticeship.  Other scholars subsequently expanded on our work.

We show that an amnesty is more desirable the bigger is the gain to aggregate income induced by granting legalized workers access to all the available employment opportunities. On the contrary, a more redistributive welfare state makes an amnesty less desirable, as low-skilled legalizedforeign workers will gain access to benefits. We also find that the introduction of a legalization program can only be optimal if there is a positive shock affecting the income received by the natives. In this case, the legalization allows the government to mitigate the adverse effects of an excessively restrictive policy implemented in the first period.

That paper offers the following elaboration on our work.

Karlson and Katz (2003) consider instead the role of amnesties as a tool for governments to induce immigrants to self–select based on ability. Similarly to our model, they also consider migrants that differ in their skill level. In particular, they emphasize that a legalization will offer skilled workers better labor market opportunities. As a result, the latter might be enticed to migrate even as illegals, in the hope that an ex–post legalization will improve their income opportunities. Differently from us, in Karlson and Katz’s (2003) model and in their companion paper (Karlson and Katz 2010), legal immigration is not explicitly considered together with illegal immigration.

The authors continue in an academic vein, and it looks like light bedtime reading.  But not tonight.  Rather, I'm in the mood to thank loudmouth leftist Jill Filipovic for simultaneously validating our cheap labor argument and demonstrating the folly of minimum wage laws.

If you would like to pay $30 for a pint of strawberries, $700 for someone to clean your one-bedroom apartment, and $100,000 for a new roof on your normal-sized house, then deporting all undocumented people is a policy you should support. https://t.co/l3m7JyCzfP

— Jill Filipovic (@JillFilipovic) November 18, 2025

Twitchy's Brett T. compiled a few of the more pungent ripostes.  "Are Americans that spoiled by cheap, illegal alien labor?"  Hie thee hence, and judge for yourself.