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.

Throughout the years, though, I have maintained that the flow of illegal immigration depends on how restricted the flow of legal immigration is.  "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's one of the not-yet-answered empirical questions.  Depending on your attitude toward entering the United States without proper papers, those young men from all over the world are "military age males" or "potential terrorists" or "prime-age workers."  Among the future research questions might be "what is the effect of China's one-child policy on the marriage potential for Chinese young men?"  Now pick the sub-topic: in China, in Siberia, in the United States.  Variations on that theme, and there are many, are left to the researchers.

I continue to maintain, as well, that the restrictions on legal immigration are inefficiently onerous.  "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."  That post also noted,

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.

And the problem with polemics is they're polemical. Take New York representative Jerry Nadler, a Democrat. Please?

“We need immigrants in this country,” Nadler said. “Forget the fact that our vegetables would rot in the ground if they weren’t being picked by many immigrants — many illegal immigrants.”

“The fact is the birth rate in this country is way below replacement level, which means our population is going to start shrinking,” he added. “And the ratio of people on Social Security and Medicare is going to increase relative to the number of people supporting them.”

He's owning the cheap labor subsidy that my research with Eliakim Katz treated as a benefit, plus he's confirming the Ponzi-like nature of "Social" "Security."  Two Kinsley gaffes in one chubby package!

I wonder, though, whether his Republican colleague would favor reducing the hassles in obtaining student visas or permanent residence for professionals.

Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) also called out Nadler, writing: “Immigrants do more than pick vegetables, Jerry — they contribute to our economy, our culture, our community. They are doctors, nurses, home health aides, lawyers, professionals, and yes, ag workers.”

“No one is against immigration — but there must be a process,” he continued. “What is happening at the border is a catastrophe and cannot continue. Secure the border and fix our broken immigration system so that those who want to come here and contribute to our economy can do so, and do so legally.”

The process, or absence thereof, seems to have turned up in Whitewater, Wisconsin, better known as the home of one of the converted teachers' colleges the cool kids in high school choose on the basis of the parties.  As far as I know, Whitewater is not a sanctuary city.

The Whitewater Police Department sent a letter to President Joe Biden asking the White House for help to address challenges connected to a "rapid increase" in immigrants.

The letter, signed by Police Chief Daniel Meyer and City Manager John Weidl on Dec. 28, 2023, says the City has seen a soaring number of immigrants arriving from Nicaragua and Venezuela since early 2022.

"We estimate that there are roughly 800-1,000 individuals who have arrived here in that short time," the letter states. "Regardless of the individual situations [for coming to Whitewater], these people need resources like anyone else, and their arrival has put great strain on our existing resources."

It might be that some of those arrivals are coming based on word of mouth, to do year-round work tending the dairy herds.  The details, though, sound a lot like that underground economy, cheap labor subsidy, employees subject to hold-ups from their employers.  Professor Katz and I treated that as a net benefit to the host country, despite the complaining it provoked from some quarters.  "Net benefit" does not preclude difficulties confronting Whitewater and Walworth County officialdom.

The police department, according to the letter, has identified "major challenges" associated with the demographic change, including communication with a Spanish-speaking population, transportation, housing, and documentation/identification concerns.

"We have found approximately three times the number of unlicensed drivers on our roadways compared to previous years," the letter states. "Our officers have also seen first-hand the terrible living conditions that many migrants are living in."

The letter details a family living in a 10'x10' shed in -10-degree temperatures, as well as over-occupied apartments. The police department links this to a "number of situations involving juvenile victims of sexual assault." According to the letter, immigrants have been connected to other serious crimes as well.

"None of this information is shared as a means of denigrating or vilifying this group of people," the letter says. "We know that challenges will come with the addition of any significant number of people to a City. In fact, we see great value in the increasing diversity that his group brings to our community. We simply need to ensure that we can continue to properly service this group, and the entirety of the City of Whitewater."

Those unlicensed drivers?  Because Wisconsin has a "motor voter" law, the office that issues driving licenses checks citizenship in order to register voters.  That might be enough to scare some people from applying for a driving license, which puts traffic enforcement in a difficult spot.

Central Wisconsin’s Clark County is home to more dairy farms than any other county in the state, which bills itself as America’s Dairyland. Its identity is so tied to the dairy industry that a 16-foot-tall, black-and-white talking Holstein stands outside downtown Neillsville, the county seat.

To corral the cows, milk them and clear their manure at these dairy farms — the dirty, dangerous work that makes this multibillion-dollar industry go — farm owners here and across Wisconsin rely on a labor force that they know is largely undocumented.

But the state makes it almost impossible for workers to have lives outside the farm without breaking the law. In Wisconsin, undocumented immigrants can own and register their cars and trucks, but they aren’t allowed to drive them. Those who drive anyway are pulled over again and again and again, and issued tickets that eat away at their wages.

The law banning undocumented immigrants from obtaining driver’s licenses has cascading effects across the state. Law enforcement officials say the roads are less safe because undocumented immigrants aren’t trained and tested on basic driving rules but they drive anyway — and often without insurance. Court officials say tickets for driving without a license overwhelm their dockets and drain their limited resources. Farmers say they have to build or find employee housing to help their workers avoid getting ticketed.

The workers, many from remote, impoverished communities in Latin America, are grateful for the jobs. And yet they feel trapped.

Their presence in Whitewater has become another episode in domestic politics, as well as evidence of that underground economy hold-up in action.

Sitting in the Sweet Spot cafe on Whitewater Street last Saturday, city council member Brienne Brown shook her head, bemused by the political storm that has descended on her town.

“I do want to impress upon you that they’ve been here for a while,” Brown  said of Whitewater’s immigrant population. Brown’s district is right in the center of the city, and includes a lot of the rundown rental properties that traditionally housed UW-Whitewater students. Lately, the same properties  are housing many of the estimated 800-1,000 immigrants and asylum-seekers, mostly from Nicaragua, who arrived during the pandemic when in-person classes were shut down and the students moved away. Brown noticed the transition while knocking on her constituents’ doors over the last several years, she said.

“No one really knows the reason for the increase in Nicaraguan refugees,” Whitewater school board member Miguel Aranda told me on the phone. “But I’d argue the employers in our area are the reason. There’s a labor shortage.”

Aranda’s Mexican-American family has lived in the area for decades and originally came to Whitewater for work. “The moment they learn there’s an employer looking for workers, people come,” he said.

Immigrants make up a significant part of the workforce on the farms surrounding Whitewater in rural Walworth County, where dairy cows and fields of grain and vegetables are tended by immigrant workers.

A recent Pro Publica investigation explored how this mostly undocumented workforce is cast aside without compensation or medical care when workers get injured on the job. It featured a dairy worker from the Walworth area who said he was fired and thrown out of the house where he lived when he got frost bite on his hands working outside in the bitter cold.

“Personally it’s hurtful when you hear this kind of rhetoric,” Aranda said of the alarmism about the new immigrants in Whitewater. As a school board member, he worked on creating a multilingual curriculum. “There was some pushback at the time, but it passed,” he said. “The majority is very welcoming of the immigrant community.”

That essay suggests allowing residents to get driving licenses, no questions asked, would reduce the traffic enforcement burden, although it's difficult to do that without making Wisconsin into a sanctuary state in a limited sense, as well as allowing people to go to work immediately upon establishing residence, which is consistent with my suggestion that the legal pathways to residency be less constricted.

Confounding the story further, there is a guest worker visa program for agricultural workers (and circus roustabouts) but thus far Wisconsin dairy farmers have not been able to participate.  “Our farms would not be able to survive without [immigrant labor],” according to a municipal clerk in Sparta.  Meanwhile, Whitewater residents have pitched in with warm clothes and other useful goods and services for their new neighbors.

That underground economy, though?  In rural Wisconsin, it might be substantial.

What’s happening in Clark County and across Wisconsin is the result of Congress’ failure to figure out what to do about the millions of undocumented immigrants who live here and work in industries that, like dairy, unabashedly depend on them. That leaves state lawmakers to craft legislation to try to address the consequences — or to ignore what’s happening, punishing immigrants in the process.

Wisconsin is home to about 70,000 undocumented immigrants, mostly from Latin America, according to estimates from the nonprofit Migration Policy Institute. These are the people who hang drywall, clean hotel rooms, wash dishes in restaurant kitchens and package the nation’s cheese.

Determining how many of Wisconsin’s dairy workers are undocumented is almost impossible. Workers use fake papers to get jobs, farmers accept those papers without question, and the state and federal governments make little effort to get an accurate count. But a conservative estimate from a recent University of Wisconsin at Madison study puts the number of undocumented Hispanic workers on medium-to-large farms at roughly 6,200. That figure excludes the many immigrant workers on smaller farms, those with fewer than 500 cows.

We're still higgling over the same things, and I can't help but think that neither major party is getting the policy mix right.  It does little good to treat the people who milk the cows and pack the cheese as criminals, nor does it do much good to treat those people only as future taxpayers.