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 state of play eighteen years ago was different in one way.  "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."  The current government has failed in that it has turned illegal immigration into a net sink of public benefits, which isn't playing well in Woodlawn and other stressed neighborhoods of Chicago, and some among the illegal immigrants are turning out not to be good citizens.  Thus the usual suspects raise the usual objection.  In National Review, James Lynch notes that the amnesty, if that's what it is, is limited in its application.  "White House Announces Mass-Amnesty Plan for Illegal Immigrants Married to U.S. Citizens."  Matt Margolis of Pajamas Media pours on the scorn.  "Biden Make His Mass Amnesty Move."

The president and his handlers are not able to temper principle with practicality.  It is possible to do so: here I was as Bush the Younger gave way to Barack the Messiah.  "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."

The challenge has always been in fine-tuning the mix of immigrants so as to bring in the entrepreneurs and discourage people likely to become public charges or continue their criminal ways.  There, the current administration has not covered itself with glory.

The president is also expected to announce a new action that will allow some undocumented immigrants, including some DACA recipients and so-called "Dreamers," to obtain employment-based nonimmigrant visas quicker, senior administration officials said.

To be eligible, applicants must have graduated from an accredited higher education institution in the United States and have a high-skilled job offer from a U.S. employer in their field of study.

Tuesday’s announcement comes just two weeks after President Biden implemented an executive action that restricts the number of migrants who can seek asylum in between ports of entry when migrant encounters at the border reach more than a daily rate of 2,500 for a week straight.

Some members of his own party denounced the asylum cap. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit to challenge the order last week.

Look, this is not difficult, which means that politicians will screw it up. If it takes longer for an assistant professor to get permanent residence than it takes him to earn tenure, and if applying for legal residence is no longer something that can be managed in a few minutes in the reception hall at Ellis Island, you're going to get people taking their chances at sneaking in and then blending in.  And if they blend in by holding down jobs and forming families, perhaps nobody ought be objecting.  How foolish is it, dear reader, for Democrats to import voters with the lure of social services, and Republicans to accuse Democrats of importing future voters, when the political economy of immigration might not have anything to do with public assistance.

I have a relatively simple request of immigrants.  "I've long been of the view that there are Pareto improvements possible between immigrants and their new country.  'Give new arrivals an America to buy into, and an America that buys into the new arrivals, and we'll be OK.'"  That post also prayed for the Critical Studies types to rethink their priors.  "There are myriad reasons why the Great Society failed. An immigration reform of approximately the same age might have come along at precisely the worst possible time, if the intellectual current pushed deconstruction of those notions most essential for the new arrivals to buy into. At the same time, might the new arrivals to the United States have been least equipped to buy into those notions?"

Our President, in offering the sort of Pareto improvement that passage has in mind, is unlikely to satisfy anyone.  The immigration hawks will continue to point to the unvetted criminals and potential foreign operatives, while the civil liberties sorts will call the policy too restrictive.

I have little reason to change the position I took earlier this year.

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."

Perhaps after we've tried everything else, the United States will return to its Ellis Island model, in which arrivals who have a reference somewhere in country and who pass a basic physical examination and are not likely to become a public charge will be admitted, but not eligible for much in the way of social services, and subject to removal if convicted of a felony or multiple misdemeanors.