Whitney Payne

Immigration

March 9, 2016

The United States of America is and always has been a melting pot, and that is not about to
change. This country was founded on immigrants who came here looking for a fresh start, better
life, and a safe haven to call their own. Today is not so different. Currently residing in the United
States, there are over 11 million undocumented immigrants and that number is growing by
700,000 per year. On one hand, the presence of so many aliens is a powerful testament to the
attractiveness of America. On the other hand, it is a sign of how dangerously open our borders
are (Khane and Johnson). Due to these facts, it has become all too clear that our immigration
policy could use some drastic changes.
One of the greatest arguments on immigration is that immigrants are hurting the United States
economy. This is not the case. As Stephen Moore pointed out in a recent article in The Wall
Street Journal: The increase in the immigration flow has corresponded with steady and
substantial reductions in unemployment from 7.3 percent to 5.1 percent over the past two
decades. And the unemployment rates have fallen by 6 percentage points for blacks and 3.5
percentage points for Latinos. If anything the immigrants have helped our economy which is
why I personally believe kicking them out and closing up are boarders is a horrible idea. There is
currently an idea in place to build a wall that reaches over 2,000 miles along the United StatesMexico border. Not only is this idea highly implausible, but the funding that would have to go
into this idea would drive the nation further into debt and would not be a 100% fix any way. So
on the hole it would just be a total waste of funding and labor.
Aside from building a giant wall that would throw the nation into more debt, another poor idea
that our immigration policy currently has in place is immigration detention. Detention should be
the last resort for these individuals who havent even committed a violent crime, and detaining
these individuals is not necessary to effect deportations and does not make us any safer. Among
those unnecessarily locked up are survivors of torture, asylum seekers, victims of trafficking,
families with small children, the elderly, individuals with serious medical and mental health
conditions, and lawful permanent residents with longstanding family and community ties who
are facing deportation because of old or minor crimes. This lock-up system is a massive waste of
taxpayer dollars, costing $2 billion a year. Detainees are also exposed to countless abusesfrom
a lack of adequate medical and mental health care that has caused unnecessary deaths to rape and
sexual assault (OSF, 2013).
Following the poor idea of immigration detention, there is also a new idea in play thanks to
Donald Trump to find and deport all of the 11 million undocumented workers in the United
States. As simple as this idea sounds, its actually quite difficult. According to some recent figures
put together by the CNBC, the high estimate for the cost of deportation for 11 million individuals
is roughly $935 billion with the low estimate being $735 billion. In addition to that it would take
another $315 billion in higher enforcing costs to keep these people from coming back to the
United States, according to the CNBC article. These numbers alone should be enough to deter
anyone from following Trumps jaded idea of mass deportation. But if they are not, through
deeper investigation into the CNBCs articles I found a quote stating that, By one estimate,
removing the entire population of undocumented workers now in the U.S. would wipe out a
chunk of the American economy roughly the size of the annual gross domestic product of

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Immigration

March 9, 2016

Texas. The annual domestic gross product of Texas, which as we all know is the 2nd largest state
with a massive contribution to the United States economy. Clearly, mass deportation is NOT the
answer. But on that subject, what is? Should we grant these illegals citizenship? Should we give
them work visas? Should we just turn a blind eye to the situation? Personally, I think citizenship
is not something that they should be given, but I also do not believe in their deportation. Perhaps
a solution would be to biometrically identify the 11 million undocumented workers, have them
all be registered into a guest worker program, have them find a long term sponsor employer, and
continue with their labor.
Through extensive research I have found an abridged 12 step list of economic principles that
should be applied to the United States immigration program composed by Dr. Kirk Johnson
(Center for Data Analysis) and Dr. Tim Khane (Center for Trade and Economics). These ideas
are not my own and I claim no credit for any of them, but if these principles were brought
before congress I would vote for them to be put into effect. I believe these changes would
drastically improve our immigration dilemma.
The list is as follows:
All guest workers in the U.S. should be identified biometrically. Technologically, a
nationwide system of biometric identification (fingerprints, retina scans, etc.) for visitors has
already been developed for the US-VISIT program. A sister "WORKER-VISIT" program is
essential for enforcement efforts and would help American companies to authenticate guest
workers efficiently. There is at present no effective system of internal enforcement, but the
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has in place a "basic pilot employment verification
program"[9] that demonstrates the potential effectiveness of using such technology with guest
workers to discourage undocumented work arrangements. Employers who want to hire guest
workers should be required to verify electronically that the particular worker has registered with
WORKER-VISIT and is eligible to work in the United States.
Existing migrant workers should have incentives to register with the guest worker
program. A guest worker program that is less attractive to migrant workers than the status quo
will fail. Therefore, the new law for guest workers should include both positive incentives for
compliance and negative incentives (punishments) for non-compliance. For example, a program
that caps the tenure of guest workers at six years can be expected to experience massive
noncompliance at the six-year point because a hard cap on tenure is essentially an incentive to
skirt the law. If the goal is to limit the number of undocumented foreign workers, then renewable
short-term work permits have a greater likelihood of success than a single permit with an
inflexible expiration date.
U.S. companies need incentives to make the program work. Immigration reform will be
successful if-and probably only if-American companies support its passage and enforcement. A
new law must therefore avoid both onerous red tape (e.g., requiring an exhaustive search of
native workers before a job can be offered to migrants) and any provision that would make it
easier to hire guest workers than it is to hire natives (e.g., waiving payroll taxes on guest workers
that must be paid on native worker payrolls). Perhaps the most important incentive is a negative

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Immigration

March 9, 2016

one: The new law should include funding for a system of internal enforcement to police and
prosecute companies that break the law.
Efficient legal entry for guest workers is a necessary condition for compliance. Existing
illegal migrants should be required to leave the U.S. and then allowed a system of entry through
border checkpoints with strict conditions for identification, documentation, and compliance with
U.S. law. If the guest worker program instead involves prolonged waits for reentry or a lottery
for work visas, existing migrant workers will have little incentive to comply with the law.
Moreover, such reforms will be perceived as attempts to shrink the supply of migrant labor and
will be resisted. However, a program of efficient legal entry for migrants who comply with
biometric identification will not deter compliance and will encourage migrants to utilize the
formal channels of entry rather than jumping the border.
Efficient legal entry should be contingent upon a brief waiting period to allow law
enforcement agencies the time needed to screen incoming workers. A waiting period of at least a
few days will give law enforcement agencies time to screen incoming visitors' biometrics against
criminal and terrorist databases.
Provisions for efficient legal entry will not be amnesty, nor will they "open the floodgates."
Such a system will actually encourage many migrants to exit, knowing that they will be able to
return under reasonable regulations. This is in stark contrast to the status quo, in which the
difficulty and uncertainty of reentering the U.S. effectively discourage aliens from leaving.
Documented migrant workers would enter a new status: not citizen, not illegal, but rather
temporary workers.
Government agencies should not micromanage migrant labor. Any federal attempt to license
migrants by occupation-micromanaging the market for migrant labor-would be a dangerous
precedent and would likely fail. Socialized planning of any market is inferior to the free market,
and its implementation is dangerous on many levels. First, allowing government management of
the migrant labor market would be terrible precedent for later intrusion into all U.S. labor
markets. Second, it would be open to abuse, vulnerable to corruption, and inefficient even if run
by angels.
The guest worker program should not be used as an excuse to create another large federal
bureaucracy. The inherent risk of authorizing a new guest worker program is that it will
establish a new, unwieldy federal bureaucracy that outgrows its budget and mandate. Critics
contend that the federal government is ill-equipped to handle the substantial influx of people who
would enter the U.S. through a guest worker program. They further cite the long backlogs that
plague other immigration programs, most notably the green card program. One way to alleviate
this problem is to involve the private sector in the guest worker visa process, much as gun
retailers are integrated into the criminal background checks of gun buyers. Many parts of the
guest worker visa process could be facilitated by contracting out certain parts of the process,
including paperwork processing, interviewing of visa candidates (if necessary), coordinating
with the DHS and federal law enforcement agencies on background checks, facilitating
placement with prospective employers, and facilitating the exit upon expiration of the visa. As

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Immigration

March 9, 2016

long as the private contractor has no conflict of interest in the visa selection or placement
process, such a system should be better than another federal bureaucracy.
Bonds should be used to promote compliance after entry. There are many smart ways that
bonds could be used to manage the immigrant pool. In one system, guest workers would pay
upon entry for a bond that is redeemable upon exit. An individual who wanted to recoup the
money would comply with the overall guest worker system and other U.S. laws, effectively
acting as part of a self-enforcing network that discourages non-bonded, undocumented migrants.
An alternative arrangement would have U.S. companies paying for the bonds as a right to hire
some number of workers. If Congress felt compelled to cap the number of guest workers, the
bonds could be treated like property rights and bid on to establish the market value of a guest
worker. In both cases, the dollar value of the bond would be repaid after the migrant exited the
U.S. but would be forfeit if the migrant went into the black market economy.
Guest workers should be required to find a sponsoring employer within one month (or some
other reasonable period of time). The employer would verify via WORKER-VISIT that the
particular worker is eligible to be employed in the United States. If the migrant cannot locate an
employer within the time frame, the law should require that he or she leave the country. A
sponsorship system is an efficient alternative to government management of the supply of and
demand for migrant labor. It would be self-checking because employers could be required to
submit payroll records regularly for automated review, which would identify the guest workers at
each location. If employment with a sponsor ended, the worker would be allowed a similar
reasonable period of time to find a new employer. Existing undocumented workers should find it
relatively easy to get sponsorship with current employers, so the act of leaving the country and
reentering would neither discourage their compliance nor come at the expense of legal migrants.
Day laborers should be required to find long-term sponsoring employers. The presence of
tens of thousands of day laborers in the U.S. may seem to pose a challenge to immigration
reform, but the day labor market should not be given an exemption. A functioning WORKERVISIT program would likely motivate the creation of intermediary firms that employ day
laborers and connect them with customers in a more formal market that develops along the lines
of subcontracting firms that are already active in gardening, house-cleaning, janitorial services,
accounting, and night security. Intermediary firms could offer day laborers in teams of variable
sizes, allowing the hiring firms to avoid the hassles of sponsoring and documentation paperwork.
Skeptics might protest that most subcontracted jobs are routine (even regularly scheduled),
whereas day labor is by nature last-minute and unpredictable. However, that is not really true in
the aggregate, especially when compared with other last-minute industries like plumbing/flood
control or emergency towing. Competitive firms can meet demand with very little slack as long
as free-market incentives are in place.
All migrants should respect American law and traditions. The requirement to obey all laws is
not optional for new citizens and should not be optional for visitors. While we encourage and
insist on the primacy of American values for those who join our workforce, we should also
remember the full spectrum of values ourselves. The Statue of Liberty reminds us that we are all

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Immigration

March 9, 2016

equal, regardless of ethnicity, origin, or even state of wretchedness, and that America will
continue to be a land of opportunity.

Whitney Payne

Immigration

March 9, 2016

References
[1]Congressional Budget Office, "The Role of Immigrants in the U.S. Labor Market" November
2005, at http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/68xx/doc6853/11-10-Immigration.pdf and Jeffrey S. Passel,
"Unauthorized Migrants: Numbers and Characteristics" Task Force on Immigration and
America's Future, Pew Hispanic Center, June 14, 2005 at pewhispanic.org/files/reports/ 46.pdf.
[2]Stephen Moore, "More Immigrants, More Jobs," The Wall Street Journal, July 13, 2005, p.
A13.
[3]Council of Economic Advisers, Economic Report of the President (Washington, D.C.: U.S.
Government Printing Office, 2005), pp. 93-116.
[4]These additional visas are available only to individuals who have master's degrees or higher
from a U.S. university.
[5]Press release, "USCIS Reaches H-1B Visa Cap," U.S. Department of Homeland Security, U.S.
Citizenship and Immigration Service, August 12, 2005, at
http://uscis.gov/graphics/publicaffairs/newsrels/H-1Bcap_12Aug05.pdf (December 27, 2005).
[6]Eric Chabrow, "IT Employment on Upswing," Information Week, April 4, 2005, at
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtmlarticleID=160403526(December 27,
2005).
[7]David Card, "Is the New Immigration Really So Bad?" National Bureau of Economic
Research Working Paper No. 11547, August 2005.
[8]See IDG News Service, "Study: Offshore Outsourcing Helps U.S. Economy," March 30,
2004, at http://www.itworld.com/Career/826/040330outsourcing (December 27, 2005).
[9]Associated Press, "Firms Test Web Immigration Check," September 5, 2005, at
http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,68761,00.html (November 3, 2005). See also U.S.
Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, "SAVE Program:
Employment Verification Pilot Programs," at http://uscis.gov/graphics/services/SAVE.htm#two
(December 27, 2005).
[10]Abel Valenzuela, Jr., "Working on the Margins: Immigrant Day Labor Characteristics and
Prospects for Employment," University of California at San Diego, Center for Comparative
Immigration Studies Working Paper No. 22, May 2000.
[11]The Cornyn-Kyl bill is a good start, but it also has a number of flaws that could be fixed. See
James Jay Carafano, Ph.D., Janice L. Kephart, and Alane Kochems, "The Cornyn-Kyl
Immigration Reform Act: Flawed But Fixable," Heritage Foundation Executive Memorandum
No. 982, September 23, 2005, at
http://www.heritage.org/Research/HomelandDefense/em982.cfm.
"Why Does the U.S. Need Immigration Reform." Open Society Foundations. N.p., 2013. Web.
Schoen, John W. "Deport Undocumented Workers? Here's the Tab..." CNBC. NBC Universal, 17
Aug. 2015. Web. 29 Mar. 2016.