Why can’t we stop unauthorized

Immigration? Because it works.

(nytimes.com, september, 30th)

Our broken immigration system is still the best option

for many migrants – and U.S employers .

‘We’re getting no support on this national crisis,’ Mayor

Eric Adams said in September at a town-hall-style gathering on Manhattan’s
Upper West Side. He was talking about the influx of transnational migrants
who have landed in the city’s shelter system: more than 118,000 since the
spring of last year, with about 10,000 more arriving each month. There are
now about 115,000 people in the city’s care, and more than half of them are
migrants. In August, the city projected that it would spend $5 billion caring
for migrants during this fiscal year.

“This issue will destroy New York City,” Adams told his audience. “Every
service in this city is going to be impacted.”

Responding to the sense of crisis in New York and around the nation, the
Department of Homeland Security recently announced that it would grant
temporary protected status to about 472,000 Venezuelans, allowing them 18
months to live and work in the United States. This measure may help New
York because many of the migrants there have traveled to the state from
Venezuela (via Texas). But as Adams pointed out on the Upper West Side,
New York now also shelters migrants from “all over the globe,” including
Ecuador, Eastern Europe and West Africa — so the Biden administration’s
decision on temporary protected status is, at best, a partial and fleeting
solution.

The three most recent presidents have tried and failed to fix the problem of
mass unauthorized migration into the United States. President Obama tried
to balance empathy with enforcement, deferring the deportation of those who
arrived as minors and instructing immigration officers to prioritize the arrest
of serious criminals, even as he connected every jail in the nation to
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). President Trump emphasized

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enforcement at all costs: revoking deferred action for minors, declaring the
arrest of every undocumented person a priority, separating migrant families
and trying to terminate temporary protected status for about 400,000 people
— though Trump also extended deferred action to about 200,000
Venezuelans during his last full day in office.

So far, President Biden has revived the empathy-and-enforcement strategy:

resuming deferred action for minors and helping Venezuelans while also
making it more difficult to qualify for asylum.

But these variations in policy have had almost no effect on the number of
migrants trying to enter the United States through the Southern border.
Obama and Trump chose mostly opposing strategies, but each prioritized the
arrest of unauthorized migrants in the Rio Grande Valley. Yet in 2019, before
the pandemic gave Trump legal standing to force asylum seekers back into
Mexico, Customs and Border Protection (C.B.P.) arrested about 82,000 more
migrants there than they had at the peak of migrations in the Obama years.

Already, a new group of presidential candidates promises that things will be

different if they’re elected. But barring a major reorganization of America’s
immigration system, these problems are unlikely to improve over the long
term. That’s because the “solutions” rarely address the root cause:
Unauthorized immigration, for all the obstacles America throws at it, remains
a boon for countless U.S. employers and a reasonable bet for migrants who
seek a better life.

To begin with, it’s important to recognize that our world is simply a more
mobile place than it ever has been before. The number of people who leave
their homes to seek better lives in foreign nations has been rising, in absolute
and proportional terms, for decades. According to the United Nations, 281
million people were living outside their birth countries in 2020. That’s 3.5
percent more than in 2019 — despite the travel restrictions imposed in
response to Covid-19 and before Russia invaded Ukraine.

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The U.N.’s report lumps together all kinds of international migrants. It
includes professionals with visas working abroad, asylum applicants seeking
to permanently change residence and undocumented laborers doing
seasonal work. But its figures are useful, nevertheless. They demonstrate
both the world’s increasing fluidity and America’s unique status as a favored
destination. Though only about a fifth of international migrants head to North
America, the United States has attracted more migrants than any other nation
for the past 50 years. In 2020, the U.N. notes, the United States held about
51 million international migrants. The runner-up, Germany, had about 16
million.

Migrants dream of America because they are an entrenched part of our

economy. This is nothing new; America’s economy has always relied upon a
mass of disempowered, foreign-born laborers, whether it was enslaved
Africans picking cotton, Chinese building railroads, Irish digging coal, Italians
sewing garments or Mexicans harvesting fruit. Even today, some sectors in
the U.S. economy seem almost reserved for workers who have been
deliberately kept vulnerable. When Congress passed the Fair Labor
Standards Act in 1938, establishing a minimum wage, they excluded most
farmworkers and domestic workers from its protections. These workers were
largely excluded again when Congress passed the Occupational Health and
Safety Act in 1970. “These spaces that were once filled by slaves are now
filled by immigrants,” Anita Sinha, a professor of law at American University
told me. “They are exploitative by design.”

Other sectors use foreign-born labor as a more recent strategy. When the
anthropologist Angela Stuesse investigated the history of the poultry industry
in Mississippi, for example, she found that when African American workers
organized for better wages and working conditions in the 1970s,
businessmen cultivated an alternative work force of Latin Americans, whom
they found in Texas and Florida. As they recruited and transported these
migrants, she demonstrates, they catalyzed the demographic transformation
of central Mississippi and the poultry industry across the South.

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Today migrants are routinely employed in almost every blue- and pink-collar
industry in America. Recent Times investigations by Hannah Dreier
found unaccompanied minors packing Cheerios, washing hotel
sheets and sanitizing chicken-processing plants. The United States has laws
banning these and other abusive labor practices, but many companies have
found a workaround: staffing agencies. “They’re all designed to skirt
litigations,” Kevin Herrera, the legal director of Raise the Floor Alliance, in
Chicago, once explained to me. Many of these agencies specialize in hiring
people who will suffer any number of degrading or dangerous conditions
because they are desperate for work. Their offices are sometimes inside the
company factories. But if one of their employees files a complaint, is injured
on the job or is caught working illegally, the agency runs interference so that
the company avoids legal responsibility.

A migrant worker on a
farm in Homestead,
Fla., earlier this year.

American consumers
benefit from these
systems every time
they find exceptionally
inexpensive ways to
get their lawns cut,
their bathrooms
cleaned, their houses built, their apples picked, their nails painted and their
young and old cared for. The prices we pay for these services have been
subsidized for generations by transnational migrants. In 2015, economists at
Texas A&M concluded that if immigrant labor were eliminated from the dairy
industry, the retail price of milk would nearly double. More recently, in Florida,
construction projects stalled and their costs rose after the state passed new
laws targeting undocumented residents. Economists say that recent migrants
have also blunted the worst effects of post-pandemic inflation.

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In the United States, versions of these economic dynamics have always been
in play, but what has changed over the past 100 years is the way that
immigration policy has created a permanent class of disenfranchised “illegal”
workers.

Until the 1920s, America received migrants with an almost open border. Our
policies emphasized regulation, not restriction. A few general categories
were barred from entry — polygamists and convicted criminals, for example
— but almost everyone else was permitted to enter the United States and
reside indefinitely. The move toward restriction began in 1882 with laws that
targeted the Chinese then evolved to exclude almost every other national
group as well.

Legal immigration today is close to impossible for most people. David J. Bier
of the Cato Institute recently estimated that around 3 percent of the people
who tried to move permanently to the United States were able to do so
legally. “Legal immigration is less like waiting in line and more like winning
the lottery: It happens, but it is so rare that it is irrational to expect it in any
individual case,” he wrote in a comprehensive review of the current
regulations. He concludes that “trying the legal immigration system as an
alternative to immigrating illegally is like playing Powerball as an alternative
to saving for retirement.”

In other words, illegal immigration is the natural consequence of the conflict

between America’s thirst for foreign labor and its strict immigration laws. The
world’s increasing connectedness and fluidity have just supercharged this
dynamic. There are now more than 11 million undocumented immigrants
inside the United States, three times the number that lived here in 1990. And
during the last fiscal year, the number of C.B.P. arrests in the Rio Grande
Valley hit a record: more than half a million.

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Congress tends to invest heavily in immigration enforcement but not in
the enforcement of labor laws that could dissuade businesses from
exploiting unauthorized workers in the first place.

Periodically, American presidents have tried to release pressure from these

systems by granting amnesty or temporary protection from deportation to
large groups of migrants, as Biden recently did for Venezuelans. But these
are short-term Band-Aids that do little to affect the ongoing causes of illegal
immigration and still leave millions of workers vulnerable to abuse.

Congress, for its part, has proved itself incapable of passing the kind of
legislation necessary to recalibrate the economic incentives. Though five
major immigration reform bills have been brought to a vote since 2006, none
of them made it through both the House and the Senate. To be fair, perhaps
no single legislative act or executive order could ever change these
dynamics. But some people have suggested targeted measures that could
make unauthorized migration less chaotic, less exploitative and less
profitable to unscrupulous actors.

The National Association of Immigration Judges has made a strong case for
increasing the funding for immigration courts. There are now more than 2.5
million cases pending in these courts, and their average processing time is
four years. To handle this backlog, the nation has fewer than 700
immigration-court judges. According to Mimi Tsankov, president of the
association, this disparity between manpower and caseload is the primary
reason many immigration cases, especially complex asylum cases, take
years to resolve. To speed processing times, Tsankov explained, the courts
need more judges but also more interpreters, legal assistants and law clerks.
Improved efficiency would benefit those who merit asylum. Others say that it
would also decrease the incentive to submit frivolous asylum claims in order
to reside legally in the United States while waiting for an application to be
denied.

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Among academics, another idea keeps resurfacing: a deadline for
deportations. Most crimes in America have a statute of limitations, Mae Ngai,
a professor of history at Columbia University, noted in an opinion column for
The Washington Post. The statute of limitations for noncapital terrorism
offenses, for example, is eight years. Before the 1924 Immigration Act, Ngai
wrote in her book about the history of immigration policy, the statute of
limitations for deportations was at most five years. Returning to this general
principle, at least for migrants who have no significant criminal record, would
allow ICE officers and immigration judges to focus on the recent influx of
unauthorized migrants. A deadline could also improve labor conditions for all
Americans because, as Ngai wrote, “it would go a long way toward stemming
the accretion of a caste population that is easily exploitable and lives forever
outside the polity.”

One of the most curious aspects of American immigration politics is that

Congress tends to invest heavily in immigration enforcement but not in the
enforcement of labor laws that could dissuade businesses from exploiting
unauthorized workers in the first place. Congress more than doubled the
annual budgets for ICE and C.B.P. from 2006 to 2021. At the same time, it
kept the budgets for the three federal agencies most responsible for
preventing workplace abuse — OSHA, the Wage and Hour Division of the
Department of Labor and the National Labor Relations Board — essentially
flat. There are now only 750 Department of Labor investigators responsible
for the country’s 11 million workplaces. “As absurd as it sounds, the
enforcement of labor standards is a very controversial thing to do in this
country,” David Weil, the former administrator of the Wage and Hour Division,
told me earlier this year. The laws needed to protect the interests of workers
are already on the books, he said; the Department of Labor just needs
funding adequate to enforce them.

There is one more reason the problem of unauthorized immigration has

become so intractable. Over the past 20 years, incendiary rhetoric about
migrants has become a powerful and popular political tool, and many elected
officials now or recently in office have built their careers by wooing voters

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with such rhetoric. This path to power makes it difficult for them to
compromise on any issue related to immigration, no matter how rational such
flexibility might be given the facts of global migration and the demands of
American businesses and consumers. For many of these politicians, blocking
all or nearly all immigration to the United States is a top priority.

And though the Biden administration and congressional Democrats have cast
themselves as more realistic on matters of global migration, they are also
unlikely to spearhead much significant reform. Over the past three years,
they have prioritized objectives that affect a larger portion of the electorate,
like infrastructure and education bills. This also makes sense. Most voters,
even Latino voters, rank immigration below the economy, education, gun
policy and health care as a top concern. By definition, voters are already
citizens. For most of them, rationalizing our immigration system is not a
bread-and-butter issue.

Democrats like to blame Republicans for their own inaction on reform, but
that’s only part of the story. The day Biden took the oath of office, his
administration introduced a plan for comprehensive immigration reform, one
designed to secure the borders, keep communities safe and “better manage
migration across the Hemisphere.” Legislation based on that plan was
introduced in the House weeks later as the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021, with
80 co-sponsors. The Oval Office, the Senate and the House were all under
Democratic control. But the act died in subcommittee, along with several
more modest immigration bills.

The only immigration policies that Congress can bring itself to enact, it
seems, are funding more border security and ICE raids. But these actions
alone will never fix America’s immigration problems. No matter what anyone
says on Capitol Hill, migrants know that if they can just make it inside the
United States, they will find relative safety — and plenty of work.