Bush's Looming Immigration Crackdown a Painful Exercise in Futility

This fall, Americans are going to witness a brutal and ham-fisted "crackdown" on illegal immigration by the Bush Administration. It will be a stark and tragic illustration of what happens when a vocal and well-organized minority of hardliners hijacks the country's legislative process.

The results are entirely predictable - the results of bad public policy are in some ways easier to forecast than good. Here's what we have to look forward to.

Over the next few months, the feds will launch some well-publicized SWAT team-style immigration raids much like the one earlier this year that Aimee Molloy described in Salon:

...swarms of armed federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement gathered in the blistering cold outside the Michael Bianco Inc. leather goods factory in New Bedford, Mass. At about 8 a.m., as a helicopter circled overhead and police kept watch in Coast Guard boats in the nearby harbor, the agents rushed the building military-style, blocked the exits, and ordered the employees to turn off their sewing machines, where most were busy stitching backpacks and vests for the U.S. military. By evening, 361 workers -- mostly from Guatemala and El Salvador -- had been taken into custody after they were unable to prove they had legal status to work in the United States. The factory owner and three managers were also arrested and charged in connection with hiring illegal aliens.

They'll be designed for some nice "tough on immigration" photo-ops, but they will have, at most, a superficial impact on the flow of immigrants into this country -- of that we can be as sure as we are that the sun will rise tomorrow.

How can one be so certain? Because the policy does nothing to address the underlying supply of willing foreign workers or the demand for exploitable migrant labor. Anyone who believes that such a policy has even a chance to work must also believe that Prohibition was a success and that Reagan won the "war on drugs" 20 years ago. Attempts to crack down on black markets for things like drugs, prostitution or immigration without addressing the economic factors that drive those markets simply will not work. In such cases, "enforcement only" has a proven track record -- it's perfectly ineffective.

The proof is in the pudding: as the effects of NAFTA were felt in the Mexican economy -- wiping out millions of jobs in the agricultural sector as cheap, subsidized corn flowed in from the States, the number of entries on the Southern border surged. Immigration hardliners repeat that we need only enforce the laws like a mantra, but what they don't tell you is that during the same period as the latest wave of immigration was cresting on our shores -- 1994 to 2005 -- enforcement dollars increased by 1200 percent.

There will be more of the same. Some fencing will be built on the Southern border. Some of it will divide communities that have long co-existed and who don't want a fence in their backyard. If need be, the ecology of a large swath of the southwest will be destroyed. And while there is likely going to be an increase in detentions along the border, the more prominent effect will be making military contractors with close ties to the government rich.

In fact, the noisy crackdown may even increase the incentive for workers from Latin America to migrate Northward. A recent study reported by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer helps explain the dynamic of what "pushes" Latin American immigrants to the U.S.:

Last week, the Inter-American Development Bank released the results of a survey showing that fewer Mexican workers in the U.S. are sending money to their families back home -- down from 71 percent to 64 percent in the first half of the year. In some states, it dropped to 56 percent from last year's average of 80 percent.

Ths study estimated that two million people in Mexico are losing some of the income they depend on from their relatives in the US. They'll need to supplement that in some way, and they already have an existing social network North of the border. The logic of the policy is perverse: Bush is launching immigrant raids for an inflamed base that will ultimately give an incentive for more illegal immigrants to come to the US.