Why Harsh Immigration Crackdowns Will Never Work

With Washington deadlocked over immigration, states and localities have stepped into the void and passed all sorts of laws and local ordinances. They say that the states are laboratories of democracy, and the results can tell us a lot.

Arizona's new "enforcement only" immigration law, which mandates the use of an electronic verification system and subjects employers to the loss of their business license for hiring the wrong person, has turned out to be a disaster that might rank up there with the Edsel or New Coke in the pantheon of bone-headed ideas.

The state had a very low unemployment rate when the law was passed -- it was, at least in part, a "solution" to a problem they didn't have. Unemployment was at 4.1 percent when the law went into effect in January and had been at 3.7 percent when a judge upheld the measure in early 2007.

Lawmakers are now scrambling to undo the shock they've inflicted on the state as up to 8 percent of the population -- according to one estimate -- have decided to hightail it out of Arizona en masse. The people of Arizona are learning that immigrants not only supply labor, but also demand goods and services in turn -- and the labor that goes into them. They're also learning that newer immigrant communities have a mix of people with different legal status all jumbled together, and that when there is a widespread perception that politicians (and citizens) are attacking immigrants, it doesn't much matter that some differentiate between those who are "legal" and "illegal" -- Arizona is losing citizens and lawful permanent residents among that eight percent drop in population.

Arizona is now faced with labor shortages, and when combined with the loss in demand from all those worker-consumers, the whole enchilada might end up costing the state's economy tens of billions of dollars. [In the video window to your upper right is a brief CNN report on the aftermath of the Arizona law.]

The goal of reducing the population of unauthorized workers was accomplished, but it was not a gradual decline so much as a catastrophic shock to the system. The unintended consequences haven't been pretty, and now the very lawmakers that thumped their chest about getting tough on illegal immigration are trying to enact some sort of state-level guest worker program in order to bring those undocumented immigrants back to the state -- workers who would still be considered "illegal aliens" in Uncle Sam's eye if they succeed (Arizona can only make them welcome -- states have no constitutional authority to adjust people's immigration status).

The Arizona law was touted as a model of the get-tough enforcement approach to immigration control, but it should serve as a warning to those engaged in the national debate. Unauthorized immigrant workers now make up an estimated 4 percent of the U.S. work force.

Destined for failure

Advocates of using more law enforcement as the primary mechanism of controlling immigration to the Unites States often portray their opponents as belonging to an "open borders" movement. Obviously, such a "movement" doesn't exist within the mainstream debate, but it's a necessary straw-man. Without it, they'd be left to argue that we should not reform a deeply dysfunctional immigration system and we should not look closely at the pressures and rewards that motivate Americans to hire undocumented workers and immigrants to bypass the legal system -- we should just arrest, detain and deport more people, and otherwise maintain an almost-universally loathed status quo.

That's a very weak hand. It's an approach that violates an iron-clad axiom of public policy: when given the option, it's always -- always -- preferable to get people to choose not to do things that society doesn't want them to do -- in this case, bypassing the legal immigration process -- by adjusting their incentives than it is to wait until they do it and then punishing them for it after the fact.