Neither Walls Nor Open Borders: A New Approach to Immigration Reform

The government's failure to realistically confront immigration has created a political and policy crisis. Getting beyond this quagmire requires changing how we think about immigration. We must begin by viewing it as an ongoing socioeconomic process, rather than as a national security issue to be attacked and controlled. This will help us acknowledge that extreme measures—such as "closing the border" or allowing the status quo to continue—offer (at best) pyrrhic solutions, and that it is possible to influence immigration and mediate its effects through new policies that address all major facets of the problem. It is also essential to recognize that immigration significantly affects virtually all key aspects of society—the nation's demography, economy, culture, and politics—in ways that generate potentially unbridgeable political cleavages. Add to this the multi-dimensional impact of the nation's current economic crisis, and it is easy to understand why the politics of immigration reform have become so complicated that policymakers have essentially opted for inaction—either by doing nothing or by proposing solutions that will never be formalized (despite the obvious failure of extant policy).

Making reform more difficult is that successfully managing immigration will require more than overcoming domestic conflicts. Immigration is an "intermestic" issue—that is, it simultaneously involves politics in the U.S. and the immigrant-sending states. Managing it, therefore, requires international collaboration, without which it will be impossible to stem the flow of immigrants—a key component of any immigration management policy and its attendant problems.

What measures must be taken to create a new policy? First, we must establish its dual focus: the economic and social well-being of the nation, and respect for the civil and human rights of immigrants. The former will provide the basis for meeting employer demands for low- and high-skilled labor. The latter will validate our overstated claim of being a nation that welcomes immigrants, which requires ensuring that anti-immigrant discrimination is reduced and immigrant-worker rights are respected. No reasonable interest group should reject these objectives.

Secondly, existing national employment laws should be enforced, restricting jobs to citizens, legal residents, and authorized guest workers. This generates opposition on two fronts: agricultural, construction, and service (i.e., hotels and restaurants) industry employers depend on large numbers of undocumented immigrants, who are often the only workers willing to take such poorly-paid, low-status jobs; and then there are the pro-immigrant and human rights advocates who fear the potential human and civil rights violations that may result from the enforcement of current law.

Their concerns are well founded. Although the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986 calls for the fining and possible incarceration of employers who hire the undocumented, efforts to implement IRCA have focused much more on removing unauthorized workers. This has led to raids in sectors where workers' safety is particularly at risk, such as manufacturing and food production (e.g., meat cutting). Raid-seasoned immigration officers have seen workers jump through plate glass windows to escape, or race through work sites crowded with equipment—like band saws and heavy machinery—that could harm them.¹ Once these raids were completed, undocumented workers were arrested and deported, often without being able to notify their spouses and children or make arrangements for their well-being. In addition to fines, raided employers have suffered production disruptions and financial losses stemming from the subsequent understaffing. Documented immigrant residents have also been caught up in the raids, due to a number of identity-validation inadequacies.

The Obama administration has resorted to what employers call "silent raids"—audits of employee files, the practice of which has been optimized by technological advancements.² According to the New York Times, in the past year Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials have audited employee files at more than 2,900 places of employment, resulting in more than $3 million in fines from employers who have hired unauthorized workers.

Rather than raising the arrest and deportation numbers, the goal of these silent raids seems to be a lesson-teaching one—as...