Laura Ingram and the Fence

This evening we drove back from the Bay Area and were listening to Laura Ingram (in a repeat of a broadcast I heard earlier in the week). I am not a fan of Ingram's. Among conservative talk show hosts she ranks with Mike Gallagher and slightly above Michael Savage. I object because while she is occasionally funny, a lot of what she talks about is knee jerk.

One of the topics she discussed was the proposal to build a fence across our border with Mexico. In my mind the fence is one of those public works boondoggles that will end up costing much more than even the highest estimates (currently about $7 billion) to erect and then huge amounts to maintain.

The case against our current immigration policy is easy to make. Unfortunately both sides in the debate start with absurd premises. The Ingrams of the world make the same arguments that the nativists of the 19th Century made - that all immigrants are low lifes or criminals. The immigrants rights advocates try to portray them as victims of US trade policy - if we just had fewer multinationals we would have fewer immigrants. Both are silly and unfounded in any data. If, as I am, you are a supporter of increased trade and relative ease of entry, there is still little justification for having a border which is fundamentally unregulated. Bush was right here - one of the key elements of any immigration policy should be a guest worker program and some changes in enforcement - but they need to be coupled. The argument made by organized labor, that the jobs taken by illegal aliens are taking away from domestic workers, is nonsense.

One Congressman makes the case that the costs of the current situation are huge. He estimates that 15% of the California inmate population is illegal. His site estimates that there are 2.2 million illegals in the state. And that adding up all the costs (health care, prisons, K-12, and other benefits) costs California taxpayers more than $3.5 billion annually (that is somehow reduced below the estimate the supporters of Proposition 187 had when it was up for a vote). There are some costs associated with increased numbers of immigrants - but they are not entirely one sided.

The biggest yammering in the state comes from the two counties where migration has been actually in remission. (See the two charts from the Department of Finance Population Unit - the state's demographic experts). Two years ago I came across the Mexican border at Mexicali with a Mexican national in an older car - based on the time we went across it was easy to get across with very little documentation. That is one of the areas of the border where there is already a fence. Ultimately, we need to think about answers to this question which avoid both the nativist notions and the nobility ones (which the immigrant rights advocates propose).

So what are the reasonable answers.(not necessarily in that order) First, it seems to me that we figure out a way to create a guest worker program. We know the cycles of workers quite well - so do the Mexican officials. If given easy in and out - many workers would come to the US for a limited period of time. That would finally prove that a) these workers are not taking jobs away from American workers and b) most do not want to spend their lives here. Second, we try to establish an enforcement mechanism for employers which is more effective than the current one, without creating the police state mechanisms that were present in the initial discussions of Simpson Mazzoli. Third, we increase our direct investment in Mexico which will ultimately reduce the incentive that individuals have to move from Mexico to the US. The integration of trade between our two countries should be encouraged to grow - but bilateral trade should involve activity on both sides of the border.