Immigration, the drug war and unintended consequences

There was this article in the Arizona Republic today about many of the negative and unintended consequences of enforcement only strategies to problems like immigration. There is a very simple economic principle at work on the border. The demand for immigrant labor is largely unchanged (perhaps the Employer Sanctions law will change this?) while the supply is being affected. The anti-immigrant folks will say this is exactly what they wanted. They will say less supply is good, but the problem is that as supply decreases the costs and profitability per person smuggled increases. This leads to greater violence on the border and in our cities as smugglers protect their cargo and profits.

If you are a smuggler you might not be willing to get in a shootout with police over 10 recently smuggled immigrants at $500 dollars a head, but what happens when the price increase to $3000 to $4000 per person? This leads to other smugglers protecting their routes with violence and increases the incentive to kidnap immigrants mid-smuggle.

We have had this same problem with our disastrous drug war. When our public policy is formulated we are not considering the incentives we are creating. Worse yet, we do not try to create the right incentives to bring about our desired goals.

The Employer Sanctions law could be a step towards decreasing demand if it were formulated correctly, but I suspect it is more likely to create a larger underground economy where companies will just pay people off the books to avoid the law. We may very well end up with nearly as many immigrant laborers who paid significantly more to get here and then are forced into worse working conditions in an underground economy. The result will be stronger more profitable gangs of smugglers, a poorer immigrant labor force with a greater likelihood of exploitation and a loss of the current revenue (SSN, Medicare, Fed and State) being collected (I know you anti-immigrant people don’t like to hear it but undocumented workers pay billions into programs like Social Security with no hope of collecting any benefit).

There is a lot of doom and gloom predicted with the Employer Sanctions law (and I don't mean the negative affect it will have of the lives of immigrants already here). I am still not convinced that the sanctions law will devastate the economy. If the immigrant labor force shrinks during an economic contraction (which I think we are entering, especially in construction), I think it may not have a great effect right now. However, it may adversely affect any recovery. It is hard to recover when there is insufficient supply of labor for the activities necessitating a recovery. The economy does not turn on a dime. If there was less immigrant labor inevitably, native born US citizens would fill those jobs, but only after pay and costs rise. I don't buy the they do jobs that Americans won't argument. Having said all of that, I think I share a feeling not uncommon among liberals who completely distrust the authors of this law to be fair and judicious in the intent and execution of this law. I don't trust their aims or motives nor do I believe they have the best interests of this state in mind.

I have been mostly addressing economics in this post, but we cannot overlook our responsibilities as human beings to be compassionate towards the people that live and work beside us. No policy discussion should ignore or fail to acknowledge the humanity or the struggles of the immigrants that have come here seeking a new and better life. They are here because of our policies (and our policy failings) and we have the ultimate responsibility for that.