What would Trump’s immigration policy cost?

Black line is illegal immigrants who enter US without documents; grey line is unauthorized immigrants who enter legally but overstay their visas

Donald Trump has proposed building an impenetrable wall along the Mexican border to halt illegal immigration while hunting down and deporting the estimated 11 million unauthorized immigrants already in the United States.

My question: What would this cost?

Anybody can climb over a wall, so a barrier, to be effective, would have to be guarded, like the Berlin Wall.  Maybe it would be possible to use electronic surveillance, perhaps from drones, to detect illegal crossers, but it would still cost a lot of money and require a lot of people.

Furthermore a wall would not be sufficient to secure U.S. borders.  A large fraction of illegal immigrants enter the U.S. by sea, or enter the U.S. legally and overstay their visas.  More than a million of them are from Asia.

Finding and deporting unauthorized immigrants would be no easy task.  Many of them would be protected and hidden by their employers and friends.  That could be made a crime, too, I suppose.

I don’t see how this could be enforced without a fascist-style or Soviet-style requirement that everybody be required to carry identity papers at all times, subject to arrest if they don’t, and a system of checkpoints so that people have to frequently show their papers.

Bernie Sanders opposes open borders

Unauthorized immigration into the US and offshoring of American jobs out of the US are two different ways to do the same thing—drive down wages and escape U.S. labor law.

So I’m not surprised that Bernie Sanders said the following in an interview.

Ezra Klein:  You said being a democratic socialist means a more international view. I think if you take global poverty that seriously, it leads you to conclusions that in the US are considered out of political bounds. Things like sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders.  About sharply increasing …

Bernie Sanders:  Open borders? No, that’s a Koch brothers proposal.

Ezra Klein:  Really?

Bernie Sanders: Of course.  That’s a right-wing proposal, which says essentially there is no United States. ..

Ezra Klein: But it would make …

Bernie Sanders: Excuse me …

Ezra Klein: It would make a lot of global poor richer, wouldn’t it?

Bernie Sanders:  It would make everybody in America poorer —you’re doing away with the concept of a nation state, and I don’t think there’s any country in the world that believes in that.  If you believe in a nation state or in a country called the United States or UK or Denmark or any other country, you have an obligation in my view to do everything we can to help poor people.  What right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy.  Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them.  I don’t believe in that.  I think we have to raise wages in this country, I think we have to do everything we can to create millions of jobs.

How NAFTA drove poor Mexicans north

If not for NAFTA, the United States probably wouldn’t have the issue it does with unauthorized immigration from Mexico.

The North American Free Trade Agreement, enacted in 1993, was part of a strategy by the Bill Clinton administration, continuing the policy of previous administrations, to increase U.S. exports.

The government gave up trying to preserve the family-operated farm.  Instead it favored large-scale operations that could produce food for export.  Farmers were told: “Get big or get out.”

NAFTA, although it eliminated government subsidies for many products, preserved U.S. subsidies for corn and dairy products.  The corn subsidy was also in effect a subsidy for meat, since meat animals are fed subsidized corn.

Small Mexican farmers, especially corn farmers, could not compete against the cheap food imports that flooded into Mexico.  Many left the land, and joined the migrant stream into the United States.

U.S. government policy was successful in increasing exports of corn.  The unintended result was increased imports of unauthorized workers.   I think NAFTA should be amended or repealed, but, sadly, this will not change the results of NAFTA.

LINKS

Under Nafta, Mexico Suffered and the United States felt its pain by Laura Carlsen for the New York Times.

Corn Sales to Western Hemisphere Surge by the National Corn Growers Association.

NAFTA and US farmers—20 years later by Karen Hansen-Kuhn for the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.

Mexican Farmers Affected by Agricultural Subsidies from NAFTA, Other International Agreements by Susana G. Baumann for the Huffington Post.

Corn Subsidies at Root of U.S.-Mexico Immigration Problems by Anthony B. Bradley of the Acton Institute.

How U.S. Policies Fueled Mexico’s Great Migration by David Bacon for The Nation.

Free trade: As U.S. corn flows south, Mexicans stop farming by Tim Johnson for McClatchy Newspapers.

Presidential powers and Constitutional limits

Hat tip for the chart to David Damico.

President Obama is accused by Republicans of exceeding his Constitutional authority by issuing an executive order to allow up to 5 million unauthorized immigrants who meet certain conditions to stay in this country.

An executive order is simply a directive by a President to federal departments or the armed forces to follow a policy.

With the increase in the size and scope of the federal government, executive orders become more and more necessary to make the government work.  But so does the need for checks and balances to prevent abuse of executive power.

The Constitutional authority to issue executive orders comes from provisions vesting the “executive power” of the U.S. government in the President, making the President commander-in-chief of the armed forces and ordering the President to make sure that the laws be faithfully executed.

The most far-reaching executive order in American history was the Emancipation Proclamation.   President Lincoln claimed power as commander-in-chief to order the confiscation of property of the enemy.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued more executive orders than any other President.  On the day he was inaugurated, he ordered the temporary closing of American banks.  Another executive order was to forbid American citizens to hoard gold coins or bullion.  FDR’s most infamous executive order was the internment of Japanese-American citizens during World War Two.

The incentives to ignore due process of law

Matt Taibbi said he started researching his new book, The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap, in order to discover the solution to a mystery:

Why is it that, during the past 30 or so years in the United States, poverty went up, crime went down and the prison population doubled?

What his book reveals is that the rising number of arrests and jail sentences are responses not to crime, but to political and financial incentives.

The primary job of police in New York City (and no doubt other places) no longer is to respond to reports of crime.  Their job is to maximize arrests.  They have arrest quotas.

They go around looking for people to arrest.  Taibbi reported a woman going home from work who was charged with soliciting for prostitution because she allegedly makes eye contact with undercover police in a van.  He reported two young black men arrested on suspicion of being drug dealers because they were in an expensive car.

He told how police vans cruise poor, majority-black or majority-Hispanic neighborhoods, arresting people more or less at random.  Some turn out to have outstanding warrants.   Some turn out to have drugs [1] or weapons in their possession.  But many are innocent of anything that any reasonable person would regard as a crime.

Rather than admit a mistake and let them go, police often charge the others with loitering or obstructing traffic (which can consist of standing on a street corner) or failing to obey the lawful order of a police officer (which can consist of talking back or being too slow to obey).

They’re held overnight, and, if they can’t post bail—and many are too poor to post a small amount of bail—they’re kept in jail for trail.  Prosecutors ask for a guilty plea in return for a sentence limited to time served.  Which sounds like a good deal at that point, but then they have permanent criminal records.

Although there are quotas for making arrests, there are no penalties for false arrests, according to Taibbi.  Even if the City of New York is successfully sued for false arrest, the police officer who makes the arrest is not penalized, and may not even know about the lawsuit.

The more the rate of serious crime—killing, assault, rape, theft—goes down, the more effort New York police have to devote to finding reasons to arrest other reasons to arrest people.

The system of stop-and-frisk and mass arrests can only work because most people caught up in it waive their constitutional right to a fair trial.   If they ever stopped doing this, the system would grind to a halt, and police and prosecutors would have to focus on serious crime.

[Note 9/22/14.  This may be out of date so far as New York City is concerned.]

[Note 10/10/14.  Or maybe not.] 

Perilous journey

Last year I read a book entitled The Death of Josseline: Immigration Stories from the Arizona Borderlands about unauthorized immigrants and the Arizona borderlands.   The title referred to the death of Josseline Hernandez, a 14-year-old girl who was left behind to die on thirst and exposure in the desert when she was unable to keep up with the rest of her group of border crossers.

Josseline Hernandez was from El Salvador, not Mexico, and many of the other individuals mentioned in the book also were from Central America.  I wondered how this migrants made it across Mexico, a country which more restrictive on immigration than the United States.  This excellent Al Jazeera documentary tells how they do it.  Crossing Mexico is perilous.  Only about 40 percent of those who start out make it to the U.S. border, although some may succeed on a second or third try.

It stands to reason that a lot of people who cross the border without authorization probably do so for illicit reasons.  But I can’t help sympathizing with people who risk so much in order to gain a better life for themselves or their families.  All of us Americans, except for native Americans, the descendents of black slaves and the descendents of titled aristocrats, are descended from people like that.

Click on Death along the Arizona border for my review of The Death of Josseline.  The author, Margaret Regan, a reporter based in Tucson, describes the human side of unauthorized immigration very well, and does justice to the views of all concerned.

The profitable business of immigration detention

This documentary by Al Jazeera English shows how the growing crackdown on unauthorized immigration generates profits for the growing U.S. private prison industry.   The state and federal prison population doubled in the past 20 years, but the number of prisoners in private prisons increased 17-fold.  Prison industry is a profitable business, and includes contracting for the U.S. military.

Immigration detention is a growing part of this.  The American Civil Liberties Union reported that, according to one report, nearly half of immigration detainees are held in private prisons,  versus 6 percent of state convicts and 16 percent of federal convicts.  The Corrections Corporation of America, the largest U.S. private prison corporation in the United States, helped the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) draft Arizona’s 2009 law allowing police to lock up anyone who is without documentation to show they are a citizen or a legal immigrant, and lobbied for it, along with other private prison corporations.

The documentary shows people being held in detention centers for up to a year without a hearing.  I guess the idea is that if they were given a prompt hearing and deported, there would be nothing to discourage them from trying again right away.

I admit I don’t have a good answer to the question of unauthorized immigration.   I think it is intolerable to have a underclass within U.S. borders who are outside the protection of U.S. law, who are at the mercy of unscrupulous employers and government officials.  I don’t think it is feasible to hunt down and deport millions of unauthorized immigrants who are integrated into American society, even if the U.S. were turned into even more of a police state than it now is.   I doubt that the American economic and social structure could handle completely unrestricted immigration.  I don’t think repeated amnesties are the answer.

The implied answer of the champions of immigration rights quoted in the video is a kind of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”  I don’t think that is a good answer, but I don’t have a better one.   All I can say is that I think it is a bad idea to create a powerful vested economic interest whose profits are tied to maintaining the present bad situation.

Click on Banking on Bondage: Private Prisons and Mass Incarceration for an executive summary of the ACLU report.

Click on Immigration is a moral issue and The least bad option on immigration for earlier posts of mine on the unauthorized immigration question.