Let Them In_ The Case for Open Borders - Jason L. Riley [71]
Chertoff had particular disdain for the so-called attrition approach to reducing illegal immigration. A favorite of enforcement-first conservative tub thumpers, the idea is that illegals will self-deport if we make things tough for them. “Even assuming politically, and it’s a counterfactual assumption, that you pass a bill that’s entirely enforcement oriented, ” he said, “you still have the following dilemma”:
You have about 7 million people working [illegally] and the rest are their dependents. Many of them are rooted here. They may have their kids in school. And they’ve got jobs. If the employers fire these 7 million, who’s going to do the work? I don’t see that we have 7 million temporary workers teed up to come in right away. So it’s not practical. The major cause of attrition, which would be drying up the employment, requires you to assume the employers will either put their businesses into bankruptcy or that you’ll bring in 7 million replacements. Neither of those things is going to happen. Once you’ve disproved those two assumptions, why will there be attrition? Even if we could round up a thousand people a week, that would only be about fifty thousand a year. Do the math. How many years will it be? What are the odds of getting caught? And, remember, you’ve got a guy who’s working and won’t be fired. The chances that he’s going to attrite himself out, so to speak, are negligible. I think the attrition argument is really benign neglect. And that’s just amnesty, only it’s amnesty without the visibility.
All nineteen of the 9/11 hijackers were Middle Eastern Arabs, just like more than 90 percent of the foreigners caught plotting or committing terrorist acts in the United States since the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Given this pattern, extra scrutiny of immigrants and visitors from countries with links to terrorism is warranted. And after 9/11, the Justice Department began requiring visa holders from twenty mostly Arab and Muslim countries to register with immigration officials.
How interesting that those obsessed with illegal aliens from Mexico are so eager to link them with terrorism, while those tasked with homeland security consider economic migrants more of a distraction. As border patrol spokesman Xavier Rios put it to the Associated Press in 2007, “If there’s a way that the pressure could be taken off the law enforcement piece of it by basically taking the economic migrant out of the mix, then we’ll be well on our way to getting effective control of the border. . . . The majority of the folks that we apprehend are coming in for jobs.”
Conflating illegal immigration and terrorism makes the country less safe, because the money and manpower spent keeping Mexican workers out of the country is not being spent keeping Middle Eastern terrorists at bay.
HOW WE GOT HERE
Ridge and Chertoff also know the history of an enforcement-only approach to stopping illegal immigration from Mexico. It’s a history of misguided attempts to ignore the economic law of supply and demand. It’s a history of underestimating the will of human beings to better their circumstances and provide for loved ones. It’s a history of policy failure.
For most of the nineteenth century, the United States considered itself underpopulated. To guard against the perceived threat from Native Americans, we actively recruited immigrants from Europe and Asia, luring them with the promise of endless economic opportunity and religious freedom. U.S. employers paid for their voyage, and the federal government promised free land to immigrants willing to settle the frontier. Until the mid-1800s most of the Southwestern United States was still part of Mexico. In 1850, two years after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo officially ended