Let Them In_ The Case for Open Borders - Jason L. Riley [74]
Glenn Beck, a radio talk show host with a Sensenbrenner-type grasp of immigration law, was apparently unaware of this fact when he invited presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani on his show in the summer of 2007. The following exchange ensued:
BECK: [I]isn’t illegal immigration a crime in and of itself?
GIULIANI: No . . .
BECK: You’re protecting criminals by saying that being treated as a criminal is unfair.
GIULIANI: Glenn, it’s not a crime. I know that’s very hard for people to understand, but it’s not a federal crime. . . . I was U.S. attorney in the southern district of New York. So believe me, I know this. In fact, when you throw an immigrant out of the country, it’s not a criminal proceeding. It’s a civil proceeding.
BECK: Is it—
GIULIANI: One of the things that Congress wanted to do a year ago is to make it a crime, which indicates that it isn’t.
BECK: Should it be?
GIULIANI: Should it be? No, it shouldn’t be, because the government wouldn’t be able to prosecute it. We couldn’t prosecute 12 million people. We have only 2 million people in jail right now for all the crimes that are committed in the country, 2.5 million. If you were to make it a crime, you would have to take the resources of the criminal justice system and increase it by about six. In other words, you’d have to take all the 800,000 police, and who knows how many police we would have to have.
BECK: So what’s your solution?
GIULIANI: My solution is close the border to illegal immigration.
Similar to Michael Chertoff and Tom Ridge, Giuliani believes state and local police departments have more important things to do than chase down economic migrants. And his record of economic growth and reducing crime in New York—it became America’s safest large city on his watch, notwithstanding the presence of some 400,000 illegal aliens—suggests that Giuliani had his priorities straight.
Our maniacal focus on enforcement has failed to stop illegal immigration, but there have been unintended consequences aplenty. Increasing patrols in California and Texas has resulted in more crossings in Arizona and other regions, where mountains and desert have claimed at least 4,500 lives since 1994. The aforementioned document-fraud industry is booming, and human smuggling fees have sky-rocketed. Traditional circular migration, whereby foreign workers come for the growing season and return home afterward, is less common because the trip has become more treacherous. Now migrants stay year-round and seek out work to sustain them after the harvest. They’ve gradually moved into other industries, such as construction, hospitality, and health care. Today, just 4 percent of illegal immigrants work in farming, and growers face regular labor shortages.
We’re also wasting a lot of money. To appreciate how much, consider this observation from Gordon Hanson, an economist at the University of California at San Diego:
For the sake of argument, take literally the estimate that illegal immigration was costing the economy the equivalent of 0.07 percent of GDP annually as of 2002. In that year, the Immigration and Naturalization Service spent $4.2 billion (or 0.04 percent of GDP) on border and interior enforcement, including the detention and removal of illegal aliens, in a year in which half a million net new illegal immigrants entered the country. The $13 billion in proposed border security spending for next year [2008] is already two-and-a half times that figure at 0.10 percent of GDP.
In other words, the amount of money we spend to keep illegal immigrants out of the country now exceeds the amount of economic “damage” they supposedly cause. Remember that the next time you’re told that we need to