Illegal Immigration vs. Speeding

I’ve ranted about illegal immigration before, and how annoying it is when people go all warmongerin’ about it (sometimes more so after they go all presidentin’). Thinking more about it, the thing that bothers me the most about increasing punishments for immigration problems is this: the foul does not match the harm.

I’ve never disputed the idea that immigration laws should be enforced. The rule of law must be upheld even when we disagree with the finer points¹. And I know there are illegal immigrants who cause harm to the people or resources of the United States². But the trend toward upping the punishment ante is not reasonable. Put them all in jail? Charge them all with felonies? Give them all long prison terms? These punishments do not match the crime.

Now, I may not be a big-city lawyer, but it seems to me that the severity of criminal punishment in the U.S. is based on at least three things:

1. The amount of harm done by the criminal act
2. The intent of the person who committed the crime
3. The moral “wrongness” of the act (or the extent to which it violates our cultural ideas of right/wrong)

Extreme punishments for illegal immigration fail on all three of those points. Lemme splain:

1. Harm: As I’ve mentioned before, our best data suggest that the overall amount of harm done by illegal immigration is not nearly as high as the sky-is-falling doomsayers (*cough*Bill O’Reilly*cough*) would have us believe. Yes, there is harm from some illegal immigrants, but so far it looks like it’s less (on average) than the harm from good old God-fearing lifelong American citizens³. That’s the criminal angle, anyway. Economically, it appears that illegal immigrants are a net benefit to the U.S. economy.
2. Criminal Intent: I’m sure there are some illegal immigrants who come to the U.S. with the intention of doing something bad to Americans. But again, our best information suggests they are a small minority. The vast majority of illegal immigrants (especially Latin American) come here with motives like “earning a living,” or “escaping political repression back home,” or “eating three meals a day, for once.”
3. Moral Wrongness: I don’t know about this one… how wrong is it to sneak into another country? Is it like trespassing? We have long traditions about the wrongness of murder, rape, theft, robbery, incest, arson, etc., but I don’t think most of us really have a common sense of just exactly how bad sneaking across a border is, in and of itself. In fact, there are plenty of Americans who think national borders should be open (including those American presidents who called for the Iron Curtain to be lifted). I suggest that it’s not very high on the wrongness scale to sneak across the border. It is wrong in the sense that it does violate law, but not much beyond that.

So, there’s some harm done (personally, but not economically), there are some people who have evil intentions, and it’s some kind of wrong, in itself, to come to the U.S. without permission. This is clearly, I think, not the national crisis it’s sometimes made out to be. Problems? Yes. Threat to All That Is American? Hardly. Now, I’d like to compare illegal immigration to another legal violation that frequently happens in the U.S.:

Speeding vs. Illegal Immigration

Speeding. You know, driving faster than the speed limit. This is estimated to have caused over 13,000 deaths in the U.S. in 2005⁴. Also over 40 billion dollars in property damage, healthcare and other costs. The penalty for speeding is generally a fine. And points on your license. In extreme or repeated cases, a person may get jail time⁵ or a really large fine, or have their license revoked. Rarely is there an arrest. Almost never does speeding become a felony. Speeding generally stays at the same level of criminality as the traditional “status offense” of illegally entering the U.S., almost never rising to the level of felonies and demonization recommended by people on the Fox Network for illegal immigrants. For comparison…

• How many American citizens are killed or injured as a result of illegal immigration each year?⁶
• How much money is lost by the U.S. economy as a result of illegal immigration⁷? Note for this one that most experts (who aren’t being paid by conservative political groups) agree that there’s a net gain, especially since illegal immigrants’ wages get taxed.

I am open to being wrong, if there’s reliable data⁸, but it seems to me unlikely that immigration is going to exact the toll in life, injury and property that we rack up by speeding. Even if we break it down on a per-person basis (should we? I don’t know), I doubt the situation will change⁹.

So, if speeding costs more than illegal immigration, shouldn’t speeding be punished more severely, especially in cases where there is no reason to suspect criminal motives in the immigration? My sense of justice says “yes.”¹⁰

So, what’s it going to be? Should illegal immigrants be punished less severely than speeders, or should speeders be punished more severely than they are now? Felonies for speeders? Automatic prison time for speeding? These would certainly make our highways safer.

What is (IMHO) Actually Happening

The reason certain people on TV (O’Reilly and his ilk) continue to exaggerate the numbers of illegal immigrants, and insist in the face of all reliable evidence that they cost this country huge amounts of money and human life, is because they know that their viewers do not like the idea of immigrants coming to our country, and these viewers don’t always know why they don’t like it. So, the doomsayers feed them a plausible reason: it must be that the immigrants are dangerous and expensive. They must be stealing from us. They must be hurting us. Now, people who don’t like the foreigners can indulge their instinct to punish and punish, telling themselves they’re protecting America.

I suspect the real reason for insisting on increasing punishments for illegal immigration is a basic discomfort with things (and people) who are strange to us. Otherwise, the suggested punishments would fit the crime.

1. I also advocate revising our immigration laws to be more in line with the realities of both the justice and economics of the situation [↩]
2. because they always make it into the papers [↩]
3. One might argue that, since some illegal immigrants commit robberies and murders, therefore all of them should be punished more harshly, just for sneaking into the USA, but that’s certainly not what we do in other domains. We have not heard Republicans, for instance, proposing restrictions on foreign business involvements when some foreign businesses commit fraud or other crimes. [↩]
4. sorry; no more recent data from my websurfing [↩]
5. extremely rare for speeding without other violations [↩]
6. Let’s say, not including casualties incurred on the job of policing the immigration regulations or border, as those particular problems are tied to immigration policies, not just the act of illegal immigration… otherwise, it’s like saying marijuana is lethal because people get killed in drug raids [↩]
7. again, not including the cost of immigration enforcement [↩]
8. please let me know if you have some [↩]
9. That would be, FYI, a net of about $160 per illegal immigrant per year, and 1 citizen death per about 18,000 illegal immigrants. If the made-up number of 200,000 illegal immigrants were correct, we would need a dozen murders of U.S. citizens per year, committed by illegal immigrants, just to match those from speeding [↩]
10. This is a somewhat separate issue from enforcing immigration through border security, which can take non-punitive forms. Some of those ideas and their implementation are also problematic, but for different reasons [↩]

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