My issues with Arizona’s new immigration law

Look, I argue about Arizona’s immigration law, and about people’s response to illegal immigration in general, but it’s not because (as the rabid anti-immigrant crowd is wont to insist when anyone doesn’t toe their particular line) I think illegal immigration is laudable. Of course it’s not. It is, however, a question of costs, benefits, and priorities.

Sure, illegal immigration is illegal. It’s right there in the name. It’s a violation of U.S. law, plain and simple. But so are other things. That’s the point, the rabid anti-immigrant crowd will say: it’s illegal and it’s causing horrible, terrible harm to America.

And that’s my problem: (a) the harm it’s causing is open to question, and (b) other illegal things cause equal or worse harm. It really feels like a group of people is highly dedicated to finding the harm because they’ve already decided that immigration is bad. Which makes you wonder why they really think it’s bad.

I posit that you can’t (with good data) make a serious case that immigration is destroying America, so it’s one of many issues with pluses and minuses and some serious, serious costs if we want to eradicate it.

You want to know what causes a lot of harm, both economically and physically? Bad driving, especially speeding. Traffic accidents killed almost 34,000 Americans last year, with speeding being a main factor in about half of those cases. This costs American taxpayers (even those who don’t blatantly and repeatedly break the law) billions and billions of dollars. Those numbers are many times higher than any estimate of the costs of illegal immigration. People are breaking the law and killing Americans and getting a slap on the wrist. The law is the law! What part of “illegal” don’t you understand? Unsurprisingly, however, I don’t hear Rush or Glenn calling for the National Guard to patrol roads and root out the problem, though. Nobody is pushing for speeding to be a mandatory felony with prison time. I don’t notice anyone demanding that we suspend the constitution so we can be sure to apprehend every speeder in Arizona. Why not? Would it not be OK to give the police a mandate to check the traffic record, outstanding unpaid speeding tickets, etc., of anyone they interacted with who fit the profile of a chronic reckless driver or speeder? You know, a male between 16 and about 25? Domestic violence call? We’re going to have to also check to see if you need to be sent to jail for an unpaid speeding ticket while we’re here.

No. No one is saying that, despite the far higher death toll from illegal speeding than from illegal immigration.

If the anti-immigrant movement is really only concerned about our safety as Americans, then the question of why they aren’t pushing for tough penalties and profiling of those who commit much more dangerous crimes is a good one. It applies to speeding, white-collar offenses, safety violations in coal mines, hunting accidents, and a whole passel of other things where the illegal behavior of a few harms many. Why have the anti-immigrant crowd picked their particular crusade instead of one of the many others where the economic and human harm is so much more clear and egregious? The answer to that will tell us something about the mindset of those pushing the anti-immigrant agenda.

The facts about illegal immigration are not yet fully known (though there are some useful data on several issues), and they often shift with funding sources or ideological biases. It seems clear that illegal immigration has risen in the past two decades, though we are far from the historical peak. Illegal immigrants occupy lots of jobs, though how many of those would be taken by Americans otherwise is debatable. Immigrants pay taxes and social security (not always knowingly), and their purchasing dollars go into the American economy. Even the service fees on the money they send back home contribute to Wells Fargo’s revenue. There is some evidence that illegal immigration boosts the economic fortunes of the middle class while harming the poor. You’d think the Tea Party would be all over that.

Some illegal immigrants take advantage of social services like medicaid, emergency rooms, food stamps, education, etc. Others are arrested for crimes, sometimes violent. It is extremely difficult to gauge how many crimes are committed by illegal immigrants, but only the most obviously anti-immigrant organizations “find” a percentage greater than those committed, per capita, by long-time American citizens. Muddying these waters is the fact that some immigrants come to the US specifically because they are criminals or they want to commit crimes (e.g., human traffickers, smugglers, drug dealers), and others are recruited into crime because of their immigrant status or their legal vulnerability (e.g., the drug industry, prostitution, gang membership). Balancing these criminal elements are the many more illegal immigrants who are, essentially, family members looking for jobs and trying to stay as far from official notice as possible.

Some studies find that the net economic impact of illegal immigration is positive, and others that it’s negative, though even these clarify that it’s not much, compared to the benefits doled out to legal Americans. You can argue that even a single dollar given away to an illegal immigrant is too much, and you’d have a solid basis to argue. Would you also argue that we need to catch every single white-collar embezzler, pot-smoking college kid, or stock fraudster in America, no matter how much of our tax money that takes? Why not?

Down here near the border (and in Arizona, New Mexico, and California), the issues get more polarized. These areas bear the brunt of the costs of the Mexico-US drug trade and some of the most negative consequences of illegal immigration. We also have disproportionately large numbers of both legal and illegal immigrants who don’t seem to cause any harm. Places like South Texas, where most of the people are Hispanic, demonstrate ambiguity about enforcement; you get both strong pro and con opinions expressed, with plenty of “meh” in between. Places where Anglos make up the tax base tend to show much more consistently anti-immigrant sentiment.

Illegal immigrants do not outnumber the legals. They also don’t show some kind of rabid resistance to acculturation into American society. Overall, my take is that the majority of illegal immigrants are similar in many respects to legal American citizens, espousing similar values about family, freedom, and economic choice. Maybe that’s why so many Americans have such an opposition to them.  It would seem that most of those who cause the most problems are associated with the situation where the richest country on earth (with the most voracious appetite for recreational drugs and underaged prostitutes) is situated right next to a country still firmly in the developing world. Bad problems, to be sure, and they need some serious solving; but blaming immigration for the drug trade is like blaming BP for our dependency on petroleum.

I have problems with our immigration laws and philosophy, sure. We are ideologically (and some biologically) descended from illegal immigrants. Our forefathers in many cases hosed the Native Americans (who were doing just-fine-thank-you-very-much) to no end, squatting by the tens of thousands on their land and refusing to leave, killing the legal residents instead of respecting their laws. Well, we’ve been here two centuries, and the US is awesome in many respects, so perhaps we should forget about that, but it’s still pretty hypocritical to claim that we are “original” or “native” Americans and ban everyone else. Jesus had a parable about stuff like that.

Maybe immigrants are bringing nasty diseases like tuberculosis to the US. OK, then we need to issue a LOT more work visas. This will bring those coming here for upstanding reasons (wanting jobs) through the legal checkpoints where they can be screened for such conditions. And maybe there’s too much drug money and trafficking going on (all right; there most definitely is). Then we need to put our money where our mouth is and stop smoking weed and snorting blow. Seriously. But immigration is not the problem, in itself. It’s a red herring for entitlement, spoiled adolescent thinking, and probably a good dose of xenophobia.