Arizonans have heard a lot about illegal immigration lately. Lawsuits, protests, racial profiling, and repealing constitutional amendments have become the vocabulary of the evening news. With all the talk, few have given any real attention to a practical solution.
Oh, sure, immigration enforcement laws may appear to solve the problem. This solution is undermined, however, by the ability of deported illegal immigrants to become repeat offenders. The result is a high-cost enforcement merry-go-round, with officers catching and returning the same repeat offenders over and over again.
Another solution is to catch and punish the drug traffickers that finance the illegal border crossings. The big appeal with this strategy is that it also reduces the supply of drugs crossing into the United States. It punishes the bad guys.
The reduced supply of drugs also pushes up the price for those drugs. The higher price of drugs is a huge incentive for drug lords to produce more—not less—drugs, for more people to begin producing drugs, and for traffickers to find new, innovative solutions for transporting the drugs to America. In short, supply-side enforcement creates the financing that allows drug producers pay for illegal immigration.
So what is the solution?
A political solution could integrate a variety of economic ideals. Decreasing the time requirements for legal immigration—a literal cost on prospective immigrants—would make the riskier, illegal alternative less enticing, for example. Guest worker programs would have a similar effect.
Ultimately, the best economic solution for illegal immigration will be found in policies focused on demanders, not suppliers, of illegal immigrants. If the incentives for illegal immigrants to cross the border could be controlled—usually the prospects of a relatively good job—so illegal immigration would be controlled.
Consider again the problem of drug trafficking. Punishing suppliers—the “bad guys”—only raises prices and creates incentives for new bad guys to start producing, selling and trafficking drugs. But if enforcement focused on raising the costs for demanders—be it through higher prison sentences, greater risk of getting caught, or some financial cost—we would see the opposite effect. There would be a lower demand for drugs, the price would drop, and drug producers would not have the surplus to finance other illegal activities.
Similarly, by erasing the benefits to demanders of illegal immigrants—particularly employers of cheap labor—we could drastically reduce the incentive to cross the border illegally.
It is worthwhile to remember that a solution for illegal immigration will never completely eliminate the practice. Such a solution would be inefficient and prohibitively expensive. Stationing a platoon of soldiers every 20 feet along the border would likely stop nearly all attempts at illegal immigration—but who would want to pay the exorbitant cost to deploy tens of thousands of soldiers that repel, and therefore never catch, any trespassers? Rather, a solution to illegal immigration will contain the problem and reduce the costs to society.
Economic solutions for illegal immigration should be multidimensional. The most effective dimensions of the solution will focus on reducing demand by reducing the cost of legal immigration while increasing the cost of crossing illegally.
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