Illegal Immigration Essay, Research Paper
ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION
The Issues
They slip into the San Diego rail yard furtively, preferably beneath the protective cover of darkness, jumping fences, eluding
guards and dodging 200-ton locomotives in a perilous dash for the most elusive of prizes, a free ride to the north. “To be truthful,
I have no idea of precisely where this train goes, other than it takes us to el norte,” says Jose Flores Osuna, an illegal Mexican
migrant seeking work in the United States.(1)
Every day thousands of Mexicans and Central Americans surreptitiously cross the U.S.-Mexican border carrying little more than
dreams of a better life. And they are not alone. Last year in the region around El Paso, Texas, the U.S. Border Patrol apprehended
illegal entrants representing 75 nationalities.* (*Ninety percent of those apprehended at the border are Mexicans.) Some are driven
out of their homelands by war or political oppression, but most are bread-and-butter migrants hoping to trade poverty for
prosperity.
Foreigners unauthorized to work in the United States can be found in restaurant kitchens, garment factories, tomato fields,
parking garages and taxicabs, or pushing brooms and performing a host of other menial tasks whose common features are long hours and
low pay. Despite passage of the long-fought-for 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), which liberalized legal immigration
in exchange for a promised crackdown on unlawful entry and employment, millions of illegals continue to flood into the United
States, competing for scarce U.S. jobs, putting pressure on public services and arousing xenophobic fears.
The number of people caught at the U.S.-Mexican border dropped sharply from 1986 to 1989, after IRCA legalized more than 3
million aliens already living here. But apprehensions have increased dramatically in the past two years. More than 1 million people
were intercepted last year, and apprehensions were up 15 percent in the first quarter of this year, leading many observers to claim,
once again, that our borders are out of control.
“As Americans we must always remember that immigration helped make this country great,” says U.S. Attorney General William P.
Barr. “But as we welcome people in the front door…we see people crashing through the back door and the back window, violating our
laws, flouting our sovereignty and ignoring our process.”(2)
In a Sisyphean effort to staunch the flow along its southern border, the United States has recently added 300 Border Patrol
agents, put up new stadium lights and constructed a 10-foot-high, solid-steel barricade along a 14-mile stretch of the frontier,
just south of San Diego.
The fact that each night literally hundreds of men and women clamber over the barricade is testament to its ineffectiveness–
and to the irresistible pull of U.S. jobs that on average pay eight times their equivalent in Mexico. “It doesn’t matter how many
people, horses, bicycles, helicopters or planes they use,” says Javier Ortega, a 40-year-old auto body repairman from Guadalajara.
“People will go. It doesn’t matter if the fence is electric.”(3)
Critics of the U.S. enforcement effort say it is a waste of time and resources and may even impede attempts to address the
underlying problem–the huge economic disparity between the United States and Mexico. U.S. emphasis on police measures, such as the
new wall, increases resentment and economic nationalism in Mexico, says Wayne A. Cornelius, director of the Center for U.S.- Mexican
Studies at the University of California at San Diego. U.S. policies, he says, “make it more difficult for the Mexican government to
adopt free-trade policies needed for a long-term solution.”
But Americans are nearing the breaking point. The United States accepts 700,000 immigrants legally each year, more than the
rest of the world put together. Many wonder how many more the country could absorb without causing a social breakdown. According to
a poll conducted by the Gallup Organization last month, two-thirds of Americans want greater restrictions placed on immigration.
The brewing backlash against immigrants–even those here legally–is also evident in this year’s election campaigning.
Republican presidential aspirant Patrick J. Buchanan touched a nerve when he said: “I think God made all people good, but if we had
to take a million immigrants in, say Zulus, next year, or Englishmen, and put them in Virginia, what group would be easier to
assimilate and would cause less problems for the people of Virginia?”(4)
In California, U.S. Senate candidate Rep. William F. Dannemeyer, R-Calif., has openly campaigned against illegal immigration,
calling upon President Bush and California Gov. Pete Wilson, a Republican, to bring in the California National Guard and U.S.
military to seal the border.(5)
Declaring war on illegal immigration, adopting a Berlin Wall attitude, makes many experts and government officials
uncomfortable. But what should the United States do? As policy- makers grapple with the issues of how to treat illegal immigrants
once they’re here–and how to prevent more from coming–these are some of the questions being asked:
- Does illegal immigration damage or help the US. economy?
Obviously, legal immigration has profoundly influenced U.S. society. Numerous studies conclude that migrants enhance
productivity in a number of ways. They accept temporary or marginal jobs, work hard, pay more in taxes than they take in services
and establish vibrant small-business sectors. Bustling commercial areas from Koreatown in Los Angeles to Miami’s Little Havana
attest to the entrepreneurial verve of recent immigrants.
The equation, however, is more complex for illegal migrants. For one thing, they are a mysterious and–in a real, statistical
sense–undocumented lot. There is little reliable data on their tax input and service use. Some pay taxes and function as active
citizens in the community while others live quietly on society’s fringes and are paid “off the books.” Furthermore most analyses
still are based on 1980 census data and fail to reflect recent changes in immigration laws and the current economic downturn.
In the absence of hard data, discussion tends toward the polemical. Persistent perceptions that immigrants take jobs away from
natives and are hard to assimilate into society have joined another growing viewpoint: that increasing numbers of newcomers strain
public services. Suspicions of illegitimate use of welfare by undocumented migrants were so strong that Congress included provisions
in the 1986 immigration law for a high-technology automated program–Systematic Alien Verification Entitlements (SAVE)–to weed
unentitled aliens from the welfare rolls. So few were discovered that several states, including Texas, sacked SAVE because it cost
more to operate than it saved.
Most experts say widely held assumptions that illegals are a net drain on the economy are probably erroneous. By law, illegal
immigrants are barred from receiving federal welfare payments and a range of other benefits, including food stamps and unemployment
compensation.(6) Fearing deportation, few file for the income-tax refunds owed them, and the vast majority are too young to apply
for Social Security benefits–even if they dared. Illegals come to the United States to work, not to go on welfare.
At the same time, their children born in the United States can–and do–receive government assistance. Dependents of illegal
residents tend to use education and neighborhood medical services, albeit sparingly, squeezing state and local revenues in areas
where they are concentrated. “In a macro sense, any economist will say immigration–even illegal immigration–is always a gain to
society,” says Charles Keely, a migration expert at Georgetown University in Washington. “The problem is a distributional one. Taxes
flow to the federal government, but services used are at the state and local levels.”
Nowhere is the imbalance more acute than in Southern California, home to as many as 1 million undocumented migrants. In Los
Angeles County, illegal immigrants–mostly from Mexico– generated almost $3 billion in assorted tax revenues during 1990-91,
according to a recent study.(7) But the bulk of those funds–$1.7 billion–went to Washington in the form of income tax and Social
Security levies. Related county costs–mostly in health and child care, jails and other justice-type expenses associated with the
immigrant population–outpaced local tax inputs by nearly 3 to 1.
Los Angeles officials say that children born to illegal immigrants now account for more than 65 percent of all births at
county-run hospitals, costing taxpayers $28 million a year. Federal welfare payments to U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants
residing in Los Angeles County approach $250 million annually.(8) “The federal government is making out like a bandit,” Keely says,
“while Los Angeles is taking it in the neck.”
Though few economists would deny that immigrant competition hurts low-skilled American workers, Lawrence Fuchs, former
executive director of the U.S. Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy and currently a professor at Brandeis University,
says his research convinced him that illegal aliens “probably create more jobs than they take away.” Douglas Massey, a sociologist
at the University of Chicago, agrees. “Without illegal immigrants,” he says, “many U.S. factories would go offshore. The garment
industry in East Los Angeles…would be in Taiwan or Mexico.”
That’s cold comfort to unemployed textile workers in Los Angeles, displaced by undocumented Mexicans working in sweatshops.
Moreover, expanding the nation’s gross domestic product on the backs of low-paid workers may not be morally just or economically
sound. Billions of dollars’ worth of wages are sent out of our economy. And hard-won benefits to American workers–the minimum wage,
an eight-hour work day, pensions–are undermined by the enormous underground economy.
The larger issue concerns how undocumented workers affect the structure of the economy–making it more service-oriented and
labor-intensive. Illegal immigration has almost certainly postponed greater mechanization, particularly in agriculture and
manufacturing, which may be essential for U.S. industries if they are to compete in the global economy.
- Would a national identification card diminish the flood of undocumented workers?
The novel idea behind IRCA was to hold businesses accountable for hiring improperly documented workers. But the
employer-sanctions section of the 1986 law had to be watered down to win enactment because of opposition from employers, who
resisted being deputized as border guards, and from civil rights groups that feared anyone with a Hispanic surname or Asian features
might be subjected to the third degree. IRCA set fines and jail terms for employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens, but in
practice the law is a sieve.
IRCA requires only that the employer examine any two of 17 proofs of citizenship, some of which, baptismal certificates for
example, have thousands of acceptable variations. And the employer need only make a reasonable inspection of a worker’s documents.
This lax standard has spawned a cottage industry in bogus documents. “The word is out that you can circumvent the law with
fraudulent documents,” says Duke Austin, spokesman for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) in Washington. “You can
pick up a Social Security card for $20 on just about any street corner in Los Angeles.” Immigration experts estimate that at least
40 percent of undocumented workers carry fraudulent papers. Last September, the INS seized two printing presses and more than
250,000 phony ID cards in Los Angeles.”
The prevalence of counterfeit documents has prompted some experts to call for a national identification system. “If America
were more adult about this issue, like some Western European nations,” argues Robert Kuttner, the economics correspondent for THE
NEW REPUBLIC magazine, “we might save ourselves endless inconvenience by establishing a single official ID. Employers could ask to
see it, and counterfeiting it would be a serious crime.”(10)
Most advocates for reforming immigration documents don’t go that far. But many agree with the University of Chicago’s Massey,
who says if the nation wants to control and deter undocumented migration, “there has to be some sort of employer-verification
system.” Massey contends that credit-card technology could easily be adapted to limit the hiring of undocumented workers. “VISA and
American Express cards are used millions of times daily,” he says. “Retailers simply call a number for verification.”
“The technology is there,” he adds. “What is lacking is the political will.” Americans have a deep-rooted distrust of any form
of government identification card. Until recently, Social Security cards included the disclaimer: “For Social Security and tax
purposes–not for identification,” even though Social Security numbers are now in standard use for driver’s licenses, bank accounts,
passport applications and so on.
Talk about an employment-verification system has met relentless opposition from a host of groups from the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce to the American Civil Liberties Union, who liken identification cards to South African passbooks. Even the Social Security
Administration opposes it.
“A national I.D. card may seem a logical solution,” says Muzaffar Chishti, an immigration specialist with the International
Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, “but for all sorts of social, political, civil libertarian reasons, it’s not worth the price.”
Nancy Cervantes, an attorney at the Coalition for Humane Immigration Laws in Los Angeles, agrees. “The prospect of a national
I.D. card is a little scary. Already the practice of requiring Social Security numbers for driver’s licenses encourages people to
drive without a license. I don’t think it’s in the public interest to have more government intrusion than there already is.”
Proponents of employment-verification cards say such Orwellian fears are misplaced. In fact, few people are seriously
advocating a national I.D. card that must be carried around at all times. Rather, proponents insist, most proposals for reforming
immigration documents are intended merely to enforce existing laws, and ultimately would lead to less discrimination. “America
didn’t need employment cards to intern the Japanese during World War II,” says Fuchs. “Their absence is not what guarantees freedom
and keeps fascism out of the U.S.”
In any case, virtually everyone agrees that without a more consistent–and fraud-resistant–means of differentiating eligible
workers from ineligible workers, employer sanctions won’t work. “The whole document business has to be reformed,” says Doris
Meissner, a former acting commissioner of the INS and presently a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace. We knew that when IRCA passed, but I don’t know if we have the stomach for it.”
- Do illegal immigrants have any rights under U.S. law?
Whether Americans welcome them or not, once immigrants are here they have certain rights guaranteed by the Constitution. In
earlier eras, however, some Americans assumed that undocumented aliens did not have any rights whatsoever–other than the right to
humane treatment during deportation. Talk of a right to an American education, for example, would have been dismissed out of hand.
Yet in 1982, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that undocumented immigrant children had a right to go to school, invalidating a 1975
Texas law withholding educational funds for children not “legally admitted” into the country.
In an opinion written by Justice William J. Brennan Jr., the court held that the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment
applied to all, regardless of citizenship status. Though public education is not a constitutional right, noted Brennan, “neither is
it merely some governmental `benefit’ indistinguishable from other forms of social welfare legislation.”
Education has “a fundamental role in maintaining the fabric of our society,” Brennan said. To deny children the right of
education, he concluded, would in the long run add to the problems and costs of unemployment, welfare and crime.(11)
Undocumented migrants have other rights, too. For example, all illegals have the right to apply for political asylum, a process
that can take more than a year and effectively prolong their stay in the United States. Though relatively few illegals have any
realistic hope of gaining asylum status, an increasing number are applying, knowing the system can’t handle them. Those awaiting a