Immigration

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Almost a thousand people a day are apprehended in this sector; in the course of several hours on the hilltop, I watched patrolmen pick out a group of crawling or running green shapes every few minutes and then, by radio, guide patrolmen on horseback to intercept them. Unlike E1 Paso's sojourners, many of these people tried to escape. They seemed desperate at having been caught. It was an ugly and sobering business; this is what the abstraction of "controlling the border" really means. But it also suggested that the Border Patrol can be more than a fig leaf. The crucial variable, as with the police, seems to be presence, and more presence requires more money. The least controversial part of the Simpson-Mazzoli bill is its recommendation that the Border Patrol be beefed up.

While a stronger border patrol might further restrict illegal immigration, it will not stop it. All parties to the political debate agree that poor people will continue to come to a rich country until life in their homeland improves.

Some claim that if international poverty is the ultimate cause of immigration, coping with poverty is the cure. Thus Senator Gary Hart, of Colorado, has said that immigration policy is really foreign policy. By encouraging economic development, we can reduce the pressures that drive people to our shores. Logically and ethically appealing as this approach may be, it is also utterly unrealistic, at least as the centerpiece of immigration policy. Through all its decades of providing foreign aid, the U.S. has helped other nations grow more wheat and produce more steel, but it has been spectacularly unsuccessful in sponsoring large job-creation projects in the Third World.

As its answer to illegal immigration, the Select Commission recommended the step that has become the most hotly contended feature of the Simpson-Mazzoli bill: "employer sanctions," which would undo the Texas proviso—that is, make it a crime to hire illegal immigrants.

The case in favor of employer sanctions is that jobs are the magnet for illegal immigrants, and if the jobs disappear, so will the incentive to migrate. Technical arguments rage about the circumstances in which limited employer-sanction programs have or have not proven effective in Europe or in certain American states. But there is a commonsense connection between restricting jobs and restricting illegal immigration. Illegal immigrants told me that the one place they had to produce plausible documents in order to be hired was southern Florida. (Elsewhere, employers asked at most for Social Security numbers and immigrants provided fake documents, a ruse expedient for both sides. ) Miami was also the only place where I saw illegal immigrants who had trouble finding work.

"The chief attraction of employer sanctions for me is that it controls jobs rather than people," the economist Michael Piore told a congressional committee in 1981. "I think it is more humane in general....Most undocumented immigrants come to work....If you could eliminate work opportunities, you would therefore stop the basic attraction. People do develop attachments to this country....Once those attachments develop, it becomes extremely cruel and, I think, in a fundamental sense, inhuman, to expel them."

Under the Simpson-Mazzoli bill, those entitled to work legally in the United States would have to carry some sort of identification. The bill leaves the details of the identification system vague and asks the President to report on different options within three years.

Three groups have formed an unlikely alliance to oppose this plan. Together, they were responsible for keeping the Simpson-Mazzoli bill from coming to a vote in the House last year. Business interests, including agricultural growers, claim that checking credentials will be yet another intolerable regulatory burden. Their real objection, especially in the case of the growers, seems to be the loss of a hardworking part of the labor force. In deference to growers' interests, the Simpson-Mazzoli bill includes a plan under which foreign laborers can be temporarily imported, usually for farm work.

Civil libertarians, including the American Civil Liberties Union, view the national identity card as another dangerous infringement on individual rights and privacy. "A secure verification system could very likely be built on a national data bank which would centralize personal data about all persons authorized to work in the United States," John Shattuck, of the ACLU, told a congressional committee last year.

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