Exploiting Our Immigration Issues
President-elect Trump’s approach to our immigration issues is very descriptive of his personality: he would rather exploit a problem than solve it. He also seems to enjoy creating chaos and imposing pain on others. This is apparent from his recent actions with respect to the over 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. and a few million more seeking entry. He not only has interfered with the bipartisan efforts in the Senate to address immigration issues, but also has proposed some actions that will only make matters worse.
Without a doubt our nation needs to adopt a host of policies regarding immigration; such as which and how many immigrants should be admitted and the criteria and procedures for making those decisions. It also needs to decide what rights and privileges should be accorded to those permitted to enter our country and what criteria and procedures should be employed in determining which immigrants should be allowed to become citizens. In addition, protocols need to be established for safeguarding our borders and what resources should be allocated to enforce those protocols.
Still, it must be understood that immigrants are not an inherent problem as our nation was built by immigrants and continues to need additional immigrants to assure its future success. Contrary to Trump’s claims, immigrants coming to our country are not felons who have been sent here by the governments of their respective countries. Rather, they are simply individuals and families seeking a better life in the “land of the free and the home of the brave” and are willing to work hard to achieve that goal. Indeed, most have traveled long distances and faced many dangers just for that opportunity. Equally important, contrary to the accusations of President-elect Trump, the rate of crime committed by immigrants has been consistently lower than that of our own citizens.
Clearly, there are problems with the manner in which our nation has been treating its undocumented immigrants, and how it intends to deal with the many millions more who are trying to gain entry into our country. In order to appreciate what can and should be done, it’s important to understand the nature of our immigration issues and how they came to be. It’s also important to understand that the immigration issues that are now being debated almost exclusively relate to our 2000 mile border with Mexico even though illicit drugs are frequently smuggled into our country via airplanes and ships.
A fundamental question is whether the U.S. has too many undocumented aliens. The answer is mixed. On the one hand, the U.S. needs to expand the size of its work force as it has more job openings (approximately 7.7 million) than unemployed workers (4.1 million). It also has a declining percentage of workers contributing to the nation’s Social Security Trust Fund in relation to retired workers receiving Social Security benefits. Specifically, the U.S. currently has roughly 167 million workers contributing to the Social Security Trust Fund and 70.6 million retirees receiving Social Security benefits. In 1960, there were 5.1 workers per beneficiary; that ratio has dropped to 2.8 today. This situation places this important social welfare program in fiscal jeopardy. In addition, there are 63 million retires who receive Medicare benefits, 34% of which is funded by federal payroll tax deductions.
On the other hand, many of the nation’s unemployed workers appear to be unqualified to hold the jobs that are currently available. Some of the differential between unfilled jobs and unemployed workers can be explained by the fact that there may be a geographical misfit; i.e., workers with the requisite skills simply may not reside where there are openings for jobs for which they are qualified to perform. Another explanation is that many of the unemployed workers are illegal aliens and cannot be legally employed to fill the available jobs. This possibility is supported by the fact that the vast majority of the 4.1 million unemployed workers may be undocumented aliens as the total number of U.S. workers currently seeking unemployment benefits is only 224,000. This seems to indicate that the U.S. may also need to modify its laws to permit its undocumented workers to work in those industries with widespread worker shortages.
Of the roughly the 36.9 million immigrants living within our borders 11.7 million are undocumented. Those undocumented immigrants include roughly 1.5 million individuals who have received protection from deportation as a result of their refugee status, 530,000 are children who were brought to our country by their parents and are currently not subject to deportation under the DACA Program and another 50,000 who have been accorded temporary protection from deportation for having assisted U.S. law enforcement agencies to stop human trafficking. It’s therefore important to understand (a) how, when and why the balance of our nation’s undocumented immigrants came to our country, (b) what roles, if any, they are playing to help grow our nation’s economy, and (b) whether they pose a danger to our nation’s citizens.
Roughly 50% of our current undocumented aliens have come from Mexico as migrant farm workers. When the U.S. began imposing quotas on immigrants in 1924, many of them chose to remain in the U.S. where employment opportunities were more abundant, rather than return to Mexico and chance not being able to return. The number of undocumented Mexicans in the U.S. peaked at 6.9 million in 2009. Thereafter, their numbers declined to roughly 4.0 million largely as a result of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) which created a large number of high paying jobs in Mexico. Those jobs attracted many undocumented Mexican immigrants to return to Mexico and eliminated the necessity of others to seek employment in the U.S.
The total number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. peaked in 2008 at 12.2 million. That number declined to10.2 million in 2020 principally as a result of the Covid pandemic in which over 15 million workers lost their jobs. For the past three years, however, the number of undocumented immigrants has grown back to 11.7 million. Today, while Mexicans still represents the largest group of undocumented aliens living in the U.S;, other principal sources of undocumented aliens include El Salvador (750,000), India (725,000), Guatemala (675,000), and Honduras (525,000). Underlying the recent increase in undocumented aliens are two factors: the “push factor” (i.e., dangerous and unsettled conditions throughout South and Central America compelling their citizens to migrate) and the “pull factor” (i.e., the need for low-wage immigrant labor that exists in the U.S. in certain industries, especially agriculture, two service industries (restaurants and housecleaning) and the construction industry.
Concerns over problems in our immigration policies are not new. During the administration of George W. Bush there were repeated efforts to pass comprehensive immigration reform. These bills addressed border security concerns as well as immigration quotas. Ultimately they all failed to pass. The Senate wanted to address creating a path to citizenship for those undocumented migrant farm workers who had chosen to remain in the U.S. The House bills did not address that politically sensitive issue out of a concern that those illegal aliens would likely cast their votes in favor of Democratic politicians if they were allowed to become citizens.
Efforts to reform our immigration system were renewed during the Obama administration. A bipartisan group of eight Senators drafted a bill entitled the “Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act” which passed by a vote of 68-32. That bill provided for”
A 13 year path to citizenship for most illegal immigrants;
An increase in border enforcement to be made possible by a $46.3 billion appropriation;
A system to enforce visa time limits and to verify immigrant employment status; and
An expansion and streamlining of immigration processing.
The House, however, refused to even bring that bill to a vote. Like the problems encountered by the Bush administration, the sticking point was again a provision creating a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
When Trump began his campaign to become our nation’s 45th president in 2015 he demonized immigrants crossing our southern border, claiming that they were murders, rapist and drug dealers being sent by Mexico to undermine our nation. This, of course, was total poppycock as those who were then seeking asylum in the U.S. were coming from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Nor were they felons, but rather they were seeking to escape hunger and oppression in their home countries and pursue a better life here. It should also be pointed out that in 2015 the number of illegal immigrants in the U.S. had fallen from a high of 11.78 million in 2007 to 11.44 million, and the number of illegal border apprehensions during 2015 was roughly 400,000 compared to over 1 million per year during the 1990s.
This makes you wonder why Trump mischaracterized the identity of those seeking asylum in the U.S. Was this just a case of mistaken identity or even outright ignorance on his part? In addition, why did he think that they were murderers, rapist and drug dealers and why did he think that Mexico had sent them. Moreover, did he really think that the Mexican government would pay for a wall he planned to build? The answer to all of these questions seems to be that Trump was totally unconcerned about the “invasion” of these individuals. If he had been, he would have sought to learn more about the problem he was calling to the public’s attention. Instead, he was simply trying to generate a political issue that would arouse Republican voters not unlike the “Music Man’s” warnings about the young men from the other side of the tracks in River City. In short, he misidentified them as Mexicans because Mexicans represented the vast majority of illegal aliens in our country and mischaracterized them as felons to make them seem more threatening.
Trump’s solution to his perceived immigration “problem” was to build “a great wall” boasting that he would coerce Mexico to pay for It. This wasn’t just a fantasy of a delusional politician; it was a highly calculated attempt to win the support of poorly informed Americans, fearful of their futures and distrustful of people who were different. Trump was appealing to their hates and fears and his audacity of wanting to erect an impenetrable wall and compel the Mexican government to pay for it was intended to set him apart from other politicians as someone who could come to their rescue.
Of course, Congress refused to allocate sufficient funding for Trump to build his wall and his assertion that Mexico would pay for that folly was quickly set aside when Mexico’s president emphatically rejected Trump’s assertion. Still, it accomplished Trump’s purpose and helped him win the hearts and minds of a large segment of American voters as well as the 2016 presidential election. Nevertheless, despite his failure to actually build a 2,000-mile wall, he was able to cement his appeal to those disaffected Americans who had taken a chance on a man who had displayed how cruel he could be to persons they perceived to be their enemies. To that end, he made a show of establishing over-crowded border detention camps and separated over 5,000 immigrant children from their parents. However, it was not his overt inhumanity or even his failure to erect his wall or his inability compel Mexico to contribute to that effort, but his mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic that ultimately caused him to lose his reelection bid in 2020.
What he learned from this experience was that immigration remained a winning issue for him. The Covid-19 pandemic helped by worsening living conditions in Central and South America and prompted even more individuals and families to seek asylum in the U.S. Now they were coming from Haiti and Venezuela as well as Central America. Trump characterized their efforts to gain entry into the U.S. as caravans and falsely claimed that they were causing crime rates to soar in U.S. cities. He also blamed the new influx of immigrants on the Biden administration’s being receptive to the incoming asylum seekers.
Trump’s anti-immigrant campaign was aided by Texas Governor Abbott who sent buses loaded with over 100,000 immigrants to New York, Washington, Philadelphia and Chicago. Even Florida’s Governor DeSantis helped in this effort by transporting a plane full of immigrants which he had commandeered from Texas and flown to the small island of Matha’s Vineyard. For his part Trump claimed that Haitian immigrants living in Springfield, Ohio were eating their neighbors’ pets and that Venezuelan gangs were terrorizing Aurora, Colorado. He even claimed that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of America”, a phrase previously employed by Adolf Hitler to breed animosity against German Jews.
The Biden administration responded to these tactics by deploying more border patrols, speeding up the processing of asylum seekers and increasing deportation rates. Biden also adopted a policy of not considering asylum applications of those who illegally crossed our southern border. As a result, even though the number of individuals seeking asylum had dramatically increased by over 2 million, the number of undocumented aliens in the U.S. only increased by roughly 200,000.
Perhaps most significantly the Biden administration encouraged the Senate to again develop legislation that would deal with the nation’s immigration issues in a comprehensive manner. One of the principal draftsmen of this effort was Republican Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma and the resulting bill would have expanded the Department of Homeland Securities’ ability to (a) secure our southern border, (b) process incoming asylum seekers and (c) sets stricter standards for granting asylum. In addition it would have given the president the authority to close the border in the event that daily border encounters exceed 4,000 individuals. This effort was never brought to a vote in either the House or the Senate as a result of Trump’s request to Republican legislators that it not be considered. In making that request, he expressly stated that he wanted to preserve immigration as an issue in the 2024 presidential election campaign.
Since then Trump has spelled out his own agenda with regard to our nation’s undocumented immigrants. It calls for all such immigrants to be rounded up and placed in detention camps until they can be deported. Like his “great wall,” this plan is not only quixotic, it is one loaded with enormous adverse political and economic consequences. First, it will greatly disrupt the construction and hospitality industries. Secondly, it would leave a multitude of food items left to rot in the fields for lack of workers to harvest them. Thirdly, it would also cause inflation to rise higher than the 9.2% annual rate it reached in 2022 and that in turn would cause the Federal Reserve Bank to increase interest rates, further adversely affecting the nation’s economy. Unlike the recent rise in inflation, the resulting inflationary pressures would not quickly subside as a 7 million reduction in the nation’s work force cannot be quickly or even easily replaced. This, of course, does not even take into consideration the costs and disruptions that would be experienced as a result of rounding up and detaining 11.7 million undocumented aliens.
As demonstrated during his first term in office, constructing an impenetrable wall was a total fantasy as those sections that were constructed proved to be porous and construction in other areas of the 2,000 mile border were even more problematic. Undeterred by his failure to construct a wall along the entirety of our southern border, Trump now has seemingly altered his strategy, speaking simply of “sealing” our southern border. Presumably he is now considering using a variety of means which is a far more realistic (even if not, foolproof) undertaking. Equally important, this time Trump may not encounter Congressional opposition as virtually every Republican member of Congress is now fully beholden to him and has no illusions that he/she can vote to block Trump’s agenda and still remain in the Congress. That will give him at least a two-year window in which to secure the necessary funding for this project.
Trump has also mentioned his intention to eliminate “birthright citizenship” (i.e., awarding citizenship to children of undocumented aliens born in the U.S.). This may be even more fanciful than constructing a 2,000 mile impenetrable wall because birthright citizenship is ensconced in the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution. It would likely take years to pass an amendment to the Constitution even assuming the requisite majorities in the Congress and State legislatures could be assembled. Of course, Trump might seek the help of the Supreme Court to again rewrite the Fourteenth Amendment, something it recently did when it ruled that the “Disqualification Clause” did not apply to him based upon his incitement of the January 6th attack on the Capitol.
Arousing hate and fear appear to be Trump’s principal motives behind his waging war on undocumented immigrant as he seems to care little about the problems associated with deporting and excluding them. This is similar to his demonstrated lack of concern for resolving the more critical problems that bedevil the American people, such as reducing the costs of food, housing and healthcare services (see, “Curbing Rising Living Costs”). The only open question is whether those major donors who helped him win the 2024 election will be able to convince him not to do what his political ambitions are driving him to do. I fear that just as Putin has been able to silence his oligarchs, Trump will be able to do the same to his well-heeled political supporters.