Fix immigration

But reforms must prevent new influx at borders

President Biden has proposed a comprehensive immigration plan providing a path to citizenship for America’s estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants and legalizing the 650,000 “Dreamers” brought here as children. We dearly need such a comprehensive reform of our broken immigration system, but any such plan must have realistic inherent safeguards against the kind of abuse that could return us to our present large numbers of unauthorized immigrants.

The current situation is the worst of all possible outcomes. Some 11 million people, mostly from Mexico and points farther south, are living here without legal authorization and therefore without the safeguards that provide security, human rights, political rights and the right to the pursuit of happiness that our Constitution provides to citizens. This is irrational, unfair, unjust and unsafe for unauthorized immigrants and citizens alike. After all, a “nation” is a body of people living in a particular geographical region and united under a common system of governance that provides certain rights, protections and obligations for citizens. But if 11 million of those living here permanently are not citizens, how can there be a workable common system of governance? Unauthorized immigration is bad for immigrants, who are not protected from exploitation, and bad for communities, which must bear this burden with little federal recognition or assistance.

Immigrants, whether authorized or not, are likely to be among the best people on our planet. Immigration requires fortitude, bravery, planning, energetic action and strong desire to improve one’s life — qualities that America surely values. But immigration in very large numbers places real burdens on the nation and on destination communities.

The United State has not passed a major citizenship bill since 1986, when Republican President Ronald Reagan legalized 3 million previously unauthorized immigrants. Although the bill made any immigrant who had entered the country before 1982 eligible for amnesty, Reagan’s plan was sold partly because it offered tighter border security and strict penalties for hiring undocumented workers. But Reagan’s bill did not succeed in stopping unauthorized immigration because, in order to pass the bill, its strict sanctions on employers were stripped out. The result was that, despite passage of the bill, the unauthorized immigrant population rose from 5 million in 1986 to over 11 million in 2013.

We must legalize our unauthorized immigrants, but we must get it right this time by guaranteeing that it will not simply result in a new flood of unauthorized immigration. Indeed, Biden’s bill will be impossible to pass without such a guarantee. Legal immigration is beneficial for immigrants and for receiving nations, while illegal immigration is harmful for all.

President Biden’s bill supports increased border technology and higher penalties for employers who exploit unauthorized immigrants. It opposes an expanded border wall and does not make the E-Verify system, which checks a person’s legal status to work here, mandatory. The border wall makes no sense because immigrants are, above all, resourceful and will always find a way around a mere physical wall. But I don’t understand why we wouldn’t want to make the E-Verify system national and mandatory. The key mistake of Reagan’s amnesty program was its failure to enact sanctions on offending employers.

Biden’s program must not only utilize all methods of workplace enforcement, including E-Verify, but also reinforce these methods with sanctions against employers who skirt the rules. Once Biden’s admirable plan is passed, we must not allow it to blow up in our faces as Reagan’s plan did. Success requires strict enforcement, and enforcement requires strict workplace rules with sanctions against employers who violate them.

Ultimately, we can help the most by reaching out to needy countries through the United Nations and foreign aid. We spend only $35 billion per year on non-military foreign aid—near the bottom of the developed nations as a fraction of the national economy. This aid goes into health, education, science and other endeavors that improve the world while reducing emigration pressures. Our bloated $700 billion military budget would provide far more security, and do more to reduce foreign emigration pressures, if a big slice of it were instead devoted to foreign aid.

America’s efforts should go more into helping the world and less into fighting and sanctioning everyone with whom we disagree. Immigration is a wonderful American tradition and a solution for many desperate victims of poverty and bad governance. Biden’s comprehensive plan should have been passed two decades ago. Once this happens, we need new policies that are both more humane and more sustainably effective.