A recent bipartisan proposal in Congress would allow more foreign health care workers to immigrate to the US to help combat the pandemic. The Healthcare Workforce Resilience Act (HWRA) would recapture up to 40,000 unused employment-based immigrant visas from prior years and allocate them to physicians and nurses. Specifically, the legislation would reserve 25,000 visas for nurses and 15,000 for physicians. The visas issued under the legislation would not be subject to any per-country numerical caps, and additional visas would be made available for spouses and unmarried children of the health care workers. Prospective recipients could petition for the visas up to 90 days after the end of the COVID-19 national emergency declaration. Temporary measures like the HWRA would be beneficial, but America’s aging population will result in physician shortages well beyond the pandemic, and permanent solutions are needed. 

America’s Looming Physician Shortage

According to projections from the Census Bureau, the population of people over the age of 75 will more than double in the next 40 years. Figure 1 below shows that over the same period, the population of people over 85 is expected to nearly triple.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau Population Projections 

Meanwhile, approximately 32 percent of physicians in the United States are already over the age of 60, and 51 percent of physicians are between the ages of 40 and 59. The median retirement age among physicians is about 65- years old, which suggests that a large share of America’s physician workforce is likely to think about retiring over the next decade.

The number of new health care workers entering the workforce may not be sufficient to offset the combined effects of the aging population and anticipated physician retirements. Figure 2 shows recent projections from the Association of American Medical Colleges suggesting the US could face a shortage of between 54,100 and 139,000 physicians by 2033. Allowing more foreign-trained physicians to practice in the United States could help alleviate this shortage.

Source: Association of American Medical Colleges 

The Role of Foreign Medical Graduates 

Immigrant physicians and nurses already play a significant role in the country’s health care workforce. A recent Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report found that approximately 30 percent of physicians in the United States were foreign-born. However, it can be difficult for more foreign-born physicians to come to the US and practice medicine, especially if they received their training in other countries. 

Data limitations make it difficult to assess how many health care workers in each occupation arrive annually under various visa programs. However, the available data suggest that the US immigration system does not prioritize health care workers. For example, a report from the Migration Policy Institute stated that:

“Just 5 percent (or 4,771) of the 93,615 H-1B petitions approved for initial employment in fiscal year (FY) 2018 went to workers in occupations in health care and medicine, according to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data. Fifty-one percent of annual H-1B petitions in FY 2018 went to workers in computer-related occupations.”

Expanding immigration opportunities for physicians would likely be beneficial given the anticipated shortage. However, doing so within the current immigration system would involve difficult tradeoffs and disadvantage other occupations. The challenge is that workforce needs and priorities vary across states. Some states may, in fact, benefit more from workers in tech-related occupations than from physicians. 

One solution to this problem is to grant states additional authority to determine their own immigration priorities based on their own workforce demands. Canada and Australia have implemented similar regional immigration programs that could serve as models.

Navigating limited immigration channels is only part of the problem. Foreign medical graduates (FMGs) must also obtain state-level licenses to practice medicine in the United States. Education requirements in the US are different than in most other developed countries, so FMGs often need to receive additional education and training––even if they have substantial experience working abroad.

Licensing requirements for foreign medical graduates can vary considerably from state to state. In general, FMGs are required to pass multiple exams, demonstrate English-language proficiency, obtain sub-specialty certifications, and complete a residency program in the US or Canada. If they wish to meet their residency requirement in the US, they must clear additional hurdles along the way. As the American Immigration Council explains: 

“First, the Educational Commission on Foreign Medical Graduates (ECFMG) must certify that the foreign national is academically prepared to enter a U.S. graduate medical education program (residency). Then, the physician must “match” into a U.S. residency program, in competition with U.S. medical graduates as well as other international peers.”

Residency program requirements can create significant bottlenecks for foreign medical graduates. In many cases, FMGs who completed residencies in other countries are required to repeat them because states may not recognize residency requirements in those countries. Moreover, match rates are considerably lower for foreign-trained physicians than US medical school graduates, leaving large numbers of otherwise capable FMGs unable to practice. In 2019 alone, more than 2,800 FMGs passed their required exams but were not matched with a residency program. 

Most states also require longer residencies for foreign medical graduates than for US medical school graduates and in many cases, these requirements are up to three times longer for FMGs. Holding foreign and US medical graduates to the same standards is a fairly modest reform that would present little risk in terms of quality. A 2014 paper pushed in Public Choice concluded that “over a third of all US states could reduce their physician shortages by at least 10 percent within 5 years just by equalizing migrant and native licensure requirements.”  

Many of the state-level pandemic responses point to opportunities for permanent reform. Early on in the COVID-19 crisis, several governors issued emergency orders that temporarily loosened restrictions on foreign medical graduates. New Jersey even granted temporary licenses to physicians already licensed in foreign countries. Unfortunately, the state is no longer accepting applications for these temporary licenses.   

Conclusion

The aging US population is expected to result in a growing shortage of physicians over the coming years. Inflexible immigration policies and onerous licensing requirements are exacerbating the problem by preventing foreign-trained physicians from practicing medicine in the United States.

The COVID-19 emergency responses at the state and federal levels have specifically recognized the importance of foreign-trained physicians. However, it would be a mistake to dismiss concerns about physician shortages after the COVID-19 crisis subsides. Lawmakers should build on the lessons learned during the pandemic and pursue permanent reforms to expand the physician workforce.  

The post COVID-19 Response Shows How America’s Physician Shortage Can Be Addressed appeared first on Reason Foundation.

Given all the suffering that has accompanied Puerto Rico’s prolonged recession and disaster recovery, it might seem odd to worry about bondholders. Much of the island’s debt is held by so-called “vulture funds” who bought bonds at deep discounts in hopes of realizing outsized returns. These players are hardly sympathetic. But they only represent a portion of the creditor class:  many middle-class individual investors both in Puerto Rico and the mainland are also losing out. Further, Puerto Rico’s ongoing insolvency prevents the government from financing new infrastructure while casting a shadow over the entire municipal bond market. If bondholders cannot expect reasonable and timely recoveries on defaulted bonds, they will hesitate to lend to Puerto Rico and potentially all other US municipal borrowers.

It wasn’t supposed to work this way, and the hurricane is only partly to blame. In 2016, Congress passed a Puerto Rico fiscal reform bill with bipartisan support. The Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA) gave Puerto Rico access to federal bankruptcy court while imposing a federally-appointed financial oversight board. Under the bill, Puerto Rico was given time to work out its debts, while being obliged to cut wasteful spending and improve fiscal transparency.

Unfortunately, the government, the oversight board and creditor groups failed to agree on a debt restructuring plan during the time allotted by PROMESA – the law’s stay on bond litigation ran out long before Hurricanes Irma and Maria landed. The dispute is now in federal bankruptcy court where the proceedings are chewing up tens of millions of dollars in legal fees — dollars that could instead be going to bondholders, and the commonwealth’s employees and/or retirees.

Meanwhile, the Puerto Rico government is over three years behind in producing audited financial reports and is refusing to implement spending reductions mandated by the oversight board. Representative Rob Bishop (R-UT)—who played a major role in crafting PROMESA—recently criticized the oversight board for allowing the commonwealth government to circumvent its authority and for its inadequate outreach to bondholders.

With roughly $70 billion in bond obligations and another $50 billion in unfunded pension liabilities, Puerto Rico has an unmanageable debt burden, and the problem becomes worse as the island’s economy continues to shrink. Restoring economic growth is crucial to ensuring that creditors see a meaningful recovery: not 100 cents on the dollar but something more than a token percentage.

The Economic Challenge Of Chronic Population Decline

To achieve economic growth, Puerto Rico will have to halt and then reverse its chronic population decline. As the accompanying chart shows, the island’s population peaked in 2004 and has recently fallen back to levels not seen since the 1980s. During the last calendar year, 275,000 more passengers departed Puerto Rico airports than arrived, mostly in the wake of the destruction wrought by Hurricane Maria.  The majority of those leaving are unlikely to return soon if ever: Florida and other states offer better opportunities than—and more than double the wages of—the stagnant Puerto Rico economy.

Sources: US Census through 2017; Puerto Rico Fiscal Plan for 2018-2023.

Government projections show a further population decline through 2023 when the number of residents is expected to fall below three million — a level last seen in the 1970s. Aside from out-migration, the commonwealth is also afflicted by a low birth rate. According to World Bank statistics, Puerto Rico’s crude birth rate (the number of births per thousand population) fell from 15.6 in 2000 to just 9.0 in 2015, well below the 2015 US rate of 12.4.

Reversing Population Decline through Territorial Work Visas

With insufficient births and the exodus to the mainland, Puerto Rico can only stabilize and grow its population by attracting newcomers. The commonwealth has enacted multiple laws designed to attract wealthy Americans by providing them with tax incentives. For example, Act 22 offers new residents a 100 percent income tax exemption on capital gains, dividends and interest. But these laws are only attracting a tickle of mainlanders. In 2015, the Census Bureau estimates that only about 9,000 US residents not of Puerto Rican origin moved to Puerto Rico, little changed from the levels seen before the tax incentives took effect.

If Puerto Rico cannot attract other Americans, it should be able to attract foreigners, especially individuals from Latin America who share the island’s Spanish language. Right now, prospective Latin American immigrants are attracted to California, Florida, Texas and other mainland states because of their stronger economies.

But if the federal government allowed Puerto Rico to issue territorial visas, it could attract individuals from Venezuela and Central America now living under difficult conditions who would not otherwise be granted admittance to the US. By issuing territorial visas, Puerto Rico would not be able to grant US citizenship or even a path to US citizenship, but it could give a new class of immigrants work permits and/or permanent residency in the commonwealth.

The idea is somewhat akin to one advanced by my Reason colleague Shikha Dalmia. She has advocated state-based work permits, an idea that took legislative form last year. S.1040, the State Sponsored Visa Pilot Program Act of 2017 introduced by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), would allow states to provide visas that would allow aliens to “perform services, provide capital investment, direct an enterprise, or otherwise contribute to the state’s economic development.”

S.1040 does not include Puerto Rico, sets a low limit of just 5,000 visas per state per year and does not allow states to offer permanent residence. Because Puerto Rico is separated from the rest of the US by an ocean, is primarily Spanish speaking and is experiencing an economic crisis, it needs to and should be able to take advantage of much more liberal limits without raising the same red flags that normally worry immigration opponents.

When I previously suggested this idea, commenters had a fair question:  since Puerto Rico has a high unemployment rate, how would migrants find jobs? For this plan to work many of the new arrivals would have to start their own businesses, employing themselves and others in their cohort. Entrepreneurship is common among immigrants, including those who come to the US from Latin America.

Unfortunately, Puerto Rico is not a business-friendly place. The World Bank ranks Puerto Rico 64^th in the world in its Ease of Doing Business Survey, well below the US, which ranked 6^th. Puerto Rico scores poorly in such areas as dealing with construction permits, registering property, paying taxes and enforcing contracts.

Sparking Economic Growth through Deregulation, Special Economic Zones

To absorb new arrivals and allow them to become economically productive taxpayers, Puerto Rico needs to reduce red tape, a task that may be easier said than done given political support for the various regulations Puerto Rico has implemented.

An alternative to island-wide deregulation would be the creation of Special Economic Zones (SEZs) that provide a much greater degree of business flexibility. Puerto Rico already has a 4,500-acre free trade zone in which manufacturers are exempt from duties on imports of raw materials. Expanding this zone and offering more tax and regulatory variances could be a way forward.

SEZs have been successful elsewhere around the world, especially in China. Shenzhen, previous a small market town near Hong Kong, grew at an annual rate of 40% in the dozen years after Deng Xioaping designated it as an SEZ in 1980.

Two city-states that operate much like SEZs are Hong Kong and Singapore. Both of these small nations have joined the ranks of First World economies over the last half-century by offering relatively high levels of economic freedom and relatively low levels of taxation. More recently, the former Soviet republic of Estonia has followed the example of these Asian tigers, adopting free trade and a flat income tax (now 20 percent). Since 1995, its per capita gross domestic product (GDP) on a purchasing power parity basis has grown from 35 percent to 75 percent of European Union levels.

The potential for SEZs in Puerto Rico will be a topic of the Startup Societies Foundation conference at George Mason University on May 9-10. I look forward to discussing the benefits of both SEZs and territorial visas for Puerto Rico. Unorthodox ideas like these are needed to rejuvenate the island’s economy and provide value for its beleaguered creditors.

The post As It Recovers, Puerto Rico Needs More People and More Economic Freedom appeared first on Reason Foundation.

To learn how to receive invitations to future private telebriefings, please contact Preston Cornish at preston.cornish@reason.org.

America’s immigration system is a monument to Leninist central planning. Under it, federal bureaucrats in Washington sit and plan the labor market of the entire country. And, as expected, they make a complete hash of things. They divide foreign workers into “skilled” and “unskilled” categories. This distinction is economically meaningless, of course, given that as far as employers are concerned, the relevant distinction is between those workers who generate value and those who don’t. But it is also arbitrary. Why are underwater welders regarded as unskilled rather than skilled?

It is vital to move America’s immigration laws in a more rational direction by letting states and employers-instead of federal bureaucrats with their one-size-fit-all approaches-call the shots in recruiting foreign workers. One way of doing this would be by federalizing immigration policy along the lines of Canada’s Provincial Nominee Program.

The post Federalizating Immigration: A Path to More Rational Policy appeared first on Reason Foundation.

The one prominent exception was Karl Marx. Although he doesn’t seem to have treated this subject in a systematic way, his comments here and there suggest that he was no fan of immigration. For example, he regarded England’s decision to absorb the “surplus” Irishmen being driven out of their country during the Great Famine not as a benefit but a ploy by the English bourgeoisie to “force down wages and lower the material and moral position of the English working class.” The popular, modern-day restrictionist canard that immigration from the Third World to rich countries is tantamount to “importing poverty” has its genesis in Marxist thought. Indeed, far from being embarrassed by this lineage, restrictionists tout it. Consider this quote by Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies, the premier restrictionist outfit in the country: “Employer organizations spend enormous resources lobbying the government to import a ‘reserve army of labor,’ to use Marx’s phrase, so that they can hold down their labor costs and avoid unionization.”

It is ironic that half of the public in the free world, including America, the land of immigrants, sides not with free-market economists like Adam Smith and Ludwig von Mises-but with Marx, the father of socialism.

The primary reason for this is that the case for open borders is counterintuitive. It is hard to see how, in a world with finite resources, allowing more people into a country would enhance its prosperity instead of leading to overcrowding, more job competition and lower wages. But this Malthusian worldview, I will argue, is ultimately flawed-even dangerously so. I will lay out the theoretical case for open borders, present the empirical evidence showing that immigration is a net boon and address the common restrictionist objection to open borders: the issue of welfare.

But, first, what does open borders mean?

Attachments

• Immigration Policy: An Argument for Opening America’s Borders

The post Immigration Policy: An Argument for Opening America’s Borders appeared first on Reason Foundation.

Alabama’s law is by far the worst in a slew of similar bills across the country. Like Arizona, the ringleader, Alabama requires police to arrest-without bond, in its case-anyone unable to produce proof of residency. But that’s the kindest thing in the law. It’ll also bar courts from enforcing contracts involving undocumented workers, leaving them no legal recourse against employers who refuse to pay, for example. What’s more, undocumented households will face felony charges if they try to obtain basic municipal services such as running water.

But the provision that has struck terror in Alabama’s Hispanic community is that schools will now be required to collect information about the residency status of students and share it-albeit minus the names-with state authorities. Thousands of Hispanic kids have reportedly dropped out of school, fearing that this is a set up for future deportation.

The idea obviously is to make life so miserable for undocumented workers that they will leave the Heart of Dixie voluntarily. It is deeply ironic that a state that once violated human rights to maintain cheap, black, slave labor is now doing so again to keep out cheap, brown, voluntary labor that, even George Borjas, the Harvard economist much loved by restrictionists because he opposes more open immigration policies, grudgingly admits raises an average American’s wealth by about 1 percent.

But there are parallels galore between the restrictionist and the segregationist crusades.

The most obvious is that they both invoke a grand American principle to justify a dubious cause. Racists justified slavery and Jim Crow in the name of states’ rights then and restrictionists are justifying their attack on illegals in the name of the “rule of law” now. But rule of law in the service of bad laws is a form of tyranny.

There are 11 million undocumented workers in this country because U.S. immigration policies have closed practically all options for them to legally work and live here. Every country has a right to control its borders. But both liberal and illiberal immigration policies are consistent with this right. Dispatching drones and erecting electric fences to prevent willing foreign workers from being hired by willing domestic employers are tactics more suitable to a police state than a free republic.

But a bigger similarity between restrictionists and segregationists is their total blindness to what they are doing to a minority community. If restrictionists have their way, undocumented kids will have a hard time attending school, going to college, or ever gaining citizenship.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration, buckling under restrictionist pressure, deported nearly 400,000 undocumented workers in fiscal 2011, an all-time record. Given that nearly 52 percent of illegals live in mixed-status families, this means that many American children and spouses lost a source of income. Even more tragically, a study released by the Applied Research Center last week found that at least 5,100 children whose parents have been detained or deported are under foster care-a number it expects will grow to 15,000 over the next five years.

Closing off economic opportunities and tearing apart families will ghettoize a subset of Hispanics just as segregation and Jim Crow ghettoized southern blacks. Right now, a country caught up in a restrictionist fury might not care.

But a civilized society doesn’t forever tolerate such blatant inhumanity. Ultimately, some triggering event forces it to confront its turpitudes.

For decades, Americans looked the other way as blacks endured lynchings and daily indignities in the Jim Crow south. But then a relatively minor incident-the disappearance of three voter rights activists in Mississippi (who were subsequently found murdered by the Klan)-shocked the nation. In its aftermath, President Lyndon Johnson pushed through the Civil Rights Act in 1964, paving the way for a giant growth in federal power, some licit and some illicit.

The act rightly banned government-based racial discrimination. But it also banned private discrimination by businesses. This certainly abrogated their right of voluntary association, but there were no other credible options to root out the systemic racism that froze blacks out of mainstream southern society prepared to impose its ways through violence.

But the Civil Rights era also inaugurated affirmative action programs giving less qualified blacks a leg up. This was unfair, but a nation experiencing a massive guilt attack couldn’t make such fine moral distinctions. And conservatives, who’d lost their credibility by being on the wrong side of history, couldn’t convince it otherwise.

Something of this sort is likely to repeat itself. Restrictionists can’t forever suspend America’s innate sense of justice and equality. Ultimately, the country will have to take responsibility for the havoc their agenda has wreaked on the Hispanic community-especially since Hispanics will comprise a third of the population by 2050. It’ll be impossible to reject their demands for government reparations and programs.

So the question is what do conservatives hate more: big government or undocumented workers? If it is the former, then they should stop drinking any more restrictionist poison. And if it is the latter, then they should stop pretending to be the party of limited government.

Reason Foundation Senior Analyst Shikha Dalmia is a columnist at The Daily, where a version of this column originally appeared.

The post Alabama’s War on Immigrants appeared first on Reason Foundation.

But this will put her in bed with groups such as the Center for Immigration Studies and Numbers USA who are the political godfathers of the modern anti-immigrant movement. Inspired by a radical Malthusianism, they tout an ultra restrictionist agenda-advocating in CIS’s case a moratorium on all immigration, skilled and unskilled. They are part of a network of organizations founded by John Tanton, a Michigan-based ophthalmologist, who warmly applauded China’s one-child policy and sterilization of Third World women, all of which fundamentally conflicts with Bachmann’s Christian, pro-life beliefs.

They have peddled myths about unauthorized workers that have stymied rational immigration reform. Here are the five big ones that Bachmann will inevitably hawk.

Illegal Immigrants Raise Crime Rates

The reality is the exact opposite. The violent and property crime rate in Arizona actually declined between 1998 and 2008 as its illegal immigrant population soared, debunking the central rationale for the harsh anti-immigrant law it recently adopted. The same is true for California, New Mexico, and Texas. Indeed, El Paso, a Texas border town that has a predominantly Hispanic population-much of it foreign, illegal and poor-had the third lowest violent crime rate in 2008, after Honolulu and New York.

In fact, undocumented aliens have far lower crime and conviction rates than the native born because they want to avoid the law. Indeed, Jack Levin, a Northeastern University criminologist maintains that if you want to live in a safe city, find one with a large immigrant population.

Illegal Immigrants Threaten American Jobs and Depress Wages

They don’t. Why? Because they gravitate toward those sectors where the native-born don’t or won’t work. They complement, not supplant, the skills of Americans. For example, 54 percent of tailors in America are foreign born, but less than 1 percent of crane operators are.

The economy isn’t a zero-sum game where an immigrant’s gain is an American’s loss. Immigrants create their own jobs, starting businesses at a rate greater than the native-born. They enhance overall economic productivity, lowering the prices of goods and services and raising-not lowering-real wages.

Illegal Immigrants Mooch Off Welfare

In fact, available evidence suggests that unauthorized workers contribute more in taxes than they consume in services. The National Research Council found that unskilled immigrant families on average put $80,000 more into federal coffers than they use over their lifetimes, once the contributions of their children are factored in.

And that was before the 1996-welfare reform act. Since then, illegals have been barred from collecting most means-tested federal benefits except for emergency medical services. However, they didn’t get a reprieve from taxes. All of them pay state sales taxes and property taxes (through rent) that help offset the cost of roads, schools and other non-means tested services they use. And 62 percent of them also pay federal income taxes (via withholdings) while 66 percent contribute to Social Security and Medicare. Their Social Security contributions put $50 billion annually into something called the “earnings suspense file” that they’ll likely never see again because they use fake Social Security numbers on their returns that can’t be traced back to them.

Illegal Immigrants are Queue-Jumpers Who Violate the Rule of Law

This trope has turned amnesty into a dirty word. It suggests that regularizing unauthorized workers would effectively diss the millions patiently waiting their turn. This betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of our immigration system.

The folks waiting in the “queue” are mainly skilled immigrants because there is a queue for them to wait in. Not so with most unskilled immigrants.

Skilled immigrants can apply for a temporary work visa called H1-B. This allows them to legally work here while simultaneously applying for a green card. The available H1-Bs are woefully inadequate and the green card process byzantine and long. But it exists.

There is nothing equivalent for non-agricultural unskilled immigrants. Not only is it way harder for them to land a temporary work visa, the terms of the visa bar them from applying for a green card while here. And there is no process for them to apply for one from their own country. Asking them to wait in line is a polite way of telling them to get lost.

Mexicans will Overrun America Without a Berlin Wall Along the Rio Grande

This is the mother of all fears. However, immigration flows are remarkably self-regulating when left to market forces. They increase when the U.S. economy is booming relative to Mexico’s, and diminish when it slows down. Indeed, a growing body of research, including by Princeton University’s Mexican Migration Project, has found that since America’s recession began, the flow of Mexican workers has gone into negative territory. But even during booms, the flow closely tacks the jobs available and the economy’s capacity to absorb foreign workers.

Shikha Dalmia is a senior analyst at Reason Foundation and a columnist at The Daily, where this column originally appeared.

The post Michele Bachmann’s Unholy Crusade appeared first on Reason Foundation.

Last month, the administration announced a renewed crackdown against employers who hire undocumented aliens, notifying 1,000 of them to prepare for an audit raid. Under these raids, Immigration and Customs Enforcement inspectors descend upon companies and comb through their books, looking for irregularities.

Employees who don’t have authorization to work or valid Social Security numbers are fired and sometimes arrested. And employers whose books show signs of under-the-table payments face fines, forfeiture, and jail.

The beauty of these raids, especially from the standpoint of PR within the Hispanic community, is that they seem more humane than the Bush administration’s flashy workplace raids in which inspectors, TV cameras in tow, would crash a taqueria or a construction site, round up the workers, demand their papers, and arrest those who couldn’t produce valid ones for future deportation. By contrast, a bunch of inspectors sitting around, quietly going through books doesn’t seem that awful. But the impact of such silent raids on businesses and workers-both immigrant and American-is far more deadly.

For starters, because they don’t require probable cause and are cheaper than the Bush raids, the Obama administration can conduct more of them. The Los Angeles Times reported even before the new crackdown that the number of employer raids had increased fourfold since 2008, and the fines collected from businesses grew sevenfold. Meanwhile, deportations were at a record high. This helps defuse accusations by enforcement-first conservatives that President Obama is soft on illegal immigrants. But the real purpose of the raids is, in the words of an Obama official, driving “unfair competition out of the market.”

They target businesses in food production, information technology, financial services, construction, and other sectors regarded as “critical infrastructure and key resources” (and therefore, apparently, ripe for destruction). Chipotle, the Mexican fast-food chain, recently faced a multicity raid, forcing it to fire hundreds of workers, something that will hurt its financial results for the first time since it opened, diminishing its ability to expand. Meanwhile, American Apparel was forced to lay off more than a quarter of its factory workers after a 2009 audit, which it maintains has brought it to the brink of bankruptcy.

American Apparel might survive, but many small businesses such as San Diego’s French Gourmet, a little eatery, and a West Coast franchise of Chuy’s Mesquite Broiler, won’t. French Gourmet’s owner is facing $4 million in fines, 30 years in prison, and forfeiture of his restaurant building-all for the crime of having 12 undocumented aliens among his 120 employees. Likewise, Chuy’s owners are looking at $10 million in fines and up to 83 years in prison. Serial rapists get milder punishments.

Beyond ruining the owners and undocumented workers, the raids will throw hundreds of Americans out of jobs when these restaurants shut down. Worse, future Chuy’s Mesquites and French Gourmets, whose economics pan out only when they can keep some portion of their labor costs low, won’t even come into existence. It is estimated that about 10 to 40 percent of workers in the restaurant business are undocumented, which means that 60 to 90 percent are not. Yet their jobs, too, will be jeopardized-at a time when unemployment has soared to 9.2 percent.

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which has been eying undocumented workers in the service sector to boost its flagging membership, broke ranks with the anti-immigration stance of its sister unions some years ago and has condemned the Obama raids. But the AFL-CIO, UAW, and others are quietly cheering them on. Incidentally, none of the unions, not even the SEIU, supports a guest worker program that would give unskilled immigrants legal options to work in the country, eliminating the root cause of the illegal problem.

Nor is the administration’s jihad against foreign workers limited to the undocumented category. It also backed legislation by congressional Democrats to double the fee for H1-B visas-a temporary work permit for highly skilled workers-for companies whose work force contains 50 percent foreign workers. This mainly affects a handful of Indian companies, raising their visa costs by $250 million annually.

Administration apologists claim that these tactics are meant to create the political space for comprehensive immigration reform. But the president has made literally no effort to advance that objective. What he has advanced is a labor agenda under the guise of immigration policy.

The great hope from President Obama when he took office was that, having spent his formative years abroad, he’d understand-and use his bully pulpit to help the American public understand, too-that immigration is not a zero-sum game: Immigrants seeking a better life make America better off, just as his family made the countries where they lived better off. Instead, he has pandered to Republicans’ parochialism and labor’s protectionism to advance his own political prospects.

This is change, but there isn’t much hope in it-for immigrants, American workers, or the American economy.

Shikha Dalmia is a senior analyst at Reason Foundation and a columnist for The Daily, America’s first iPad newspaper, where this column originally appeared. This column first appeared at Reason.com.

The post Obama’s Anti-Immigrant Stance appeared first on Reason Foundation.

It’s not clear what the police were doing there. Santiago’s lawyer says the two officers told him they were investigating a loud party from the night before, while a police spokesman says Gomez had seen the officers minutes earlier and aroused suspicion by trying to avoid them. Santiago, Gomez, and a neighbor say the cops immediately started asking Gomez about his immigration status, then roughed him up and arrested him. They apparently were suspicious about a blender, a boombox, and CDs that Santiago and Gomez were carrying. Santiago and Gomez say they were taking them to sell at a flea market, and the police spokesman says the officers did not have probable cause to charge them with any crime related to the items. The incident nevertheless landed Gomez in an immigration jail two states away, where he has been confined for nearly a year while he waits to see whether he will have to leave the country where he has lived for at least the past 15 years.

This encounter did not take place in Arizona, where a controversial law enacted last year, on hold as a result of a federal injunction, requires police to question suspected illegal immigrants about their citizenship status. It happened in Raleigh, North Carolina, where Police Chief Harry Dolan has spoken out against the Arizona law. Raleigh police are not even among the 70 or so municipal law enforcement agencies in 26 states that are trained to enforce federal immigration law by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). That program, authorized under Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, has expanded dramatically since 9/11.

For Gomez, it didn’t matter that Raleigh police don’t participate in 287(g) because the Wake County Sheriff’s Department, which runs the local jail, does. The department was also the first agency in North Carolina to sign onto the Department of Homeland Security’s Secure Communities program, which means deputies have ready access to ICE databases and electronically alert the agency when an unauthorized alien has been fingerprinted in the jail. That’s how Gomez ended up behind bars.

Secure Communities and 287(g) are supposed to focus the federal government’s immigration enforcement powers on “criminal aliens”-illegal immigrants who commit crimes and thus come into contact with local cops performing their regular duties. In practice, however, many noncriminal aliens, whose lawbreaking is limited to the civil offense of living in the United States without permission, get swept up in this dragnet. As a result, they are treated like criminals, but without the legal protections that criminal defendants enjoy. They are subject to indefinite detention, and they can be ordered out of the country based on a legal process much less rigorous than a criminal trial.

In the post-9/11 political climate, local cops are tasked with enforcing civil immigration laws, whether they’ve been trained for it or not. Rogue officers can set an immigrant on a path to detention and deportation even if immigration enforcement is not within their authority. While detained, suspected illegal aliens may suffer from medical neglect and physical abuse. Their freedom, health, and safety depend on the whims of police, federal agents, judges, and jailers.

Federal Law, Local Enforcement

The overall number of noncitizens apprehended by federal authorities fell by almost two-thirds between 2001 and 2009, from about 1.6 million to just over 600,000. Yet the number detained in ICE jails during this time rose by 85 percent, from 209,000 to a record 383,500. Some 32,000 are in detention on any given day in about 370 facilities across the nation, most of which are state prisons and local jails in which ICE pays for space.

The assistance of local law enforcement agencies has played a crucial role in the surge of detentions. As of March, more than 1,100 local jails across the country, 36 percent of the total, were participating in Secure Communities. As a result, an undocumented immigrant jailed for any reason anywhere in Florida, the Southwest, or the mid-Atlantic states faces potential deportation. By 2013 ICE aims to have full participation by every local jail in the United States, which will result in an estimated annual identification of 1.4 million undocumented immigrants (out of 11 million or so currently residing in the U.S.).

Because they lead to incarceration, 287(g) and Secure Communities effectively criminalize immigration violations, which the U.S. had historically handled as civil matters in special administrative courts. Immigration courts, crucially, are not bound by the same rules as criminal courts. Suspected illegal aliens do not have an absolute right to an attorney: The government can’t stop them from hiring a lawyer, but they can’t fall back on a public defender. Nor do they have a right to see exculpatory evidence. Judges can allow hearsay and illegally obtained evidence. To make its case, the government has to provide “clear, unequivocal and convincing evidence,” not the proof “beyond a reasonable doubt” required in criminal cases. Hence an immigrant like Gomez can be deported even with only doubtful evidence that he entered the country illegally, and even if the police never should have approached him in the first place. Nor can he count on the immigration courts to protect what limited rights he has. According to the American Bar Association, immigration judges apply the law inconsistently and the Board of Immigration Appeals “unduly favor[s] the government at the expense of the noncitizen.”

Since ICE detentions have risen dramatically in the last decade, thanks largely to the assistance of local police, the immigration courts are clogged. Karen Grisez, an immigration attorney who chairs the American Bar Association’s Commission on Immigration, says judges are under pressure to process detainees’ cases within 60 days, meaning nondetained immigrants have to wait at least a year for their cases to be heard. And when they are, judges limit the hearing to two hours, which leaves little time to call witnesses. “You can be precluded from making your best case,” Grisez says. “The problem is not really that the law has changed but the more aggressive enforcement.”

Officially, the enforcement efforts are supposed to focus on spies, terrorists, violent criminals, felons, repeat offenders, gang members, and others who “pose a serious risk to public safety.” In a March 2011 memo, ICE Director John Morton reiterated this policy, which was developed under President George W. Bush and maintained under President Barack Obama.

But the record of ICE’s “fugitive operations teams,” which track and arrest illegal immigrants at their jobs and in their homes, suggests that the agency is not following its official policy of deporting immigrants who commit crimes, as opposed to violating civil immigration rules. Between 2003 and 2008, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a D.C.-based think tank that studies immigration around the world, only 27 percent of the people arrested by the teams had prior criminal records of any kind. Similarly, according to a 2009 report from the Department of Homeland Security (which oversees ICE), two-thirds of all ICE detainees between 2007 and 2009 had no prior criminal record.

Furthermore, some detainees with criminal records committed their offenses long ago, but ICE is moving only now to deport them, even if they have been living in the country legally for many years. In North Carolina, Hector Villanueva, a Baptist pastor with a valid green card, faces deportation because ICE agents learned of a 15-year-old burglary conviction in California. In New York, the Dominican cab driver Eligio Valerio is fighting ICE’s attempt to remove him from the country for possessing an illegal gun in 1982, shortly after he became a permanent resident.

You might think that partnerships with local police, whose mission is to protect public safety, would help ensure that immigration enforcement focuses on dangerous criminals. But officers participating in 287(g) and Secure Communities can choose to round up illegal immigrants, including otherwise law-abiding people who came to the U.S. to work and support their families. Under 287(g), Grisez reports, police have gone to apartment complexes looking for one family, found they had moved, and then questioned the new tenants about their status. “Even though all of the laws on their face say there can’t be racial profiling,” she says, “some of these cooperative agreements lend themselves to officers going a bit overboard.”

In fiscal year 2009, local law enforcement agencies participating in Secure Communities arrested 111,000 undocumented immigrants, nearly one-third of the national total. According to ICE, less than 10 percent of them were charged with violent crimes. Between 2007 and 2009, researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found, only 13 percent of immigrants detained under 287(g) in that state had been charged with felonies. In some counties, the UNC researchers found, the only charge for nearly a third of the immigrants deported was driving without a valid license.

Since undocumented immigrants cannot legally obtain driver’s licenses in many states, 287(g) and Secure Communities invite racial profiling of Hispanics through license checkpoints and traffic patrols. “If the only charge they could find to put on a driver is driving while license revoked,” says Elizabeth Simpson, an immigration lawyer with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice who is representing Gomez pro bono, “I have to wonder why they pulled him over in the first place.”

A Year in Jail

In Gomez’s case, police charged him with resisting a public officer and disorderly conduct; they charged Santiago with resisting and assaulting an officer. All of these are crimes they could have committed only after the officers approached the two of them. According to Santiago, the officers tried to link her and Gomez with a loud Memorial Day weekend party that had stretched into the early morning hours that Saturday, a detail not mentioned in the arrest reports or warrants. She and Gomez say they were never at that party, just walking down the street in broad daylight. A neighbor anonymously told the Spanish-language Raleigh newspaper Que Pasa it looked like the officers planned to arrest the pair as soon as they pulled up. “He never did anything to be arrested,” the witness said. “They were only walking. To me, there was an element of discrimination.”

In an affidavit, Santiago (who is Irish American but kept the surname of her Puerto Rican ex-husband) agreed. “Those officers targeted Francisco because he looks Latino,” she wrote. “They got mad that he was just asking for his right to a lawyer and started beating him up.”

Wake County jail records show Gomez suffered a bloody wound to his right arm. Santiago says that’s because one of the officers jammed Gomez’s arm into the concrete sidewalk while twisting his other arm behind his back and kneeling on his ribcage. The Mexican consulate in Raleigh asked the Raleigh Police Department to investigate the officers for brutality and racial profiling, but an internal affairs investigation concluded that they had conducted themselves properly. Raleigh police spokesman Jim Sughrue says the officers arrested Gomez for profanity, verbal abuse, and threats, while they arrested Santiago for attacking one of them. Santiago says Gomez was complaining about previous harassment by other officers and demanding to be left alone; she also admits she tried to pull the officers off him, but her charges didn’t stick because the officers didn’t show up for court.

Sughrue declines to talk about the officers’ actions but says the department’s “nonbiased policing” policy prohibits officers from detaining someone based on race, ethnicity, or national origin. A civil rights complaint about the incident filed by the Southern Coalition for Social Justice is pending at the Justice Department. “They never should have hit me or treated me in that manner,” Gomez wrote in his statement for the Justice Department. “They were torturing me and abusing me for no reason.”

For Gomez, the criminal charges and the true facts of the case were irrelevant; once he was in the Wake County jail, he was subject to an ICE hold. After he spent 18 days there, the prosecutor dropped the disorderly conduct charge and Gomez pleaded no contest to resisting the officers because his criminal defense lawyer (not Simpson) told him he’d be deported anyway and giving in would be the quickest way back to Mexico. He was sentenced to time served, and ICE immediately transferred him to the Alamance County jail, a holding facility an hour east of Raleigh. That jail provides ICE with up to 200 beds a day for $61 each.

From there Gomez went to the 1,900-bed Stewart Detention Facility in Lumpkin, Georgia, operated by Correctional Corporations of America, a private prison company that charges ICE $65 a day per inmate. CCA, which built the Lumpkin jail in 2004 and has profited from the immigration crackdown, contributed to the campaigns of the Arizona legislators who sponsored that state’s law aimed at rounding up illegal aliens. The company is a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council, which lobbied for the new legislation, according to a 2010 NPR investigation.

Although he has resolved the charges against him in North Carolina, Gomez has been incarcerated in Georgia for nearly a year. He has been through several court hearings, and the slow pace of his prosecution is typical for such complex cases. In 2010 the American Bar Association (ABA) found that the average immigration judge hears more than 100 cases every month, which leaves little time for questions about police misconduct. Calling for reform, the ABA faulted Justice Department lawyers for failing to use prosecutorial discretion and overloading the system with minor cases.

Gomez had no lawyer during his first six months in ICE custody, which is the norm for immigration detainees. In fiscal year 2008, according to the Justice Department, only 16 percent of detained immigrants had legal representation. (The Immigration and Nationality Act gives noncitizens the right to legal counsel as long as they pay for it themselves.) The Migration Policy Institute says the average detainee spends 81 days in jail prior to a deportation order, then another 10 weeks after the order. Those who are eventually deported will have spent an average of six months in detention.

Simpson said William Cassidy, the immigration judge in Atlanta who is overseeing Gomez’s case, has given him extra time to prepare a defense because of his allegations about police misconduct and the injuries he sustained during his arrest. Until Simpson took on the case in December, Gomez had to prepare his own pleadings. “Apparently he was convincing enough that the judge kept giving him more time,” Simpson says, “which is actually fairly remarkable.”

Simpson’s defense emphasizes the circumstances of Gomez’s arrest. She says ICE has the burden of proving he is an illegal immigrant, but any evidence it might present could have come only from an unjustified line of questioning by the Raleigh police officers, who have no authority to enforce immigration law. Eventually, she wants a hearing on whether any of that evidence is admissible. Because the rules of evidence are looser in immigration cases than they are in criminal cases, this strategy is iffy.

Cassidy will give Gomez a chance to present his case this summer. At a recent hearing, Simpson says, Cassidy considered her arguments for suppressing the evidence and terminating the removal process. This surprised her, she says, as most immigration judges “really do not want to hear about what the Raleigh P.D. did. For them, the manner in which someone comes into proceedings is completely ancillary to the ‘truth’ of someone’s status or non-status.”

Alternatively, she hopes Judge Cassidy will set her client free on bond if she can prove that the Justice Department needs him to investigate his civil rights allegations against the Raleigh police officers. The Mexican consulate has joined that request. Simpson thinks Gomez’s alleged beating could be the factor that temporarily gains him legal status in the United States. Special “U” visas, which last up to four years, are available for victims of violent crimes.

“He was the victim of a crime committed by two police officers, and he is therefore potentially eligible for a U visa,” Simpson argued in a motion to set Gomez free on bond. “In order to pursue his complaint effectively…Francisco needs to be in Raleigh, North Carolina-rather than detained in Georgia.” Pleading for a bond in a written statement to Cassidy, Santiago said she and Simpson were struggling to fight for Gomez from North Carolina while he’s incarcerated in Georgia. “If he’s detained in Georgia, he won’t be able to fight his case,” she wrote. “He won’t get a chance to prove what really happened.”

‘They Don’t Want to Do Anything’

In the meantime, Gomez is asking for medical treatment for his injuries. When the officers arrested him, he was already nursing a spinal fracture from being hit by a car a few weeks earlier. He says one officer crushed his ribs and the other punched him in the back half a dozen times. He says his first lawyer had to pressure the jail in Raleigh to get the wound on his arm treated.

“It’s been nine months now, and I still have a mark on my hand they gave me,” Gomez wrote in a March statement to the Justice Department. “They think that I am fine, and this is not true. The truth is that my back hurts since the day they hit me, and the ribs at times also hurt.…I am going to make a report in this detention where I am now already. I made one, but they did not give me more pills for the pain, and I told them that I want an X-ray of my back, and they don’t want to do anything for my case here in this jail where I am.”

As with legal representation, access to medical care is extremely limited for ICE detainees, especially in giant immigrant-only jails, where the ratio of medical staff to inmates is lower than in ordinary jails. In 2008 The Washington Post documented the spread of tuberculosis and chicken pox, as well as deaths due to untreated heart disease and cancer inside immigration jails. Last year ICE settled a lawsuit in which the American Civil Liberties Union accused the agency of falling below federal jail standards by failing to provide proper medical care at the San Diego Correctional Facility. ICE had denied detainees treatments it deemed “non-emergency,” including heart surgeries, cancer biopsies, and medication for chronic illnesses such as diabetes and high blood pressure.

During the first half of 2008, a quarter of medical personnel jobs in the immigrant detention system were vacant, according a U.S. Division of Immigrant Health Services report cited by The Washington Post. Studies by the ACLU and the Department of Homeland Security itself found the vacancies closer to 40 percent. A report by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which earlier this year published a report critical of ICE detention practices, says facilities housing hundreds of detainees often have only one doctor working limited shifts. The Post reported that the South Texas Detention Complex in Pearsall had a backlog of 2,097 medical appointments in 2008. A December 2006 survey of three immigration detention centers by the Department of Homeland Security found that 41 percent of nonemergency medical requests were not being addressed promptly.

In 2008 representatives of the Georgia ACLU visited the Stewart Detention Center, where Gomez has been held. They met a man whose asthma had gone untreated for two months. He and others had infections and rashes they said they had contracted while in custody there. “This appears to undermine the [ICE] standard which states that ‘detainees diagnosed with a communicable disease shall be isolated,’ ” the ACLU reported. The ICE Detention Standards Compliance Unit found conditions at Stewart to be deficient in 2007 but said they improved to an “acceptable” level a year later.

From October 2003 to November 2010, 115 immigrants died in ICE custody from various causes, including heart disease, cancer, and suicide. Last year The New York Times told the stories of one immigrant who committed suicide after jailers withheld pain medication for a broken leg, and another man who suffered from untreated and eventually fatal head injuries while officials debated how to avoid paying for his care and whether to send him back to Africa.

Jailers’ treatment of immigrant detainees can go beyond neglect. Last August, Human Rights Watch reported on 15 female inmates who had been sexually assaulted or harassed by guards or ICE agents in eight different immigration detention facilities.

‘An Honest, Law-Abiding Young Man’

Edith Santiago, a single mother of five, wants her friend to get a fighting chance at freedom. The two met when Gomez was in his early 20s, and she soon adopted him into her home. He had been living with another friend, and Santiago says he is no longer in touch with his family in Mexico. She says Gomez helped her care for her children, her ailing mother, and her baby granddaughter, who has cancer. “He is like a son to me, and it was like seeing my own child get beaten for nothing,” Santiago wrote in her affidavit for Judge Cassidy. “I couldn’t sleep for about four days after seeing what happened because I kept seeing those officers beat on Francisco.”

Santiago’s pastor, the Rev. Michael Morris of Raleigh’s First Baptist Church, wrote to Judge Cassidy asking for a low bond to free Gomez while he makes his case to the Justice Department. “Francisco is a quiet person who always acts courteously,” the pastor said. “He deserves every consideration as an honest, law-abiding young man.”

But the way immigration laws are being enforced today doesn’t treat immigrants like law-abiding people locked in civil disputes with the federal government. It treats them like criminals, with all the hazards and indignities of life behind bars.

Jesse James DeConto writes from Durham, North Carolina. An award-winning newspaper reporter, most recently at the Raleigh News and Observer, his work appears regularly in The Christian Century and Prism. This column first appeared at Reason.com.

The post Muddled Masses appeared first on Reason Foundation.

Texas Rep. Lamar Smith, a committed restrictionist who now chairs the House Judiciary Committee, is already planning a big push to clamp down on undocumented aliens, especially by denying automatic or birthright citizenship to their children-a right enshrined in the 14th Amendment. Meanwhile, Republicans in five states-led by Arizona-are launching their own offensive to force Congress to repeal this right.

Such calls are not new. What is new is that they are gaining traction beyond a shrill nativist minority. Some conservative libertarians are arguing that birthright citizenship is bad for the country-and some progressive libertarians are arguing that it is bad for immigrants. Not only are both wrong, they can’t reconcile this position with their broader commitment to the constitution and limited government respectively. (In this column I will address only the conservatives, saving the progressives for the next.)

The most famous representative of the conservative view is George Will, whose recent column is an odd hagiographic exercise lauding Smith-obviously calculated to pave the ground for Smith’s birthright crusade that Will has openly embraced.

Smith is pushing a law in Congress to scrap this right, even though literally no one believes that it would pass constitutional muster. That’s because the 14th Amendment is unusually clear about extending citizenship rights to everyone born on American soil except for children of foreign diplomats and American Indians (who belong to sovereign tribes). Eliminating these rights for anyone else will require three-quarters of the states to ratify another amendment.

Remarkably for someone who counsels deference to the original Constitution, Will has few qualms about this. Why? Because the authors of the 14th Amendment could not possibly have meant to extend birthright citizenship to illegal aliens given that no laws restricting immigration existed in1868 when it was passed, he maintains. “Is it reasonable to presume they would have wanted to provide the reward of citizenship to the children of the violators of those laws? Surely not,” he declares.

It’s even more plausible, however, that if the authors’ failed to foresee something, it was not the law-breakers but the laws themselves. Hostility toward immigrants, especially the Irish who arrived in the wake of the potato famine, was certainly around in their time. But they still didn’t pass such laws-perhaps because they thought that a country that had borne the sin of slavery to get cheap foreign labor should not erect barricades to keep out voluntary cheap foreign labor!

But if the failure to foresee events offered sufficient grounds for amending the Constitution, then we might as well throw out the whole document and begin anew. Would the Founders have written the First Amendment enshrining the freedom of press if they had known that the Internet would one day allow Wikileaks to release classified documents and jeopardize soldiers in the battlefield? Or the Second Amendment guaranteeing the right to bear arms in a world of cop-killing bullets? Or the Fourth Amendment’s injunction against improper searches and seizures in an age of terrorism? Or the Fifth Amendment’s prohibition against government takings of private property when rare species are allegedly facing extinction?

The 14th Amendment was written, among other things, to prevent Confederate states from denying citizenship to newly freed blacks. What comparable injustice would amending this amendment prevent? Restrictionists claim that birthright citizenship encourages pregnant women to illegally sneak into the U.S. for a just-in-time delivery so that their newborns can gain citizenship and later sponsor them for citizenship. They call these kids “anchor babies.”

But Time magazine reported last year that of all the babies born in 2008 to at least one unauthorized parent, over 80 percent were to moms who had been in the United States for over one year. Actual instances of “birth tourism,” where moms expressly came here to deliver babies on American soil, accounted for about two-tenths of 1 percent of all births in 2006. And most of these moms were not poor, illegal Hispanics-Smith’s target group. They were rich Chinese moms on tourist visas.

Nor is it plausible that their intention was to use their kids to gain citizenship for themselves. Kids have to wait until 21 to seek legal status for illegal parents and only if the parents have been here for 10 years. What’s more, only 4,000 unauthorized parents can receive such status every year. This, then, is the grand illicit citizenship racket that Will & co. want a constitutional amendment to crack!

Conservatives argue that this amendment is necessary to enforce the rule of law. But the first principle of conservatism, constantly deployed against liberal reformers, is that it is not wise to make radical changes to long-standing laws and institutions for small gains. As Aristotle warned in the Politics two-and-half millennia ago: “[W]hen the improvement is small, and since it is a bad thing to habituate people to the reckless dissolution of laws, it is evident that some errors of both legislations and of the rulers should be let go; for the city will not be benefited as much from changing them as it will be harmed through being habituated to disobey the rulers…The easy alteration of existing laws in favor of new and different ones weakens the power of law itself.”

Yet, here are conservatives now, disregarding their own wisdom and subverting the rule of law in the name of the rule of law to fight bogus causes.

Shikha Dalmia is a senior analyst at Reason Foundation and a weekly columnist at The Daily, where a version of this article originally appeared. This column first appeared at Reason.com.

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Despite the Republican sweep, Latino advocacy groups are trying to spin this election as an object demonstration of Hispanic strength. How? High Latino turnout, they maintain, effectively created a firewall in the Southwest ensuring Republican losses in Nevada, California and Colorado and preventing them from gaining majority control of the Senate. But this line of reasoning confuses the sauce for the whole enchilada.

It is true that had it not been for the Latino vote in Nevada, Senate Speaker Harry Reid might well have been toast. He played his cards brilliantly with the community. He proposed the DREAM Act, which would have opened up legal avenues for illegal minors to gain permanent residency in the country. But he ensured that it didn’t pass so that he could blame “evil Republicans.” And his opponent, Sharon Angle, performed her part beautifully, running vicious ads depicting Mexicans surreptitiously streaming through the border and threatening American wages, jobs and even Social Security. The upshot was that Latinos came out in record numbers with 90 percent of them voting for Reid, contributing to his 5 percentage-point win over Angle who only a few weeks ago seemed solidly ahead.

In California, where Democrats won both the gubernatorial and Senate races, Latinos played an equally significant role. Over 85 percent of them voted Democratic, giving Jerry Brown and Sen. Barbara Boxer a convincing edge over the Republicans, both of whom embraced a restrictionist agenda. Meg Whitman, the Republican contender for governor, lost Latinos when she declared that it’d be alright with her if her illegal housekeeper, who had been in her employ for nine years, was deported. Meanwhile, Boxer’s opponent Carly Fiornia supported Arizona’s draconian law requiring immigrants to carry their papers at all times, hugely irritating Hispanic voters.

And the king of immigrant bashers, Tom Tancredo, whose restrictionism is too extreme even for the GOP, got a humiliating walloping in Colorado’s gubernatorial race where he was running as an independent. But the real Hispanic clout was felt in the state’s Senate race in which the Tea Party candidate Ken Buck lost to Democrat Michael Bennet in a nail-bitter. Buck was by no means half-bad on immigration, but Bennet was better and got a whopping 81 percent of the Latino vote that might well have put him over the top.

All of this is prompting dire warnings by Latino groups (who held a teleconference Wednesday to discuss the election results) that, over the long run, immigrant bashing will prove to be a losing strategy for Republicans. If current trends continue, the Pew Research Center projects, white share of the population will drop from 67 percent in 2005 to 47 percent in 2050. As this happens, Republicans will have to either win an ever-greater share of the white population or peel away minority sub-populations, something that will be hard to do if they don’t change course now.

But all of this assumes that today’s minorities will be tomorrow’s immigration advocates. However, this election casts severe doubts on that assumption. Indeed, one of the hugely under-reported stories of this election is that Republicans fielded far more minority candidates than Democrats-and they won by touting a restrictionist agenda, proof positive that skin color-and even immigration status-are not always correlated with enlightened immigration views.

Consider, Florida’s Marco Rubio, the Tea Party-backed Republican for Senate. After initially issuing a statement on immigration that would have warmed the heart of the Statue of Liberty, this Cuban American did a complete flip-flop, positioning himself on the restrictionist-right of both his white opponents. Not only did he eventually endorse the Arizona law after criticizing it for racial profiling, he also backed away from the DREAM Act, noting that it is “gonna feel weird” to deport minor undocumented kids but America needs “an immigration policy that works”-whatever that means!

But Palin-backed Nikki Haley, the daughter of Sikh migrants from India, didn’t even bother to pay lip service to the plight of undocumented workers who have no legal way to permanently live and work in the country. She embraced the Arizona law right off the bat, even boasting on the campaign trail about co-sponsoring legislation as state legislator that “entirely matched the state of Arizona.”

But the worst of the GOP’s ethnic stars from the standpoint of immigration reform are New Mexico’s Susana Martinez and Nevada’s Brian Sandoval, both Hispanics who won the governorship. Even though New Mexico has a history of welcoming Mexican immigrants, Martinez was so unrelenting in her opposition to them that she even forced her (white) Democratic opponent to harden her stance. She opposed “amnesty” for undocumented aliens, pledged to revoke their driver’s licenses and ban them from college scholarships. And she endorsed Arizona’s “your papers please” law. Sandoval, a Tea Party darling, wasn’t quite as unflinching as Martinez, but he too ultimately praised the Arizona law and adopted a far harsher stance toward Hispanic immigrants.

The lesson for immigration advocates in all this is that hostility to immigration does not stem solely from xenophobia that shifting demographics will someday cure. It is that anti-immigration sentiment is driven by economic and other fears that have to be addressed anew for every generation regardless of its ethnic make-up.

This shouldn’t be surprising. As with trade, the benefits of immigration are enormous but not obvious. Without constant reminding, they tend to get lost-including to immigrants themselves. What seems natural to most people is Malthusianism, the view that a country’s resources are finite. Therefore, the more people you allow in, the less there is to go around. The idea that immigrants actually expand the economic pie and therefore increase job opportunities and raise real wages is counter-intuitive to say the least.

Indeed, if immigrants could be automatically counted on to make the case for more open policies then this land of immigrants would not be building billion-dollar border fences right now, it’d be rolling out the red carpet. It’d see an uninterrupted progressive trend toward ever-increasing openness. That, however, is far from the case. America’s attitudes toward immigrants have ebbed and flowed over the course of its history. Till the early 20th century, this country allowed virtually unfettered immigration from anywhere. But then it went into a restrictionist phase in 1924, implementing national origin quotas that almost completely slammed the door shut on some countries, only to scrap them in mid-Century.

What all this shows is that immigration advocates can’t advance their cause by simply scaring Republicans about the impending Hispanic backlash. They have to convince the broader American public; constantly nurture a pro-immigrant zeitgeist with arguments and evidence. Unless they do that, rather than Republicans moving in their direction, it is entirely possible that Democrats will move in the restrictionist direction-as they have already been doing. Open immigration was, is and will remain a hard slog no matter who lives in America: whites or non-whites.

Shikha Dalmia is a senior analyst at Reason Foundation and a Forbes columnist. This column originally appeared at Forbes. This column first appeared at Reason.com.

The post Immigrant Bashing By Immigrants appeared first on Reason Foundation.

By this measure, if the provisions in the current Senate bill concerning undocumented aliens make it into the final bill, progressives, who put principle above politics, should bid adios to the whole effort. The bill would turn the undocumented into a permanent underclass of health care have-nots, making universal coverage unattainable.

Undocumented aliens, along with their children, constitute about 17% of the uninsured in America. But no one is arguing they should get taxpayer help to purchase coverage. The right has pretty much won the argument that people who break the law to enter this country don’t deserve the assistance of law-abiding Americans. Both the Senate and House bills explicitly bar all direct subsidies for anyone unable to furnish proof of citizenship or legal residency-although some dispute whether the verification procedures in the House bill are stringent enough.

But the key difference between the two is that whereas the House bill would allow these aliens to use their own money to buy coverage from the new health care exchange, the Senate bill won’t. The reason for the Senate ban is that this exchange-a sort-of clearinghouse where patients will be able to pool together to purchase discounted coverage from approved plans-will be established and run by the government. Letting immigrants participate would mean allowing them to get indirect taxpayer aid. People “who are here illegally cannot avail themselves of the infrastructure that we’re creating,” Rep. Gerald E. , D-Va., said in November.

By this logic should we, then, post sentries on federal highways to shoo off undocumented workers? Position guards outside pharmacies to bar them from buying FDA-approved drugs? Dispatch marshals to stop electricity generated by public utilities from flowing into undocumented households? What’s really driving the exchange ban is not concern for American taxpayers, since allowing people access on their own dime won’t necessarily add to the nation’s health care bill. Rather it is the cold “Know Nothing” calculation that making life miserable for undocumented aliens will drive them to the exit.

The bill may or may not succeed in chasing away these aliens, but it will certainly make them more miserable. Unless they get an exemption from the individual mandate, something the Senate is proposing but the House is not, it will be illegal for them to go without coverage. But with the exchange off-limits, their main option-outside of the emergency room-will be the nongroup or individual insurance market. Yet the Congressional Budget Office has calculated the premiums in these markets, already substantially higher than the one serving large employers, will rise another 13%-partly because the exchange will leave them with a smaller pool of customers. Many observers believe the exchange will eventually kill these markets altogether.

Undocumented aliens may therefore face the double bind of having to buy coverage but being priced out of the few legal avenues they have. This should trouble anyone not part of the Lou Dobbs fan club, but civil libertarians should find it particularly odious. At the same time the government tells Americans how they must spend their money, it will tell undocumented aliens where they can’t spend theirs. Government intrusiveness combined with government discrimination is not a formula for social justice.

The Obama administration is putting tremendous pressure on the House Hispanic Caucus, which is fighting the Senate ban, to back off. It is evidently arguing that once the battle for universal coverage is won, it will make immigration reform and amnesty a top priority, eventually bringing undocumented workers into the insurance fold. But having expended so much political ammunition on health care, the White House will be in no position to pick another bruising fight. With a volatile midterm election coming up next year, there is a real risk that if this cruel policy goes forward, it will become impossible to undo.

Universal coverage advocates (a group to which I do not belong) have accepted many unpalatable compromises-including abandoning their beloved public option-because they feel that at least they will be extending coverage to two-thirds of the uninsured population. But what they have to confront is that if they accept the exchange ban, a sizable portion of the remaining one-third won’t just remain unhelped, they’ll be seriously harmed by being permanently locked out of the health care market.

The government hasn’t claimed the authority to selectively withhold access to public facilities since the Jim Crow era. But at least then it wasn’t using it for any high-minded purpose. This ban will institutionalize inequality in the name of greater equality. Is this a deal that progressives really want to cut?

Shikha Dalmia is a senior analyst at Reason Foundation and a Forbes columnist. Harris Kenny, a student at Pepperdine University, provided valuable research assistance for this column. This column first appeared at Forbes.com.

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The plan is unusual, but it isn’t unique. Spain, with an unemployment rate of 17.4 percent, has adopted a similar program, though participating immigrants there can return to the country to work after three years. And in February, the Czech Republic established a $3.2 million program to purchase one-way tickets for foreigners who can prove they have been laid off and can’t find a job. In Ireland, some political parties are proposing a plan to give unemployed foreigners six months’ benefits if they promise to leave the country.

This column first appeared at Reason.com.

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After the first decade, people lost hope it would end soon. The bailouts and government stimuli didn’t turn the market around, nor did government’s takeover of the financial sector, Michigan-based automobile companies, and fast-food restaurants west of the Mississippi make much difference. (Although the ads with Barack Obama guaranteeing you could “have fries with that” caused a brief resurgence in the stock market.) It all led to the government’s fateful decision to monetize the debt.

After a few years, the country began running out of trees for paper. Congress wavered between reducing the speed with which the debt was monetized and allowing previously off-limit trees in federally protected forests to be used for the production of paper money. There were reasonable arguments on both sides, but the monetization crowd won in the end, leading to the great Federal Deforestation Program of 2013-16.

Despite all that, there was growing concern that something more must be done. It was around this time that Bangladesh suggested it might stop buying our debt. The politicians-some pushed by conviction, others by letter-writing campaigns originated by Fox News opinion-leaders-felt that the problem was illegal immigration. Obviously, there were too many people in the country. Illegal aliens either worked or they didn’t. If they worked, removing them would free up more jobs for unemployed Americans (unemployment then hovered around 33 percent). If they were not working, removing them would free up governmental services (unemployment insurance, food-stamps, guaranteed mortgage payments, extended GM car warranties, all the usual suspects) for Americans who really deserved them.

Everyone agreed that legal immigration was good for our country. We were a nation of immigrants, after all. Politicians got choked up all along the Potomac shouting the praises of legal immigration-although the choking might have had something to do with the fumes from all the new paper plants needed to keep up with Treasury’s demands.

Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, and the other Fox pundits had nothing but hosannas to sing about legal immigration. But, as they endlessly reminded viewers, we are a nation of laws. (So many laws that the Congressional Register stopped publishing them. Besides, the Treasury hoarded all the paper.) A nation of laws must enforce the law. Who could disagree?

In 2017, during the first term of President Michelle Obama, the bright boys in the Office of Management and Budget worked closely with the president’s top economic advisors, Paul Krugman and Lou Dobbs, to calculate how many immigrants would have to go in order to free up sufficient government funding to take care of so-called real Americans. The answer turned out to be the last two generations of immigrants.

When presented with the stark numerical evidence-to say nothing of President Obama’s eloquence on the subject-Congress overwhelmingly passed the Save the Endangered Americans Act of 2018, which defined Americans as those people whose grandparents were born in the United States. The rest were illegal immigrants; the law allowed no retroactive immunity. “No one should be grandfathered in, so to speak,” said our first Madam President. She was certainly sad to see her husband, the former president, deported, since two of his grandparents were born in Kenya. “But we all have to sacrifice to improve America,” she declared.

Fox News hailed the move, running hour-long specials on the worsening immigration crisis. Illegals, the pundits ominously declared, now numbered over 200 million. And like the Communists in the 1950s, they had infiltrated every aspect of the government. Bill O’Reilly denounced those who were destroying America from his remote feed in Ireland, since he, too, was forced to leave the United States.

Things ran smoothly after that. In an interview several years after leaving office, Michelle Obama explained that once the definition of an illegal immigrant was clearly defined, it became quite easy to solve America’s economic problems. Hyperinflation ended because the few remaining Americans didn’t need that many paper bills, especially with the population’s new interest in barter. Government seizures of American businesses became less frequent as American businesses themselves became less frequent.

So the depression finally ended. The few remaining Americans-true Americans-became self-sufficient. People of other lands had little reason to want to emigrate here, so illegal immigration dried up. As Americans developed more rustic ways of cooking-usually with a pot on the hearth-all those Geithner dollars finally came in handy.

Ross Levatter is a writer in Arizona. This column first appeared at Reason.com.

The post Solving the Immigration Problem—Once and For All appeared first on Reason Foundation.

Yet Congress last month decided to thumb its nose at immigrants who can fill top jobs in the high-tech sector. It added to the “stimulus” bill a provision that will effectively put foreign workers off limits to financial companies that receive bailout money through the Toxic Asset Recovery Program (TARP). The provision was sponsored by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa). Grassley in particular has been acting like he has a new mission from god to chase away foreign high-tech workers who enter the country on temporary visas. These work permits are called H1-B visas and are specifically designed for “workers in short supply.”

Besides making it virtually impossible for TARP companies to hire H1-Bs, Grassley has also been sending letters to Microsoft, a non-TARP company, telling it to fire temporary foreign workers ahead of Americans. But like other forms of protectionism, this exercise in nativist labor policy won’t “stimulate” America’s economy. If anything, it will work to prolong the recession by keeping out precisely the sort of folks who can rejuvenate the economy.

Vivek Wadhwa, a researcher at Duke University, notes that even before the current downturn, a steady stream of highly skilled immigrants from India and China-the major donor countries-had been returning home. In fact, Indian and Chinese companies have been reporting a seven to tenfold increase in job applications from their émigrés in the last five years or so.

According to a recent study that Wadhwa coauthored with Harvard University’s Richard Freeman and University of California at Berkeley’s AnnaLee Saxenian, most of the people are not leaving because they are having a tough time getting by in the United States. Rather, they are virtually the best of the best with excellent prospects in the United States.

Most of the returning emigres are in their 30s and over half hold advanced degrees in management, technology, or science from excellent schools. That puts them “at the very top of the educational distribution” even for this highly educated cohort. Most stunning of all, 27 percent of the Indians and 34 percent of the Chinese who opted to return home had already obtained green cards or citizenship.

Even a decade or so ago, giving that up to return back to India or China would have seemed pure lunacy. No more.

What’s changed? Thanks to economic liberalization, professional opportunities have improved dramatically for these immigrants in their home countries. Over half of the Indian and Chinese polled by Wadhwa said that, relative to cost of living, they were making more money upon returning home compared to what they were earning in the United States.

This means it is no longer necessary for high-tech workers to tear up their roots and make an alien land their home for the sake of economic advancement. They can live the American dream in their own country close to family and friends.

This will have profound implications for America’s ability to hang on to its immigrant talent in the coming years. Migration patterns naturally ebb and flow with the business cycle, picking up during a boom and dropping during a recession.

But the problem of reverse brain drain is likely to be particularly acute for America during this downturn given that India’s and China’s economies are so far on track to outperform the United States’. Despite the global recession, according to the IMF, China is expected to grow 6.7 percent and India 5 percent this year. If this prediction pans out, Indians and Chinese will sprint-not stroll-to the exit doors in coming months.

This would be genuinely unfortunate since people who have willingly uprooted themselves from their homes to travel across oceans and establish themselves on foreign soil are natural risk takers. They are precisely the kind of folks America needs to help jumpstart its sputtering economic engine and create new jobs by starting businesses. It is not a coincidence that one in two companies in Silicon Valley has been founded by immigrants. If America is unable to replenish its crop of immigrants, the next Silicon Valley won’t be in California-it’ll be in Beijing or Bangalore.

Sens. Sanders and Grassley’s crusade against H1-B workers is thus both economically illiterate and outdated. Their stimulus provision, incidentally, was inspired by a single, scurrilous Associated Press story that found that the top 12 banks receiving TARP money had in the six years before the economic downturn filed 20,000 or so H1-B applications-which makes foreign workers anywhere from a whopping 0 percent to 0.74 percent of their total workforce.

Before slamming the door on foreign workers, Sanders and Grassley might have checked to see if there were throngs of crowds still clamoring on the other side. America can no longer count on gifted immigrants automatically flocking to its shore. It will have to compete for them, just like every other country.

Instead of posting “No Entry” signs, Congress should be rolling out the welcome mat. It can begin by scrapping the annual H1-B visa cap. Set at 85,000, this cap is so low that for the last few years it has been getting filled within days after immigration authorities begin accepting applications on April 1, leaving tens of thousands of potential high-tech immigrants in the lurch for the rest of the year.

Beyond that, it should put in place a fast track process that makes these visas available within weeks-not the months and years as is currently the case-of the application. That is what nearly every other industrialized country which is experiencing declining interest by high-tech immigrants is doing.

Otherwise, America, the proud nation of immigrants, might well be the big loser in the global race for talent-hardly something to celebrate.

Shikha Dalmia is a senior analyst at Reason Foundation. This column first appeared at Reason.com.

The post Goodbye Chang, So Long Singh appeared first on Reason Foundation.

Yet Congress last month decided to thumb its nose at immigrants who can fill top jobs in the high-tech sector. It added to the “stimulus” bill a provision that will effectively put foreign workers off limits to financial companies that receive bailout money through the Toxic Asset Recovery Program (TARP). The provision was sponsored by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa). Grassley in particular has been acting like he has a new mission from god to chase away foreign high-tech workers who enter the country on temporary visas. These work permits are called H1-B visas and are specifically designed for “workers in short supply.”

Besides making it virtually impossible for TARP companies to hire H1-Bs, Grassley has also been sending letters to Microsoft, a non-TARP company, telling it to fire temporary foreign workers ahead of Americans. But like other forms of protectionism, this exercise in nativist labor policy won’t “stimulate” America’s economy. If anything, it will work to prolong the recession by keeping out precisely the sort of folks who can rejuvenate the economy.

Vivek Wadhwa, a researcher at Duke University, notes that even before the current downturn, a steady stream of highly skilled immigrants from India and China-the major donor countries-had been returning home. In fact, Indian and Chinese companies have been reporting a seven to tenfold increase in job applications from their émigrés in the last five years or so.

According to a recent study that Wadhwa coauthored with Harvard University’s Richard Freeman and University of California at Berkeley’s AnnaLee Saxenian, most of the people are not leaving because they are having a tough time getting by in the United States. Rather, they are virtually the best of the best with excellent prospects in the United States.

Most of the returning emigres are in their 30s and over half hold advanced degrees in management, technology, or science from excellent schools. That puts them “at the very top of the educational distribution” even for this highly educated cohort. Most stunning of all, 27 percent of the Indians and 34 percent of the Chinese who opted to return home had already obtained green cards or citizenship.

Even a decade or so ago, giving that up to return back to India or China would have seemed pure lunacy. No more.

What’s changed? Thanks to economic liberalization, professional opportunities have improved dramatically for these immigrants in their home countries. Over half of the Indian and Chinese polled by Wadhwa said that, relative to cost of living, they were making more money upon returning home compared to what they were earning in the United States.

This means it is no longer necessary for high-tech workers to tear up their roots and make an alien land their home for the sake of economic advancement. They can live the American dream in their own country close to family and friends.

This will have profound implications for America’s ability to hang on to its immigrant talent in the coming years. Migration patterns naturally ebb and flow with the business cycle, picking up during a boom and dropping during a recession.

But the problem of reverse brain drain is likely to be particularly acute for America during this downturn given that India’s and China’s economies are so far on track to outperform the United States’. Despite the global recession, according to the IMF, China is expected to grow 6.7 percent and India 5 percent this year. If this prediction pans out, Indians and Chinese will sprint-not stroll-to the exit doors in coming months.

This would be genuinely unfortunate since people who have willingly uprooted themselves from their homes to travel across oceans and establish themselves on foreign soil are natural risk takers. They are precisely the kind of folks America needs to help jumpstart its sputtering economic engine and create new jobs by starting businesses. It is not a coincidence that one in two companies in Silicon Valley has been founded by immigrants. If America is unable to replenish its crop of immigrants, the next Silicon Valley won’t be in California-it’ll be in Beijing or Bangalore.

Sens. Sanders and Grassley’s crusade against H1-B workers is thus both economically illiterate and outdated. Their stimulus provision, incidentally, was inspired by a single, scurrilous Associated Press story that found that the top 12 banks receiving TARP money had in the six years before the economic downturn filed 20,000 or so H1-B applications-which makes foreign workers anywhere from a whopping 0 percent to 0.74 percent of their total workforce.

Before slamming the door on foreign workers, Sanders and Grassley might have checked to see if there were throngs of crowds still clamoring on the other side. America can no longer count on gifted immigrants automatically flocking to its shore. It will have to compete for them, just like every other country.

Instead of posting “No Entry” signs, Congress should be rolling out the welcome mat. It can begin by scrapping the annual H1-B visa cap. Set at 85,000, this cap is so low that for the last few years it has been getting filled within days after immigration authorities begin accepting applications on April 1, leaving tens of thousands of potential high-tech immigrants in the lurch for the rest of the year.

Beyond that, it should put in place a fast track process that makes these visas available within weeks-not the months and years as is currently the case-of the application. That is what nearly every other industrialized country which is experiencing declining interest by high-tech immigrants is doing.

Otherwise, America, the proud nation of immigrants, might well be the big loser in the global race for talent-hardly something to celebrate.

Shikha Dalmia is a senior analyst at Reason Foundation.

The post Immigrants Have Never Been Less Interested in America appeared first on Reason Foundation.

The truck is still idling when a young girl in an L.A. Dodgers jacket loses her nerve. “I’m worried about snakes and coyotes,” she says in a quiet voice. “There are rattlers in the mountains. My brother said the little green ones are also poisonous.” This is the first I’ve heard about poisonous snakes since signing up for this adventure.

“The clouds are no good,” adds someone else. “We won’t be able to see anything.”

“Like the snakes,” says the girl in the Dodgers jacket, her voice softer than before.

It’s just possible to make out the faces of the group in the faint moonlight. These aren’t the frightened, soiled migrants captured on green-lit night cams for network news investigations into “America’s broken border.” Not yet, anyway. These would-be migrants wear Diesel jeans and John Deere mesh caps, nose studs and gelled emo haircuts. Like me, each has paid $125 for two days of camping and a midnight “border crossing” experience in central Mexico. The staged run, 700 miles from the real U.S. border, covers a bruising adventure course that winds through the valley and is riddled with muddy riverbanks, bristly thwap-you-in-the-face brush, and jagged mountain passes.

The course is also flecked with gritty and realistic dramatic accents. Men in U.S. Border Patrol T-shirts bark insults in broken English through megaphones. Women and children are tossed into Border Patrol vehicles and driven off into the night. M-80s stand in for shotgun fire. Then there are the female screams in the distance, a soundtrack of rape.

It all adds up to the world’s most elaborate simulation of the Mexican migrant experience. One much safer, and about $3,000 cheaper, than the real thing.

On my night as a hunted migrant, the Caminata Nocturna (“Night Hike”) was celebrating its fourth sellout year under the direction of Mexico’s leading purveyor of domestic meta-tourism, the Alberto Eco Park in the central Mexican highlands. The park was founded in 2004 by indigenous locals known as the Otomi in an attempt to staunch the flow of their working-age population, 90 percent of which has migrated to the United States over the last two decades. Faced with the extinction of the local community and culture, a few entrepreneurial Otomi decided to tap into the regional boom in culturally aware ecotourism. Their land is remote but nestled within a mountain range blessed with sheer cliffs and clean rivers. The Mexican government paved a road leading into the mountains, and with the help of a few small grants and sponsors, the Otomi built a campground replete with a rappelling cliff, zip lines, and a dock for canoes and kayaks. There is also a large riverside stage, upon which the Otomi perform their music in the local tribal dialect for Mexico’s middle class and a smattering of European tourists. Today the camp is thriving. Among the growing list of sponsors is Corona.

The riverside picnics are pleasant enough on a summer’s day, but it is the mock border run that is the park’s primary draw and claim to fame. As America works on designs for its high-tech virtual border fence, middle-class Mexicans have been flocking to this low-tech virtual border, hungry for a taste of the danger experienced by their desperate compatriots who every year make the treacherous journey north. Tonight 130 of us pack into 12 pick-ups. Many are repeat visitors who have brought friends and relatives. “I heard about it from friends at school,” says a teenage girl in my group. “They said it was fun.”

Part of the fun, I learn, is staying in character. Sitting in the truck, I ask a kid in an Abercrombie sweatshirt why he came.

“Because there are no jobs in Mexico,” he deadpans. “I want to find a better life, to live the American Dream.”

The imitation of a pitiful migrant sparks a group laugh. But the chuckling is awkward and short-lived, as if everyone realizes a line has been crossed. The Otomi market the border crossing as an act of solidarity with Mexico’s poor, but it can quickly start to feel a lot like what we gringos call slumming. When the truck finally starts moving, Abercrombie admits in perfect English to studying communications at Puebla University. When he visits the United States, which is about once a year, he gets a tourist visa and flies Mexicana. “I’m here for kicks,” he says.

So is the girl in the Dodgers jacket with the fear of snakes. Her name is Daisy De Vasca, and she is from Lakewood, California, in Mexico visiting her aunt. Yet she swears tonight’s snake threat is real. When she again begins describing the poisonous breeds that live in the mountains, I wave her off the subject. Better to talk about the American Dream, which can also bite you in the ass but usually lets you live to tell the tale.

The Otomi know about American dreams and nightmares. Most have made the trip north to work seasonally or settle in the large Otomi communities of Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Many have returned to Mexico, but the majority stay in the U.S., unable or unwilling to make the trip twice. An unknown number have disappeared or died along the way, their bloated, hyperthermic corpses returned to their families in state vehicles if they were carrying ID cards, dispatched to anonymous graves if they weren’t.

One of those who left and returned is Laura Basuado, a fresh-faced 27-year-old park employee who crossed the border when she was 17. She says the border simulation is designed to offer well-off Mexicans a small but bitter dose of the ordeal endured by migrants. It is her hope that the experience will build solidarity between what she calls “the two Mexicos”-one middle class and thriving, one dirt poor and sinking.

“The Night Walk is not even 1 percent of what it’s really like,” says Basuado, whose own journey to the U.S. involved a four-day march through the Sonoran desert. “I have never been so terrified in my life as when I went north. I was so sure we would die that I prayed the border police would catch us.” Basuado eventually found her way to Minnesota, where she stayed four months before deciding she’d rather be poor and jobless in Mexico than poor and marginally employed in the U.S., living in constant dread of arrest and deportation.

The most painful memory for Basuado is the abuse she suffered at the rough hands of her coyote, or hired guide, known more commonly in Mexico as a pollero. These guides are usually part of violent criminal networks and are often indifferent to the safety of their charges once money has changed hands. In recent years polleros have become famous villains in the Mexican migration drama. In the interest of realism, they are well represented in the Night Hike. From beginning to end, park employees impersonating polleros scream “Vamos rapido!” while pushing participants through some of the course’s most dangerous terrain.

Then there are the screams that come from behind the bushes. During quiet lulls in the walk, female park employees periodically issue bloodcurdling cries that echo through the mountains. It is not an overly histrionic touch. Rape has become so endemic to the border crossing experience that women often start taking birth control before making the trip, expecting abuse from coyotes or the bandits that travel with them. “Even if a woman is traveling with a brother or cousin, they are at the mercy of the coyotes for survival,” says Walt Staton, spokesperson for No More Deaths, a humanitarian group that provides assistance to migrants on both sides of the border.

Nobody actually gets raped, robbed, or murdered during the Night Hike, but the simulation is not for the weak of heart or the pregnant. There are full-speed runs down steep unlit paths as sirens wail in pursuit and stretches along raging river waters where the mire is almost knee high. In most countries participants would be required to sign multiple waivers before even getting in the back of the truck. During periodic breaks, everybody collapses in exhaustion, many tending to bloody knees and sprained ankles.

It was during one of these pauses that screeching tires and high pitched sirens called our attention to the foot of the hill we were resting on. Down below, a truck marked U.S. Border Patrol stopped before a group of migrants.

In one of the night’s few dramatic set pieces, actors in camo and Border Patrol T-shirts throw several young girls into the back of the truck. Before driving away, an officer looks up at our group and yells, “Go back to Mexico! We don’t want you here!”

Watching the drama unfold, a kid next to me pulls out a Snickers bar and offers me half. “Pendejos,” he mutters. Assholes.

When Parque Eco Alberto opened in 2004, curious reporters immediately set upon the camp with cameras and notepads. The Mexican media came first, followed by a trickle of international outlets, including the BBC, which called the border crossing simulation “Migrant Mountain.” Most of the coverage was and remains positive, if sometimes bemused. “The media sees we are trying to build understanding and create jobs, and they support us,” says Eduardo del Plan, a park employee who scripts much of the simulation based on his own multiple trips across the border. “We have become an example of an indigenous community standing on its own feet, trying to stop the bleeding to the north.”

The loudest exception to the chorus of approval is the Spanish language television network Telemundo. The Miami-based channel has accused the Otomi of using the Night Hike as a training course for migrants, akin to the mercenary firm Blackwater’s North Carolina training compound, where it prepares its employees for Iraq. When asked about this charge, del Plan laughs, saying the network purposely misrepresented the entire point of the exercise. “Telemundo is always trying to be sensational,” he says. “They should stick to covering soap operas.”

But the charge of preparing migrants for their journey mirrors one frequently leveled against Mexico City in Washington: that the Mexican government tolerates and even encourages migration north because it is one of the Mexican economy’s three pillars (the others being oil and the maquiladora factories along Mexico’s northern border). Mexicans living in the U.S. send more than $25 billion in annual remittances to their relatives south of the border. After oil exports, this money constitutes the country’s second largest stream of foreign revenue. “Migration used to be an economic safety valve for Mexico,” says Laura Carlson, director of the Americas Policy Program, a Mexico City think tank. “Now it’s an economic motor. The government has little incentive to crack down, and frankly views border security as a domestic issue for the U.S.”

Community initiatives like the Eco Alberto Park aren’t going to reverse these numbers. The income from the roughly 100 jobs created by the park is dwarfed by the regular bundles of cash sent back by Otomi working construction jobs in Las Vegas. Migrants will continue to go north as long as there is work there, no matter the mounting dangers illustrated by the border simulation. The same is true at border points around the globe where the poor live within walking or swimming distance of a better life. You can see it in Spain’s African enclave of Ceuta, bordering Morocco, where would-be migrants routinely charge guarded double walls topped with razor wire or attempt to swim the 13-mile Strait of Gibraltar.

Ask any struggling Mexican if U.S. plans for a high-tech border fence will stop the flow, and he will tell you the idea is fanciful, that you cannot deter the desperate. “If you build a wall, they will build taller ladders or dig deeper tunnels,” says del Plan. “If the entire border becomes clogged with armed guards, they will take boats, as the Cubans and Haitians do.” Indeed, this shift is already happening. Coast Guard interdictions of Mexican boats off the coast of San Diego are on the rise, as are reports of fatal capsizings.

But none of this directly concerns the kids with whom I pretended to be a migrant. Mexico’s growing middle class has more in common with its American counterpart than with people like the Otomi. Despite the Otomi talk of “one Mexico” and hopes of building solidarity with the migrants, the two Mexicos reappear as soon as we return, exhausted and bruised, to the Eco Alberto campsite. At a fire I sip Modelos with a group of university students ruminating on the night’s adventure. There is a comparison of light wounds, some laughter over the simulation’s low-fi effects. The talk quickly turns to football.

Alexander Zaitchik is a freelance journalist. This column first appeared at Reason.com.

The post Alien World appeared first on Reason Foundation.

A new chart details how complicated the immigration maze is, demonstrating the countless requirements that must be met, and the red tape that must be navigated, by everyone from English soccer star David Beckham to an Indian engineer.

What’s the best-case immigration scenario? Five or six years: If you are the spouse or a minor child of a U.S. citizen, you should be able to enter the country and get a green card. Then, after three to five years, you can apply to become a citizen.

The worst case scenario? You are an unskilled worker hoping to make a better life for yourself in America. “Unlike previous periods in our history, there is virtually no process for unskilled immigrants without family relations in the U.S. to apply for permanent legal residence,” the chart by Reason Foundation and the National Foundation for American Policy states.

Unskilled workers just have to hope they get lucky. That’s because only 10,000 green cards are given to these workers each year and “the wait time approaches infinity.” Skilled workers may have better chances, but still face strict caps, thousands of dollars in fees, and an 11 to 16 year wait to obtain a green card and gain U.S. citizenship.

“Our country’s immigration system is broken,” says Shikha Dalmia, a senior policy analyst at Reason Foundation and one of the chart’s authors. “Workers with family already here or college degrees face a convoluted, cruel and uncertain process. And they are the lucky ones. For poor laborers, who pick our crops and build our homes, there is virtually no legal process and no ‘line’ to wait in if they hope to permanently work and live in this country.”

“Our high-tech companies are starving for qualified engineers and skilled workers,” declares Mike Flynn co-author of the report and director of government affairs at Reason Foundation. “These are American companies trying to find the best workers so that they can compete globally. Instead our system handicaps American companies and denies them the skills and talents of thousands of potential workers. It is economic suicide.”

“The American Civil Liberties Union commends Reason Magazine for graphically capturing how burdensome the federal government has made the citizenship process for people hoping to become Americans,” says Timothy Sparapani, ACLU senior legislative counsel. “But this process not only affects those hoping for a chance to contribute to our society – it has also created problems for innocent American citizens.

“There have been far too many stories of innocent Americans being arrested and detained for hours, and even deported, on the suspicion of being here illegally. The government engages in rampant ethnic profiling, targeting Americans solely on the basis of their names or ethnicities. Similarly, the voluntary employment verification system the government hopes to make mandatory for all new hires is plagued with errors, and expansions have been forced on the Social Security Administration – an agency already facing substantial service backlogs for its central mission of assisting the elderly and disabled. Innocent Americans cannot earn a living because the federal government thinks added layers of bureaucracy will solve our border issues.

“As Reason makes clear, we have got to go in a different direction and dramatically overhaul our immigration ‘system.’ It is illogical, burdensome and long past time those in Washington chose to address these issues in ways that will continue to allow our nation to grow and prosper.”

Helen E. Krieble, President of the Vernon K. Krieble Foundation, says, “Reason Foundation’s flow-chart graphically demonstrates how badly broken our system is. It will help show the desperate need for a program to handle workers who wish to come to the US legally. Quite simply, these people cannot wait in line because there is no line. We hope this effort will help prod Congress to create a workable program for non-citizen workers.”

“The flowchart published by the Reason Foundation clearly demonstrates that the current U.S. visa and immigration system is broken. The Golden Door Foundation shares the belief that without a functioning legal work visa process, the illegal immigrant population will continue to grow. An aging population exiting the workforce and companies moving operations outside the U.S. are issues that need to be addressed to deal effectively with the immigration crisis and current labor shortages facing the United States. The Golden Door Foundation applauds the work of the Reason Foundation to show that there is a need to fix the overly bureaucratic and unfair visa program,” states Jason LeVecke, founder of Golden Door Foundation.

Full Chart Online

The full chart, “Our Nation’s Broken Immigration and Naturalization System,” produced by Reason Foundation and the National Foundation for American Policy, is online at: /wp-content/uploads/2008/08/a87d1550853898a9b306ef458f116079.pdf

A cartoon version of the chart that will appear in the October 2008 issue of Reason magazine is here: /wp-content/uploads/2008/08/cb299f0134ca8bb75243c69caa92eea7.pdf

About Reason Foundation

Reason Foundation is a nonprofit think tank dedicated to advancing free minds and free markets. Reason Foundation produces respected public policy research on a variety of issues and publishes the critically acclaimed Reason magazine and its website www.reason.com. For more information, please visit www.reason.org.

Contact

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