Tightening the Border

Jared Bernstein is a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington and a former chief economist to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

The path to immigration reform, if not to citizenship, may have just become a bit less steep as Senate Republicans “reached an agreement on Thursday on a plan to strengthen border security … raising hopes that the new deal could build Republican support for the immigration legislation being debated on the Senate floor.”

You might expect someone like me â€" as a progressive who has long supported coprehensive immigration reform and a welcoming policy stance to those who want to try to make it in America â€" to recoil at this development.  But I think the general idea makes sense.

To be more precise, we kid ourselves if we think we can fix our broken immigration system without controlling legal immigrant flows. Unfortunately, the returns to spending $30 billion more on militarizing the border may be smaller than border-control advocates think. We’re already spending $18 billion per year and illegal flows are way down (though part of that is because of the diminished magnet of the weaker United States economy).  Resources would be much better spent strengthening employer verification systems.

But the larger point is that conservatives are right when they emphasize border control as a key part of comprehensive reform, though they predictably go way too! far when they argue that the more welcoming parts of the legislation shouldn’t kick in until the border is 90 to 100 percent secure. That’s just “poison pill” verbiage.

The 1986 reform effort demonstrably failed in this regard or we wouldn’t be where we are today. And smart parts of the Senate legislation have built in flow controls for low-wage workers, though less so for higher-wage workers.  For example, the bill proposes the creation of the Immigration and Labor Market Research Bureau, charged with evaluating local shortages of lower-skilled workers and adjusting the caps accordingly.  Obviously, that idea assumes control of the spigot (Britain effectively takes this approach).

So, before supporters of progressive reform become too outraged about stepped-up border control, I urge them to consider the logic. Absent control of flows, we’re just pretending to fix the problem.