First, thanks very much to Jack for giving me access to this forum to express some thoughts about the prolonged and heated debate we're having in this country over immigration—a debate that is not just about border security and economic growth and competitiveness, but also about how the United States’ behavior as a global economic actor implicates our identity as a democratic society.

Comprehensive immigration reform (CIR) as a piece of legislation may fall off the front page in the next day or two: the Court is set to release its potentially blockbuster opinion in the Seattle and Louisville school assignment cases today. And if CIR fails a second test vote in the Senate in the next few hours, it is likely to disappear from the legislative agenda at least until 2009. But the problem the Senate and the President have been trying to address will only get worse, and so immigration is likely to become an issue in the Presidential campaign and will return to haunt the 112th Congress in 2009. Whatever happens this week in the Senate, it is crucial to reflect on whether the fundamental paradigm shifts contemplated by today’s version of CIR are ones we really want to make.

The initial paradigm shift, which I endorse in this post, is the move away from an enforcement-only approach toward a search for legal means of channeling what I referred to yesterday as future flow—the stream of unskilled and low-skilled migration likely to persist in the future, largely from Mexico and Latin America, from which nearly 80% of the current unauthorized population of migrants comes.

The measure favored by those who eschew enforcement-only strategies is a guest worker program—the issue that has divided Democrats, much as legalization has divided Republicans. The terms of such a program vary depending on who is proposing it (President Bush has altered his own version in multiple and significant ways since he first proposed it in 2001 during the less complicated days of his Presidency.) But proponents of a guest worker program all argue, implicitly or explicitly, that the lesson of the last twenty years is that we cannot prevent illegal immigration solely by beefing up border security and cracking down on the employers who hire unauthorized workers. We have no choice but to accommodate the market realities that have generated the unauthorized population in the first place.

This motivation behind the guest worker proposal strikes me as exactly right—a position I defend here. At the same time, a temporary worker program as the means of channeling future flow strikes me as a potential disaster—a position I will spell out in a later post.
Those who resist guest worker programs from the left (and some from the populist right) are essentially resisting the future-flow paradigm shift. Opponents think the way forward is to strengthen the employer sanctions regime adopted in 1986. We should come down even harder on employers who hire illegal workers and expand a centralized database that enables employers to verify electronically a worker’s legal status, making it impossible for workers to falsify documents and “dupe” employers into hiring them. The reason to redouble our status quo efforts is to protect the American worker. It’s not that there are no Americans to fill the jobs in construction, food preparation, agriculture, domestic services, and meatpacking that illegal immigrants currently fill. The problem is that Americans won’t do those jobs for the low wages immigrants are willing to accept, and the presence of a large immigrant labor supply depresses the wages of the least advantaged in our society.

There are at least three reasons to abandon this position. First, leaving aside the fact that electronic verification of the sort contemplated in the Senate bill remains something of a pipe dream, the experience of the last twenty years suggests that no matter how strong the initial commitment to enforcing employer sanctions may be, the political and administrative will to enforce them rigorously over the long haul may not be there. The preferences of employers and consumers both will work against strong enforcement, and even the high-profile ICE raids of workplaces over the last few months seem politically timed and unsustainable given their economic and humanitarian consequences. In other words, employer sanctions will not stop future flow, and employer sanctions may do more harm than good—see Mike Wishnie’s compelling arguments against them.

Second, and less cynically, the combination of the dramatic wage differential and the extensive land border between the United States and Mexico makes a certain amount of migration from South to North inevitable, at least under current conditions. As some economists point out, trying to stop illegal immigration without opening channels for legal entry for workers who would otherwise come illegally will fail, because market forces will push labor from low-wage to high-wage countries, low-productivity use to high-productivity use. The wage differential means that workers in Mexico who seek to support their families and finance projects such as home construction have a strong incentive to head north, regardless of what the law says. To be sure, enforcement will have an effect on these flows. That effect is sometimes perverse, however, as researchers such as Doug Massey have shown in demonstrating that tough border enforcement ends up "trapping" migrants who would otherwise go home after a short period inside the United States, because border crossings have become dangerous but are still economically worthwhile.

And finally, even if there are some American workers willing and able to fill the jobs currently performed by illegal immigrants, there are simply not enough such American workers, and for good reason. As I emphasized yesterday, and as demographers explain, as our society has become more and more educated, the labor force has shifted toward higher-skilled, higher-wage jobs. Like Europe and Japan, though to a lesser extent, the trajectory of our demography is such that we need low-skilled immigrant workers. And, though it may seem intuitive that a large supply of immigrant workers without a high school diploma will depress the wages of the similarly situated native born, more and more research by economists is showing that immigrant workers are not substituting for native-born workers, but are rather complementing them, simultaneously enabling businesses to expand, thus creating more jobs.

Now, each one of these points may, over time, prove to be off (big business may lose its power, Americans may become less consumeristic, the rebellion against free trade pacts may succeed, Mexico and Central America may experience a dramatic surge in development, and the latest dynamic economic models showing complementarity may be proven wrong—the debate rages on). But one of the challenges in the policy debate is figuring out which of these facts about the world to hold constant so that we can actually address what everyone recognizes as dysfunction.

And it strikes me that the combination of all of the factors I have just enumerated demands that we come to grips with the inevitability of future flow and devise effective legal means for channeling it, rather than persisting in the belief that we can stop it if only we try harder. In reaching this conclusion, I do not mean to dismiss the potential distributional consequences of immigration on American workers without high school degrees, which most economists agree exist on some level. But it seems clear that rejecting unskilled immigration is an indirect and deeply misguided way (a head-in-the-sand strategy) of addressing the challenges facing that population.

Once we accept the virtual inevitability of unskilled immigration, the next question becomes how to channel it. The Senate’s guest worker solution reflects a second paradigm shift—toward temporary migration as the solution to our problems. As I argue in the aforementioned law review article and will explain in a later post, not only is a guest worker program (particularly as currently designed in the Senate bill) unlikely to succeed in reducing illegal immigration, it would undermine the United States’ essential tradition of immigrant integration and is thoroughly inconsistent with the spirit of social cooperation that should characterize relationships among participants in a democratic society and animate social legislation of this sort.