The Oakland, CA city council recently voted to start issuing municipal ID cards, primarily to provide government-issued IDs to illegal immigrants. There are two major arguments being made against this program:
- The program is expensive, adding almost $1 million to Oakland’s already-$100 million deficit. Supporters of the program argue that the program will pay for itself, and opponents are countering by pointing at a similar program in San Francisco which is losing money at prodigeous rates.
- Citizens and legal residents already have access to other government-issued IDs, and it’s improper to issue IDs to those who are here in violation of US immigration laws.
To me, it’s the second argument that’s key. If it’s necessary and proper for the government to issue ID even to people who are here illegally, then the program is necessary even if it’s expensive. But if it isn’t proper, then the program is wrong even if it pays for itself.
I strongly disagree with current immigration law. I think that vast majority of people currently here illegally should have been welcomed here legally. If you want to work hard and earn an honest living for yourself and your family, and there’s someone willing to hire you, I want you to be able to come here without breaking the law. Recession or no recession, the more work that gets done, the better off everyone is. Illegal immigration is a problem because it’s illegal, not because it’s immigration.
But while I believe that we should let far, far more people into this country legally, that is something that needs to happen at the federal level. For decades, we’ve had lax enforcement of bad immigration laws, leading to the current problem of a large underclass who are permenantly denied access to full participation in civil society, and who are faced with a choice between staying here illegally and underground or returning home to crushing poverty. It’s a brutal choice, and I understand why some people want to act at the local level to ease the burden on those here illegally.
But city ID cards won’t make illegal immigrants legal. It’ll just help perpetuate the current system by creating the illusion that the problem has been addressed. The real solution is to fix federal immigration law, and only Congress can do that.
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I think there’s a counterpoint to point 2, which is that the state has a compelling interest to have some form of documentation of the people within its jurisdiction – whether they are there legally or not. The issue there seems to me that it’s a hard sell to get people whose continued safety in some senses relies on being 100% off the books to voluntarily submit to be document by the government at any level – despite it affording them access to several basic services.
If you want to work hard and earn an honest living for yourself and your family, and there’s someone willing to hire you, I want you to be able to come here without breaking the law.
The trouble is, unscrupulous business owners have lots of reasons to prefer illegals even if legal immigration is easy. Hiring illegals gives you a bigger stick with which to threaten your workers when they don’t work hard enough. Illegals are unlikely to complain about dubious hiring practices and unsafe working conditions and substandard pay, and they are not likely to organize. The labor of legal immigrants is subject to minimum-wage laws, so they offer no benefit to employers over a citizen.
If legal immigration were easy, I’d expect unscrupulous employers to have a great deal of difficulty finding illegal immigrants to hire for exactly those reasons. Why would a prospective immigrant deal with all that hassle when he could just come here legally?
My wife sells little businesses here in California, and the “demand pull” of illegals is pretty clear. One thing that may surprise people is it isn’t necessarily low net wages; most illegals in these little businesses make quite a bit more than minimum wage, especially if “fringe benefits” like free food and a cot in the back room are figured into the “pay package”.
What the little businesses get is off-the-books workers, which allows them to avoid the taxman’s radar and keep labor costs down by not needing to comply with the myriad regulations and payroll withholding and reporting requirements, which can add 30% or more to the cost of low-end workers.
Personally, I’m libertarian enough to argue that, in a society that depends on voluntary compliance with the law over Gestapo-level enforcement, we should massively reduce the number of regs and such that we put on business owners so they can employ workers cheap enough that there’s less incentive to operate off the books.
As for “scruples”, one thing is that very few of these business operators are native-born Americans (of any race). Nearly all of them are first-generation immigrants from countries where only suckers pay taxes. They have the same attitude about the American government, and so dominate the markets they’re in that it’s impossible to do business and make any money if you actually tried to be completely “legit”.
One aside: part of the reason Americans “don’t do these jobs” is because they are never asked. Off-the-books dishwasher jobs and such are advertised only in non-English-language newspapers, if they’re advertised at all.
One other point: this is why “guest worker” programs won’t work. Any “guest worker” program will involve even more government than hiring someone on the books, so these little businesses will have nothing to do with it.
All of this is a result of the attempt to restrict driver’s licenses to people who are in the country legally, but the question of being in the country “legally” is so complex that driver’s licenses simply cannot cover it.
I personally knew a woman that was in the country legally under various education/student and tourists visas. She had a Calif drivers license that was good for much longer than the visas she had at the time she got the license. She could have let her visas expire and be in the country illegally and still have a completely valid Calif drivers license. As it was she was working, which was not allowed under her visa. So even though she was in the country legally and had a Calif drivers license, she was still working illegally.
Only about half of the illegals actually entered the country illegally. The other half entered the country legally and simply overstayed their visa or worked illegally when their visa did not allow them to work. Drivers licenses were intended to make sure that divers know how to drive safely. Attempting to use them to figure out who is in the country legally is a waste of time.
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