Illegal immigration’s solution isn’t taller and stronger fences, more guards and more deportations. Theses are band-aid fixes. Illegal immigration is both an act of desperation and a caution be damned leap of faith for people devoid of hope. For the receiving country, immigrants are an economic spark plug yet at the same time a political bombshell for Republicans concerned that people whose skin isn’t white are becoming a majority in the US .
Real solutions require understanding the reasons people emigrate and the reasons employers hire illegal immigrants. Meet those needs and you solve the immigration problem.
There is a two-step long-term solution. Besides stemming the tide of immigrants, they have economic and social benefits for the US.
First, remove the job incentive to emigrate by forming a free trade area mimicking the European Union between the US, Mexico and Central America that eventually encompasses the Western Hemisphere. This isn’t a simple fix and may not happen in my lifetime, but it is the right solution. Having one of the world’s richest countries bordering some of the world’s poorest is a recipe for disaster. Make the border more advanced and the people trafficking immigrants will simply become more advanced. Conversely, a free trade zone would be a win – win for everyone.
If we want to stem the flood of Latinos coming to the US for jobs, it only makes sense to take the jobs to them and ship product to the US. People with jobs and hope for their future are much less likely to split up their families and forsake everything they know for a perilous trek north.
The myth
When you hear a lie enough times, people start to believe it. This is the reason US citizens continually equate trade agreements with job losses. We have Merchandise and Trade deficits (job losses) because we have Net National Savings deficits. The two should roughly equal each other. In the US, we now have a -$465.6 billion Merchandise and Trade deficit and a -$466 billion Net National Saving deficit. (The Net National Savings deficit is money we borrow from abroad). The reason we have a Net National Savings deficit is our $593.5 billion federal government budget deficit.
If our elected officials eliminated our budget deficit, logically our Net National Savings deficit would be dramatically lowered or eliminated resulting in an equal change in our Merchandise and Trade balance. The bottom line here is opening a free trade zone will not impact our trade balance. We export jobs because our elected government officials lack the wherewithal to balance our government’s spending and income.
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was supposed to open trade between the US, Mexico and Canada. NAFTA is a 1,700 page mixture of conditions, regulations and rules that belies its name. While it has certainly helped Mexicans, it has stifled the opportunity for more trade and offers nothing to Central Americans. A free trade zone fixes that.
The second step to stemming the flow of illegal immigrants is legalizing the sale of presently illicit drugs in the US. In a single swoop, we can do more to promote individual safety and well-being in Mexico and south than all the aid and drug enforcement money we’ve squandered in the last 40 years.
From anyone’s perspective, the War On Drugs is a failure. Just like Prohibition, we might as well admit government does an ineffective job of preventing citizens from imbibing in things that aren’t good for them. Long prison sentences for sellers don’t work and capturing drug kingpins doesn’t work. There is always someone willing to take their places to keep the drugs coming into the US.
The only argument advocates of continuing drug enforcement still use is that legalization will increase the availability of drugs. It is difficult to imaging them being more available than they are now. Instead of breaking up mostly minority families in the US with long prison sentences for selling drugs, legalization would allow us to focus on the much more effective solution of treating drug users’ addictions.
Summing up illegal immigration
It is easy to simply blame Mexico and Central and South American countries for the violence, corruption and bad government that fuels illegal immigration to the US. However, it is the US’s insatiable demand for drugs and our government’s almost insane insistence to continue doing what hasn’t worked that is responsible for creating lawlessness in neighboring countries. If we want to fix illegal immigration, we need to fix our approach to drugs.
At the same time, we need to get our government out-of-the-way of protecting powerful industries from foreign competition. A hemisphere wide free trade zone will give US consumers dramatically lower sugar prices and bring higher end new jobs to the US as southern countries start improving their economies.
Shifting the illegal immigration argument away from more enforcement and higher fences to addressing the causes will result in a win-win for all countries. Unfortunately, this will require a seismic change in our politics.
