Background Check

People to watch in the new Congress

Rick Henderson from the March 1995 issue

(Page 5 of 5)

Simpson may sound like a moderate on the subject, and that's the way he portrays himself. But he promises to stir up all sorts of trouble with his proposal to reduce the number of legal immigrants by 25 percent over the next five years, to 500,000 legal entries annually.

With much of the concern over immigration driven by law-and-order sentiment, that's a prescription for disaster. Immigration quotas, like import quotas on cars, are market-disrupting laws that seek to raise the price of a domestic product (in this case, labor) by keeping out foreign suppliers. But here products can walk across the border on their own; the buyers often have no domestic suppliers; and quota-driven shortages encourage ever greater law breaking. People concerned that illegal immigration erodes respect for law have two choices: raise quotas to something approaching a market-clearing level, or adopt a zero-tolerance policy. (The easiest analogy to understand, especially in the West, may be the 55-mph speed limit. If you want to encourage obedience to the law, you either raise the limit to a level appropriate for conditions or slap a huge fine on every other driver.)

Merely cutting legal quotas does nothing to encourage people to obey the law; in fact, it's likely to have the opposite effect. Perhaps 1.2 million persons enter the country, legally and illegally, and stay every year. Unless the Immigration and Naturalization Service can dramatically accelerate the number of persons it deports--and it deported only 20,000 persons in 1993--Simpson's restrictions would create as many as 700,000 new law-breaking immigrants every year.

Theoretically, they could be sent to prison. But the United States currently has space for one million prisoners. To be effective, the Simpson plan would require the nation's prison capacity to double every 20 months--and that won't happen.

And while most illegals would never go to jail, a lot of employers might. Assuming the government enforced Simpson's immigration caps, law-enforcement agents would conduct frequent raids on businesses to check for illegal employees. As a result, employers would face constant harassment from federal officials, the type of regulatory burden Republicans say they oppose. Indeed, Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, the Republicans' lead man on immigration in the House, has pushed for extending the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) law and asset-forfeiture laws to cover those who smuggle or harbor illegals. That could unleash the same regulatory terror on employers and landlords that OSHA and wetlands enforcers engage in now. We'll know how serious Republicans are about slashing the regulatory state if they ignore the Simpson/Smith positions on immigration.