RUTHFULLY YOURS

Today’s bitter divides focus too narrowly on enforcement. All sides need to be clearer about what immigration policy is meant to achieve

The immigration debate in the U.S. has been contentious for decades, but Donald Trump’s candidacy and election have taken it to a new level of polarized animosity. Politicians and the public have focused, understandably, on Mr. Trump’s promise to build a “big, beautiful” wall on the U.S.-Mexico border and on what should be done with the millions of illegal immigrants currently in the country.

These are certainly important issues. But they are enforcement issues. They are less fundamental than a question that too often goes unaddressed in our debates: Why limit immigration at all? Almost everyone at least pays lip service to the need for limits of some kind, but we don’t often enough challenge each other to explain what limits we support and why.

If we are ever to have a rational debate about immigration—rather than a screaming match among combatants mostly intent on signaling their own moral virtue or ideological purity—the starting point has to be a candid acknowledgment of our goals and preferences. Politicians and ordinary voters shouldn’t be allowed to get away with saying “Of course there should be limits on immigration, but…” without explaining what they mean.

Almost all of the arguments for limiting immigration share a common theme: protection. Even those advocating much more liberal immigration policies acknowledge the need to protect Americans from terrorists, foreign criminals and people who pose a threat to public health. Supporters of stricter limits, such as me, seek wider protections: protection for less-skilled workers, protection for the social safety net, and protection for the civic and cultural foundations of American society.

President Trump approved the Keystone XL pipeline on Friday, and good for him, but will there be enough workers to build it? That’s a serious question. Many American employers, especially in construction and agriculture, are facing labor shortages that would be exacerbated by restrictionist immigration policies.

Demographic trends coupled with a skills mismatch have resulted in a frustrating economic paradox: Millions of workers are underemployed even as millions of jobs go unfilled. The U.S. workforce is also graying, presenting a challenge for industries that entail manual labor.

Construction is ground zero in the worker shortage. Many hard-hats who lost their jobs during the recession left the labor force. Some found high-paying work in fossil fuels during the fracking boom and then migrated to renewables when oil prices tumbled. While construction has rebounded, many employed in the industry a decade ago are no longer there.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are nearly 150,000 unfilled construction jobs across the country, nearly double the number five years ago. The shortage is particularly acute in metro areas like Miami, Dallas and Denver, and the worker shortage is delaying projects and raising costs.

A January survey by the Associated General Contractors of America found that 73% of firms had a hard time finding qualified workers. More firms identified worker shortages as a big concern (55%) than any other issue including federal regulations (41%) and lack of infrastructure investment (18%). Demand and salaries for subcontractors (e.g., carpentry and bricklaying) are going through the roof.

On the current demographic course, the shortage will worsen. The average age of construction equipment operators and highway maintenance workers is 46. When middle-aged workers retire, there won’t be many young bodies to replace them. Most high schools have dropped vocational training, and more young people are enrolling in colleges that don’t teach technical skills.

The farm labor shortage is also growing, which has caused tens of millions of dollars worth of crops to rot in the fields. Farmers can’t get enough H-2A visas for foreign guest workers, some of whom have migrated to higher-paying occupations. Workers also often arrive late due to visa processing delays by the Labor Department. The undocumented workforce has shrunk as more Mexicans have left the country than have arrived in recent years.

The Western Growers Association reports that crews are running 20% short on average. Boosting wages and benefits—many employers pay $15 an hour with 401(k)s and paid vacation—has been little help. Instead, employers are cannibalizing one another’s farms. In 2015 the country’s largest lemon grower Limoneira raised wages to $16 per hour, boosted retirement benefits by 20% and offered subsidized housing. But now vineyards in Napa are poaching workers from growers in California’s Central Valley by paying even more.

Some restrictionists claim that cheap foreign labor is hurting low-skilled U.S. workers, but there’s little evidence for that. One Napa grower recently told the Los Angeles Times that paying even $20 an hour wasn’t enough to keep native workers on the farm.

A new paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research concludes that terminating the Bracero program, which admitted seasonal farm workers from Mexico during the 1940s and ’50s, did not raise wages of domestic workers. Meantime, a 2014 study found that Arizona’s E-Verify mandate on employers reduced “employment opportunities among some low-skilled legal workers.”

President Trump has made crime a big part of his immigration enforcement campaign, last month unveiling a new immigration-crime victims unit at the Justice Department. We understand the emotive political appeal, but the federal government doesn’t need a new bureaucracy given the facts about immigrant crime.

Mr. Trump highlighted the murder victims of undocumented immigrants “whose government failed them.” He’s right about that, and it’s exasperating that foreign criminals are released onto the streets only to perpetrate more violence. But there’s no evidence that immigrants commit more crimes than do native-born citizens and some to suggest they commit less.

In a newly published paper, researchers at the University at Buffalo and University of Alabama examined 200 metropolitan areas between 1970 and 2010. They found that murder, robbery, burglary and larceny rates decreased as immigration increased. A recent meta-analysis of 50 studies published between 1994 and 2014 concluded that cities with larger immigrant populations have lower crime rates.

Copious research also indicates that immigrants are less crime-prone than native-born Americans. A 2012 study observed that “foreign-born individuals exhibit remarkably low levels of involvement in crime across their lifetime,” though the second generation “caught up” to their native-born counterparts.

A 2005 analysis of 180 Chicago neighborhoods between 1995 and 2002 found that first-generation immigrants demonstrated significantly lower rates of violence than blacks and whites and that their “odds of violence are almost half those of third-generation immigrants.” At least on crime, immigrant families are assimilating too much.

The Chicago study (and some others) discovered a robust link between “concentrated immigration” and lower crime. So whites and blacks who live in communities with more immigrants are less likely to experience crime. Researchers suggest that immigrants may be less criminal because they have strong family bonds and work ethic, which is underscored by their higher labor participation rate. Immigrants washing dishes probably aren’t committing crimes in their down time.

The anecdotes Mr. Trump cites result mainly from failures in federal and local law enforcement as well as overreaching court rulings. Between 2013 and 2015, about 8,000 convicted criminals were released as a result of the Supreme Court’s Zadvydas v. Davis in 2001 that prohibited Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from indefinitely detaining immigrants.

Federal courts have also ruled that detention orders are not mandatory, and local governments can refuse to enforce them. Municipalities have even been sued for not releasing immigrants on bond. Foreign governments are often uncooperative, and the State Department could stop issuing visas to countries that don’t repatriate their criminals.

Local governments have also resisted cooperation when they believe ICE is indiscriminately rounding up undocumented immigrants. Notably, local cooperation increased when the Obama Administration prioritized removing criminal immigrants. Former ICE director Sarah Saldana told Congress last year that “more than half of previously uncooperative jurisdictions are now cooperating.”

This evidence suggests that the Trump Administration would better protect Americans by focusing on immigrants who commit serious crimes, not anyone here on an illegal document. Trying to round up everyone, or creating a needless bureaucracy, will mean fewer resources for deporting dangerous criminals.

I respectfully disagree with the National Review editors’ comments, following President Trump’s address to Congress, that creation of a new unit in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) focused on the victims of illegal-immigrant crime “would serve no good purpose.” Actually, the office would serve several good purposes that are directly related to immigration policy, politics, and civic morality.

The “Office for Victims of Crimes Committed by Removable Aliens,” now called “Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement (VOICE),” was created by an executive order on immigration enforcement on January 25 and enhanced in a memorandum by DHS secretary John Kelly on February 20. VOICE is a very appropriate name for this office. For years American families victimized by illegal aliens have been ignored. Because of the misuse of “privacy” rules and indifference, they have been unable to find out whether the criminals who attacked their family members were in the country legally or illegally, or even whether the aliens were incarcerated, deported, or set free.

Secretary Kelly’s memo stated that “criminal aliens routinely victimize Americans. . . . Often, these victims are not provided adequate information about the offender, the offender’s immigration status, or any enforcement action taken by ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] against the offender . . . leaving victims feeling marginalized and without a voice.” The DHS memo declared that the new office would create a liaison with the victims and provide information including the “offender’s immigration status and custody status.” Funds for VOICE would be reallocated from “resources that are currently used to advocate on behalf of illegal aliens,” an Obama initiative, which would be “immediately” terminated. Thus, no major new bureaucracy would be created.

It is to Donald Trump’s credit that he has done what no other presidential candidate, or major American political figure, has ever done, by championing these unfashionable and (for many) inconvenient victims of illegal-immigrant crime (inconvenient because they muddy the dominant media narrative). In contrast to Trump, when the family members of Americans killed by illegal aliens testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in the summer of 2015, Senators Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and Richard Durbin (D., Ill.) fled the hearing room and returned only after the families had gone. As Mark Krikorian explained, these Americans are “all dead because federal, state, and local governments have abdicated their responsibility to protect American citizens from foreign criminals.”

A statement issued by Homeland Security Secretary Jack Kelly, concerning data compiled by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, noted that there has been a marked decrease in illegal border crossings at the U.S.-Mexican border this year between January and February, “as measured by apprehensions and the prevention of inadmissible persons at our southern border.” In January there were 31,578 apprehensions, while in February there were 18,762. This 40 percent drop is in contrast to previous year comparisons of January and February, during which there had been a 10-20 percent increase in apprehensions of illegal immigrants.

The trend is in the right direction, even without the border wall already in place that President Trump promised during the campaign. According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data cited by Homeland Security Secretary Kelly, “in the period from Oct 1, 2016 to the Presidential inauguration, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported 157,000 apprehensions of illegal immigrants – a 35 percent increase over the previous fiscal year, with family units increasing by more than 100 percent. However, since President Trump took office on January 20, we have seen a dramatic drop in numbers.”

Some of the decline may be due to seasonal factors. However, more robust enforcement in the wake of President Trump’s issuance of two executive orders intended to boost such enforcement of the nation’s existing immigration laws are clearly having a deterrent effect. Since the Trump administration’s implementation of these executive orders, according to Secretary Kelly, we are seeing apprehensions and the turning away of inadmissible persons at our southern border “trending toward the lowest monthly total in at least the last five years.”

What makes the robust enforcement regime introduced by President Trump’s executive orders even more effective is the termination of the practice commonly known as “catch and release,” whereby illegal immigrants have been routinely released in the United States shortly after their apprehension for violations of immigration law. Thus, illegal immigrant traffic is slowing due to the deterrent effect of more rigorous enforcement, while those caught having entered the country illegally are not allowed to simply roam free pending their immigration hearings.