The Comprehensive Illegal Immigrant Thread

I suspect KK is talking about remittances from people here illegally in particular, not remittances in general.


Frankly, we can't make people think that they have a future in Mexico. Mexico is the one that can do that, and its failing at it. However, we do have the ability to make them feel like they don't have a viable future if they were to come to the U.S. illegally.

Example: I could increase the money I'm making by dealing drugs. Very profitable. However, I don't do so (and mind, I'm pro-drug legalisation) becuase the money I could make dealing drugs is simply not worth the risks and potential legal punishment I could face.

 

And I meant it in the same way that he did.

Up to now, dollars have usually spoken louder than words, and the American employers who hire them have been telling them -- for decades -- that there's dollars to be made here.

Cross-border demand for Mexican labor goes back to -- at least -- the beginning of the 20th century, and the bracero program made it legal for decades. When the bracero program ended, the U.S. government turned a blind eye and for all effects and purposes allowed employers to continue a bracero program of their own, allowing them to hire seasonal workers from Mexico (and to a lesser extent, elsewhere in Central America) without regards for the law.

So basically you have a situation where, for over 100 years, the American employers who hire people they're technically not supposed to have been speaking with their dollars, and have been telling people from south of the border "Come here, we'll hire you and pay you more you could make in your home country!!"

I'm gonna paraphrase Barack Obama here and ask, "If the minimum wage in Canada was $100 an hour, and many Canadian employers were willing to hire anyone regardless of immigration status, how many Americans do you think would be looking for work in Canada, without employment authorization?"

 

Lowbacca has it exactly right.

We need to remove the incentives for people to come here illegally. One of the biggest incentives is the remittances. To attack those, there are several approaches that you would need to make.

1) The actual act of sending a remittance. Often, these are sent via Western Union or other wire transfers. If you require proof of legal residency before sending a wire transfer, you would reduce these outright. Yes, they might shift to sending cash, or other alternate means, but those methods are more risky. If it becomes more likely that your money would be stolen in transit, you will be less likely to wend it in the first place.

2) The ability to earn money. We need to crack down on the employers who are hiring illegals. There's not much that you can do for some of the day laborers (as many of them are hired by private citizens and not companies), but you can target the companies that hire them. As part of this, we need to make an easy system for employers to quickly verify a person's legal status. A simple, secure web interface where you enter an individual's information (Name, SSN, etc) and a simple response of valid or invalid would suffice for this. This is all information that the government already has. It's just creating the interface that would be needed.

But if they are coming here for the jobs, we need to make the jobs dry up for them. Even the argument that "they're jobs Americans won't do" is a load of crap. There are plenty of people who would be willing to do those jobs for a fair wage. Illegal immigrants are more likely to accept lower wages (including below minimum wage), and so they have a depressive effect on the value of those jobs.

3) The ability to enter the US. We need to make it more difficult and costly for them to enter the US illegally. If they have to pay a coyote $1000 (random number) today, and he has certain costs with evading border patrols, we do what we can to force his costs to go up. This includes increasing patrols, building obstacles (such as a fence or wall), use of UAVs, and so forth. If they get caught, we need to increase the penalties on them. All of this would increase their costs, and they would pass those costs on to the illegal immigrants. If the cost of hiring a coyote doubled, you would see a drop in the number of people who can afford to use them, and a corresponding drop in the number of people entering the US illegally.

The root cause of illegal immigrat

 

All this would do is create a new business opportunity for paisanos who are legal residents and would take a small fee (maybe 5%) to make the remittances in their own name.

There's already ways that employers can check. All this would do in the long run is push them further underground, and make them even more susceptible to being exploited by unscrupulous American employers.

Americans up to now have been speaking pretty loudly with their wallets. The demand for labor doesn't seem to be drying up completely, even though obviously it is affected by the weak economy at the moment.

Well, the U.S. has been trying to do this for a few decades now...

 

Which increases the costs and reduces the amount of money that the illegals can send home. Also, if those paisanos are doing that as a business, they would fall under the same regulations requiring them to establish legal status of those they transfer money for. If they aren't running it as a business, they would likely face tax fraud problems (as the wire transfer records would show them spending money that wasn't declared for tax purposes).

Either way, you are significantly increasing the costs and risks for the people sending remittances.

The current methods are not as easy for small employers to use, and are not as effective. And if it does push them farther underground, then so what? That only removes more of the incentives for them to come here. That's the whole point! If you are going after the employers, you'll eventually make it too costly for those unscrupulous employers to operate like that.

That's because there hasn't been any real effort at enforcing the employers, in large part because the tools for them to effectively verify legal status aren't in place. Fix that and then crack down on those who don't obey the law.

Your point is? More needs to be done, and quite a few people agree on that.

So, your entire argument is that because the Federal government hasn't been effective so far, nothing can be done? None of the measures I proposed above has really been implemented by the government in anything more than a token manner, so there's really no basis to say that the theory is disproven. It's all based on sound economic principles, though.

Kimball Kinnison

 

It doesn't have to be run as a business. People could just go to their best friend or relative who can prove legal residency and ask them to do it for them. The person sending the remittance only has to prove residency, they don't have to prove they're not sending on someone else's behalf.

I didn't say that "nothing can be done". All I said is the track record so far has shown that historically, the government hasn't really taken such measures, as you said, in anything more than a token manner. But like I said, we can just wait and see whether things are done differently in the next administration.

 

If it's more than a small amount, they will run into problems with tax fraud.

One of the key ways that people are convicted of tax fraud is when they are spending more money than they make. If Person A gives Person B $5000 to send to Mexico, there will be a record of the wire transfer in the name of Person B. If they do enough of these transfers, without having any documentation for where they got the money in the first place, the IRS will be on them in a heartbeat. They will then have to account for where all of that money came from, and pay taxes on it as income. Alternately, they would face money laundering charges (which is exactly what they would be doing - making illegal money look like legal money).

In short, it wouldn't work because it add significant risk to the people actually doing the transfers. If you remove the paper trail to prevent being caught, you make it far more likely that money will be stolen in transit, which also adds significant risk.

Kimball Kinnison

 

The amounts involved probably wouldn't be that great, most of these people are making close to minimum wage. It would be very easy to send $500 or less.

Well, they can turn to their friends or relatives, or they can send cash. There's probably a lot of other things they can think of that I haven't even thought of.

But before we even got to that situation, the federal government would have to make the changes that you are suggesting. Personally, I don't think it's very likely to happen, either in this administration or the next, but, as I said before, let's wait and see. Who knows, maybe our next president will adopt the policies you have suggested.

 

I already addressed all of that. If they send cash, it increases the risk that the money would be stolen in transit. In short, the goal is to increase the risk, cost, and difficulty in sending money back home.

Yes, there might be other workarounds that they can use, but the effect will be to either increase the risk to the money sent, increase the hassle to send the money, increase the cost of sending the money, or some or all of the above. All of those results work towards the goal of removing the incentives to come here illegally.

The exact same thing could be said about everything you've suggested in this thread. If you are going to simply dismiss things like that, why should anyone else give any consideration to your ideas?

Kimball Kinnison

 

Well, you think this would act as effectively as you suggest, but I remain unconvinced. Really, there's no way to know just how effective it might or might not be unless or until it is implemented.

There is a difference here, because we have the government's track record of not doing the kinds of things that you are suggesting, at least not until now. My skepticism has more to do with the fact that such policies, up to now, haven't been implemented by the federal government even though a lot of hard-liners have been demanding them for years. But, as I keep saying to you, who knows what will happen in the next administration? Maybe they will adopt some of the measures you are suggesting. If and when they do, we will know how effective they might be.

That's just a wait-and-see attitude, it is not dismissing anything as completely impossible.

 

I think this thinking is highly problematic for a few reasons Lowie.

Firstly, the US can work on building capacity in Mexico that will make people see a future there.

Secondly, you've just fallen into the classic American trap of thinking it's up to others to solve American problems. Believe me, I see this every day and won't miss it when I shift industries.

The Australian Government doesn't have the money the US or EU has to spend, but we need influence because without cooperation we will see an influx in boatload arrivals in Australia. So we have to be strategic in our investment in political capital - we couldn't drop $40mil on a border management system and walk away like DHS could - so we found a really neat solution.

We regionalised the problem.

We knew that we would get nothing by saying "illegal migration is a problem in Australia, and it's coming from your side, you need to fix it" because they'd say "it's not our problem!"

And they're partially right. So we made it a regional issue and we emphasised cooperation.

The reason I bring this up, and I already know Tina won't see the relevance so hi Tina! /wave, is that for us, illegal immigration to Australia is bad but it's not a problem for Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand et al. What is a problem we all share is illegal migration. The same system that can work to stem tides from Malaysia into Brunei Darusaalam or Indonesia can work in the GMS (Greater Mekong Subregion, from China through Cambodia, Laos, Thailand).

So, illegals entering the US from Mexico is a problem for the US, not Mexico, right?

Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't Mexico have a problem on it's southern border with central Americans entering Mexico illegally?

If I went to El Salvador, Guatemala, Belize, Panama, and I asked the governments was illegal migration a concern and a problem for them, I would bet money the answer was yes. If I asked, "is it a concern for you that your citizens are illegally migrating to the USA?", it wouldn't rank nearly as highly on their list.

If the US could find the courage to a) show leadership and b) stop telling others how to think/act/do, I would say in my professional opinion, you'd see a noticable benefit. You cannot make a significant dent in your illegal migration problem without cooperation from Mexico, because you lack the resources to match the inbound numbers. And tut-tutting the Government in Mexico and talking down to them won't make a lick of difference.

ES

 

Actually, I do think it is relevant. I believe I've said many times that any unilateral approach isn't nearly as likely to achieve the intended objectives as a bilateral approach would be. However, I don't think a bilateral agreement is likely to occur anytime soon, because of political reasons.

I agree with you in that the U.S. won't make a significant dent in the problem without cooperation from Mexico. There is some cooperation already, but it is very limited. More importantly, Mexican officials have made it abundantly clear in the last few years that Mexico isn't likely to fully cooperate with the U.S. unless there is some sort of amnesty in return. Of course, we all know how many Americans feel about that.

So I don't know how the U.S. can overcome that impasse - the other country tells you "we'll stop them on our side, if you'll just give legal status to those who already got in", when legalization is almost impossible to sell domestically.

And certainly in the last few years, the emphasis has been on an unilateral approach. Not only that, but there seems to be more animosity against the indocumentados themselves than there is against the coyotes (organized smugglers) or against the U.S. employers who continue disregarding immigration laws.