Making sense of immigration policy
The United States' immigration policy is dysfunctional. Pretty much everyone agrees on that, with the sole exception of the businessmen who profit from illegal labor. The mutual agreement ends there.
As a way of trying to formalize my thinking about what's wrong with immigration and how it might be fixed, I submit a hypothetical solution I call the YOYO visa.
(Note to my fellow libs in the audience: this discussion will use phrases like "illegals" and "illegal aliens" to describe foreign nationals working and living in the United States without a valid work visa. This is because the discussion is intended to be accessible to more conservative readers, who might consider the phrase "undocumented workers" to be excessively PC.)
Before I explain the YOYO visa idea, let me cover a bit about the problems with illegal immigration now.
One of the most common complaints from the right about illegal aliens is that they take advantage of our welfare system. The thing is, with the exception of emergency rooms and welfare programs intended for children, it's actually not legal for them to do that. If an illegal alien gets federal food stamps, for example, they've committed some form of fraud, as only qualified aliens are supposed to get food stamps. In fact, most federal welfare programs are only available to citizens and qualified aliens (search for Title IV in the link).
So if illegals are getting welfare benefits, it's via fraud. This isn't all that implausible, though, since for illegals to work also requires some level of fraud. (Ironically, aliens who are in the process of being deported do qualify for food stamps until the deportation proceedings are complete.)
In short, illegals already shouldn't be getting welfare; but because of our dysfunctional immigration system, they are anyway (to some extent).
So why is this being allowed to continue as the status quo? As the saying goes, follow the money. In this case, the greatest benefit is to the people who employ illegal aliens. Illegals get paid well below the prevailing wages; the proverbial strawberry-pickers will get well under minimum wage, while illegal construction workers, although often paid more than the actual minimum, are still paid a lot less than legal workers. And if an illegal gets uppity, well, a call to la migra will fix that.
One of the interesting things about the politics of immigration is that it cuts across partisan lines. On the right, you have a divide between the business sector which quietly prefers the status quo, and the outspoken social conservatives who want to deport 'em all. And on the left, the divide is between union and labor supporters who resent the undercutting of domestic labor, and the social liberals who see our immigration system as a violation of the human rights of "undocumented workers".
(Before I go any further, I'll stake out my own position, which could be summarized as "free market in labor"; I believe that honest people should be allowed to work for a living wherever they can find work, regardless of which side of an arbitrary line on a map they were born on. There are obvious practical problems with that idea, and the YOYO visa idea is intended to address them as fairly as possible.)
So without further ado, here's how the YOYO visa works:
Wages will be lower than they'd be if YOYOs/illegals weren't here at all, but (a) it should still be an improvement over the status quo; and (b) my personal view is that kicking people out doesn't actually help from a cost-of-labor perspective. Anyone who works in manufacturing or IT can tell you that "furriners" can "tek yer jerb" without setting one foot on American soil.
Obviously construction workers, nurses, and other people whose jobs are tied to a geographical location aren't directly at risk from foreigners who can't get into the US - but they're still at risk indirectly. If a manufacturing job gets outsourced, and the American who got laid off can't afford to buy a house, guess what - the construction workers who would've built his house just got their jerbs taken too. So, on balance, keeping foreigners from competing with American workers here isn't as effective at protecting Americans as some people think.
Finally, YOYOs bring unskilled immigrants into the "system". That makes it a lot easier to enforce immigration law against those who try to stay outside the system, or those who try to cheat the system. And if anyone does cheat the system, you can deport them without anyone but the most retarded libs complaining.
As I discussed above, there are still two significant unanswered problems:
So that's the YOYO visa. What did I miss?
As a way of trying to formalize my thinking about what's wrong with immigration and how it might be fixed, I submit a hypothetical solution I call the YOYO visa.
(Note to my fellow libs in the audience: this discussion will use phrases like "illegals" and "illegal aliens" to describe foreign nationals working and living in the United States without a valid work visa. This is because the discussion is intended to be accessible to more conservative readers, who might consider the phrase "undocumented workers" to be excessively PC.)
Before I explain the YOYO visa idea, let me cover a bit about the problems with illegal immigration now.
One of the most common complaints from the right about illegal aliens is that they take advantage of our welfare system. The thing is, with the exception of emergency rooms and welfare programs intended for children, it's actually not legal for them to do that. If an illegal alien gets federal food stamps, for example, they've committed some form of fraud, as only qualified aliens are supposed to get food stamps. In fact, most federal welfare programs are only available to citizens and qualified aliens (search for Title IV in the link).
So if illegals are getting welfare benefits, it's via fraud. This isn't all that implausible, though, since for illegals to work also requires some level of fraud. (Ironically, aliens who are in the process of being deported do qualify for food stamps until the deportation proceedings are complete.)
In short, illegals already shouldn't be getting welfare; but because of our dysfunctional immigration system, they are anyway (to some extent).
So why is this being allowed to continue as the status quo? As the saying goes, follow the money. In this case, the greatest benefit is to the people who employ illegal aliens. Illegals get paid well below the prevailing wages; the proverbial strawberry-pickers will get well under minimum wage, while illegal construction workers, although often paid more than the actual minimum, are still paid a lot less than legal workers. And if an illegal gets uppity, well, a call to la migra will fix that.
One of the interesting things about the politics of immigration is that it cuts across partisan lines. On the right, you have a divide between the business sector which quietly prefers the status quo, and the outspoken social conservatives who want to deport 'em all. And on the left, the divide is between union and labor supporters who resent the undercutting of domestic labor, and the social liberals who see our immigration system as a violation of the human rights of "undocumented workers".
(Before I go any further, I'll stake out my own position, which could be summarized as "free market in labor"; I believe that honest people should be allowed to work for a living wherever they can find work, regardless of which side of an arbitrary line on a map they were born on. There are obvious practical problems with that idea, and the YOYO visa idea is intended to address them as fairly as possible.)
So without further ado, here's how the YOYO visa works:
- YOYO visa holders are expected to be completely self-supporting. This is the key part that makes the YOYO visa viable, and the part that gives it its name (You're On Your Own.). YOYOs are ineligible for the entire range of social welfare services. No food stamps. No TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families - what most people think of when they think of "welfare"). No Medicaid. If you can't make a living without these things, go home.
- YOYO visas are unlimited. Unlike most present work visa programs, there are no quotas on the number of YOYO visas issued, and if there were to be any fee, it would be the bare minimum needed to cover the administrative costs. And there is no time limit; you can stay a YOYO as long as you want, provided you can still pay your own way.
- Any honest person can get a YOYO visa. The only people ineligible for a YOYO visa are felons (either in the US or the country of origin) and terrorists. (More technically, these two things would go together. Applying for a YOYO visa while being a member of a State Department-designated terrorist organization would be a felony; the US must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the individual is a member of that terrorist organization, but if they do, out they go. We could add YOYO eligibility/amnesty to the bounties the CIA can offer to informants; if someone seriously wants to break their ties with terrorism and come live here, they need to offer us some useful intelligence in exchange.)
A YOYO visa holder who is later convicted of a felony has their visa revoked; whether we deport them right away or have them serve their prison sentence in the States should probably be decided on a case-by-case basis. We probably want to lock up a serial killer, but for someone who just stole a car out of a parking lot it's probably cheaper just to chuck 'em back over the border and let the country-of-origin deal with it. Or if they commit identity fraud... but more about that later. - YOYOs can get amnesty. Yes, amnesty. People who are illegally working here now, but haven't committed any offenses above and beyond what they had to do to live and work in the US without the proper papers, should be able to switch over to a YOYO visa, perhaps with a modest fine to cover the burden they've already put on the system. This is okay, because...
- We'll actually start enforcing immigration law. Anyone who tries to work in the country without even a YOYO visa will be deported - and unlike the status quo, we actually mean it this time. Any employer who hires someone without at least a YOYO visa will be heavily fined - and again, we actually start getting serious about it.
If you did large-scale deportation now, it would be massively disruptive to the economy. With the YOYO program, however, the vast majority of our estimated 13.9 million illegal immigrants would just get their YOYO visas and go back to work; it's the handful who are "actual criminals" or who are leeching off our social safety net that are the real problem.
For the conservatives in the audience: you know how it bugs you that we can't use IRS or other federal records to deport people? Well, with YOYO, you get to start doing that. If someone who has a YOYO visa tries to apply for welfare on their own visa, they just get rejected - no harm no foul, maybe they didn't understand the new rules. But if they then try to falsify their information so that they can get welfare, and you catch them at it - they just committed a felony, you can revoke their YOYO, and you can kick them out. If the liberals complain, you can always say "they should've just followed the rules and stuck with their YOYO". - YOYOs can become citizens, but it shouldn't be too easy. In practice, a lot of YOYOs will be unskilled workers (skilled workers would get H1B and other such visas), and thus expensive to bring into the full citizen benefit system. Perhaps a fair thing to do would be to have a moderate fee for a YOYO to become a citizen (in addition to the usual citizenship test etc.); if a YOYO is productive enough to save up enough money, they're productive enough to support if they fall on hard times later on.
- YOYOs cannot vote. You want to vote, become a citizen. (Voting/voter registration fraud is a separate issue, which I won't discuss today. For now I'll just say that, whatever voter fraud enforcement you have in place, if you do manage to catch a YOYO trying to vote, that's a felony, and you can give 'em the boot.)
- Other fine details:
- Unemployment benefits aren't entirely a welfare program. Unemployment compensation is actually insurance - people whose employers pay into the system become eligible for unemployment based on how much they made and how long they were paying in; UC taxes pay for UC benefits. YOYO visa holders whose employers pay UC taxes become eligible for UC the same as anyone else.
- Unemployment benefit extensions, on the other hand, are a welfare program, since they aren't supported by UC taxes. YOYOs would be ineligible for extended unemployment; after their six months, they either live off their savings or go home.
- Social Security, like unemployment, is structured as insurance. You pay FICA taxes, you get Social Security when you retire. (Ironically, YOYOs might actually put more strain on SSI than the status quo - right now, illegals often pay FICA taxes via their fake social security numbers and will never collect a dime. Such is life.) Of course, Social Security is more than just the old-age benefit; anything else should be evaluated based on how it's funded (if it comes from FICA taxes YOYOs get their share, if it comes from elsewhere they don't).
- Health care: Medicaid is welfare; YOYOs don't get any. Medicare (the old-age part) is insurance; YOYOs get it if they pay into the system enough. (Practically speaking, Medicare's funding structure is going to need to be seriously revamped anyway. What YOYOs get when we revamp the system depends on the details of the new system.)
When Obamacare comes online, YOYOs will be ineligible for subsidized insurance, but if they can afford to pay the full premiums by themselves (or if their employers happen to supply health insurance), they're in. (If Obamacare got repealed, its subsidized insurance program goes away, and there isn't a welfare issue.) - Emergency room service and schools are trickier, since they're taxpayer funded, but categorically excluding YOYOs from them is problematic from a liberal (my) perspective. I'll discuss this in more detail at the end.
Wages will be lower than they'd be if YOYOs/illegals weren't here at all, but (a) it should still be an improvement over the status quo; and (b) my personal view is that kicking people out doesn't actually help from a cost-of-labor perspective. Anyone who works in manufacturing or IT can tell you that "furriners" can "tek yer jerb" without setting one foot on American soil.
Obviously construction workers, nurses, and other people whose jobs are tied to a geographical location aren't directly at risk from foreigners who can't get into the US - but they're still at risk indirectly. If a manufacturing job gets outsourced, and the American who got laid off can't afford to buy a house, guess what - the construction workers who would've built his house just got their jerbs taken too. So, on balance, keeping foreigners from competing with American workers here isn't as effective at protecting Americans as some people think.
Finally, YOYOs bring unskilled immigrants into the "system". That makes it a lot easier to enforce immigration law against those who try to stay outside the system, or those who try to cheat the system. And if anyone does cheat the system, you can deport them without anyone but the most retarded libs complaining.
As I discussed above, there are still two significant unanswered problems:
- Schools. Kids of illegals using public schools are one of the biggest things right-wingers are most upset about, and not entirely without justification. My personal opinion is that the kids of YOYOs should get schooling somehow anyway, but we do need to make sure we can afford it somehow.
Personally, I have no kids and I still don't resent paying property taxes to support schools, but then again I'm a liberal. For the conservatives, I don't have a full answer, but I will say that any YOYO who can feed, clothe, and shelter their kids without taxpayer assistance is also probably already paying enough state taxes (sales, property, state income) to cover their fair share, or at least aren't too much of a burden. - Emergency rooms. Without a specific program to address the issue, YOYOs would be as much of a burden on emergency rooms as illegals are now. As a liberal, I'll still draw the line at cutting YOYOs off from the emergency room entirely; instead, I'd rather find a way to make them pay at least some of the cost.
One possible solution is to cover it under the Obamacare health insurance mandate; YOYOs would be mandated to get insurance, and could get something akin to an "indestructible youth" policy with high copays and deductibles but low premiums. But if Obamacare itself were repealed, perhaps the mandate would be kept just for YOYOs (or even immigrants generally).
I can't help but think conservatives would be less uncomfortable with a mandate on non-citizens than they are with a general mandate; there's not even a hint of a constitutional issue (the federal government can set virtually any visa requirements it wants), and morally speaking "pay your way or go home" is a lot more obviously acceptable to impose on people who explicitly chose to come here.
So that's the YOYO visa. What did I miss?