A Crisis At The Border
Part 6: The Harms of Illegal Immigration
There is a humanitarian crisis at the border. The system is on fire.
According to The New York Times and Wall Street Journal, our immigration system has reached a breaking point. ‘The country is now unable to provide either the necessary humanitarian relief for desperate migrants or even basic controls on the number and nature of who is entering the United States (Shear, 2019).’[1] ‘More than 76,000 immigrants illegally crossed the border in February and about half came with families, a 10-fold increase over the past two years. Border apprehensions in March probably exceeded 100,000, the highest monthly total in a decade. At the current rate, border apprehensions will exceed one million this year.’[2] ‘So crowded are border facilities that some of the nearly 3,500 migrants in custody in El Paso were herded earlier this month under a bridge, behind razor wire (WSJ, 2019)’. For context, there are only 300 cities in America with populations over 100,000.
A 2007 review by the Congressional Budget Office found that “unauthorized immigrants have an adverse impact on the budgets of state and local governments.”[3] They concluded:
- “State and local governments incur costs for providing services to unauthorized immigrants and have limited options for avoiding or minimizing those costs”;
- “The amount that state and local governments spend on services for unauthorized immigrants represents a small percentage of the total amount spent by those governments to provide such services to residents in their jurisdictions”;
- “The tax revenues that unauthorized immigrants generate for state and local governments do not offset the total cost of services provided to those immigrants”; and
- “Federal aid programs offer resources to state and local governments that provide services to unauthorized immigrants, but those funds do not fully cover the costs incurred by those governments.”
In 2013, conservative estimates place the net costs of services provided to illegal immigrants at $54 billion dollars.[4] Estimates are as high as $135 billion.[5] The problem has only compounded since.
Illegal immigrants do play a crucial role in the economy by providing cheap, low-skilled labor that keeps the price of many goods and services low. We benefit from their hard work — but provide them with few benefits. They accept poor pay and have almost no access to our social safety nets. Any argument in favor of the economic merits of illegal immigration relies on taking advantage of their labor and work ethic — looking the other way while someone toils for hours just so our salad is a little bit cheaper. Yet any argument that seeks to provide them with these benefits is a grave moral injustice — we are already unable to take care of the most vulnerable within our own society; refer above. No matter how you flip this coin, it lands unethically. It goes deeper.
Many who find themselves dissatisfied with the outcome of the last election point fingers at the electoral college. While it is a stabilizing force in our democracy and core to our system of Federalism — our states predate our union — they voice concern that the winner placed second in the popular vote. Critics call for ‘one-man one vote’ and what they believe is fair, direct representation.
In that case, they must stand firmly against illegal immigration as well.
The allocation of Congressional seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, and thereby the number of electoral college votes each state receives, is a direct reflection of its population — illegal immigrants included.
This ‘[U]ndermines the fundamental principle of American representative democracy that every voter has an equal voice. Through the census-based process of apportionment, states with large numbers of undocumented aliens will unconstitutionally gain members in the U.S. House of Representatives, thus robbing the citizen-voters in other states of their rightful representation (Longley, 2019)”.[6]
In “[N]ine states that lost seats due to non-citizens, four were the result of illegals…Indiana, Michigan, and Mississippi each lost one seat in the House and Montana failed to gain a seat it otherwise would have gained because of illegal aliens in other states (Camarota, 2005).”[7] [8] Three seats were gained by California.
“The large number of non-citizens would seem to create real tension with the principle of “one man one vote” because it now takes so few votes to win a congressional seat in many high immigration states. As already indicated, it takes about 100,000 voters to win the typical congressional race in the states that lost a seat due to the non-citizens. In contrast, it took less than 33,000 votes to win the 34th district in California and only 34,000 to win the 31st district in 2002…enormous numbers of immigrants has created a situation in which the votes of American citizens living in low-immigration states and districts count much less than that the votes of citizens living in high immigration districts (Camarota, 2005)”. [9]
There are 435 congressional districts, each representing approximately 747,000 people. Districts with lax immigration enforcement, and a high number of illegal aliens, will unjustly carry more political power than their neighbors. They receive more federal aid. Their votes count more.
This is taxation without representation. But all of this is just the tip of the iceberg.
The journey here is dangerous.
‘The dangers increased as they drew closer to Veracruz. At certain stations, gangs boarded the trains and demanded a ‘toll.’ “The rate was $100 per station,” Johnny told me and my colleagues at Amnesty International. “They threatened us. They said they would hold us until we could call a relative to arrange to pay. If you couldn’t pay, they would throw you off the roof.” (Shetty, Amnesty International’s Secretary General)’
According to Amnesty International, almost 20,000 migrants are kidnapped and trafficked every year. ‘One third of the people annually trafficked into the United States are from Latin America, and the vast majority of these people enter the United States through the Mexico-United States border (Human Trafficking in Mexico, n.d.)’.[10]
[I]t has become increasingly commonplace for coyotes to coerce migrants into exploitative labor arrangements upon reaching their destination in the U.S (frequently a different one from that which they paid to be smuggled to). These labor agreements frequently involve forced agricultural labor and/or sex work, conditions that migrants would never have consented to had they been previously aware of them (Chacon, 2006)[11]
Smugglers sometimes pretend to offer reduced fees to women and child migrants and then sexually assault or rape them as a form of substitute “payment”. Human traffickers masquerading as coyotes often use false promises of guaranteed jobs to lure migrants and will sometimes kidnap women and children along the journey, either for ransom from their families, or to be sold in the U.S. into servitude or prostitution. Many unaccompanied children also make the crossing from Mexico to the U.S. Unaccompanied minors are sometimes sold into prostitution by the trafficker, and their families are falsely led to believe that they died during transit. (Ugarte, 2004)[12] (Human Trafficking in Mexico, n.d.
Six in ten migrant women and girls are raped on the journey.[13] “Because of the increase in violence, at ICE when we have families with children, we have to give every girl a pregnancy test over 10. This is not a safe journey (Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen).” In 2017, Doctors Without Borders found that ’68 percent of the migrant and refugee populations as a whole reported being victims of violence.’[14] It’s not just the cartels and gangs they have to fear; abuse and extortion are rampant among police and immigration officials as well. The risk of grave illness or infectious disease is high — “The majority of our agents get sick. Infectious disease is everywhere (Cabrera).”[15] 294 migrants died making the journey in 2017.[16]
The journey here is dangerous. Yet we are incentivizing it.
Previously, we established part one of our moral framework: we must maximize legal immigration in its most productive form.
Now we’ve established part two: we must disincentivize and limit illegal immigration to the best of our ability.
How can we reflect this as policy, and what are our current failures?
Next: Part 7 - The Immorality of our Current Immigration Policy
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/us/immigration-border-mexico.html
[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-border-asylum-crisis-11554062066?ns=prod/accounts-wsj
[3] “The Impact of Unauthorized Immigrants on the Budgets of State and Local Governments”. The Congress of the United States — Congressional Budget Office. December 2007.
[4]https://www.heritage.org/immigration/report/the-fiscal-cost-unlawful-immigrants-and-amnesty-the-us-taxpayer
[5] https://www.apnews.com/1e597a4896884da08bef0a8f8134c6be
[6] https://www.thoughtco.com/should-us-census-count-illegal-immigrants-3320973
[7] https://cis.org/Impact-NonCitizens-Congressional-Apportionment
[8] These results are the same as those obtained by Marta Tienda in her 2002 article in Demography entitled “Demography and the Social Contract,” pages 587–616.
[9] https://cis.org/Impact-NonCitizens-Congressional-Apportionment
[10]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_trafficking_in_Mexico#Trafficking_across_the_border_with_the_United_States
[11] Chacon, Jennifer. “Misery and Myopia: Understanding the Failures of U.S. Efforts to Stop Human Trafficking.” Fordham Law Review 74, no. 6 (2006):
[12] Ugarte, Marisa B.; Zarate, Laura; Farley, Melissa (January 2004). “Prostitution and trafficking of women and children from Mexico to the United States”
[13] https://www.amnestyusa.org/most-dangerous-journey-what-central-american-migrants-face-when-they-try-to-cross-the-border/
[14] https://www.foxnews.com/politics/nielsen-ice-gives-pregnancy-tests-to-migrant-girls-as-young-as-10-after-dangerous-journey-to-border
[15] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/us/immigration-border-mexico.html
[16] US Border Patrol statistics
