Pubdate: Sat, 01 Apr 2006
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2006 The New York Times Company
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: John Tierney, Op-Ed Columnist

KING CANUTE AT THE BORDER

George Bush is the King Canute of the immigration debate, and I mean 
that in a nice way.

Canute has an image problem today because so many people think of him 
as that batty old English king who thought he could command the tide 
to recede. But that's the wrong spin on his legend.

In the original tale, he was a sensible ruler who was tired of 
hearing flattery from his courtiers about his great powers. When they 
told him that even the tides would obey his command, he went down to 
the sea to teach them a lesson in limits.

Today's courtiers are the Republicans in Congress and the others 
demanding that America "secure the border." They're furious at Bush 
for suggesting that a crackdown at the border will not stop the tide 
of illegal immigrants.

"When you make something illegal that people want, there's a way 
around it," he said, pointing out an inconvenient reality that would 
remain even if a 2,000-mile fence were built on the southern border. 
People would keep going under it, through it or around it to other borders.

The Border Patrol has tried building fences and adding thousands of 
agents, and in some places it has made smuggling harder. Yet the 
overall flow of immigrants hasn't slowed. No matter how hard they 
work, the agents can't outlaw basic economics.

In San Diego, for instance, agents took pride that their concentrated 
efforts had caused local smugglers to raise their fee to $1,500. But 
that's still a small price next to what immigrants stand to gain. 
Chinese immigrants are already paying $20,000 apiece to be smuggled 
into America.

It's the same kind of economic quandary that has stymied the war on 
drugs. For more than a quarter-century, federal and local authorities 
have tried to solve America's drug problem by making smuggling and 
dealing prohibitively expensive.

They've stepped up enforcement at the borders, promising that more 
agents and new technology would make a difference. They've taken the 
fight to countries supplying drugs. They filled prisons with dealers 
and addicts. But even though they raised the cost of smuggling and 
dealing, the increase was never enough to make a difference.

"Seizing drugs has not had any perceptible impact on the availability 
of drugs," says Peter Reuter, an economist at the University of 
Maryland who's an expert on drugs and other black markets. "Even 
though enforcement has gotten tougher by any measure, the prices of 
drugs have been falling steadily."

I'm not suggesting that stopping drugs is the same as stopping the 
flow of illegal immigrants. In many ways the drug war is easier 
because it enjoys more popular support. Most people would like to see 
less drug use. No one wants a drug market on the corner, and people 
will urge the police to round up dealers and addicts there.

They're not about to turn in the illegal immigrants working in their 
stores, their neighborhoods and their homes. They know how hard 
immigrants work and how much they contribute. They may tell pollsters 
there's too much immigration, but they like the immigrants they know.

Americans are understandably angry to see immigrants' breaking the 
law, but they're not going to be assuaged when a crackdown simply 
creates more illegality. The only practical way to reduce lawbreaking 
is to change the law so more immigrants can enter legally and the 
ones here can stop hiding, the approach favored by Bush and Senators 
John McCain and Edward Kennedy.

Some skeptics doubt that illegal immigrants want to come forward and 
start paying taxes. But most immigrants claim to be willing, at least 
according to a new survey of more than 200 undocumented workers in 
Los Angeles, Chicago and Miami conducted for the Manhattan Institute 
and the National Immigration Forum.

About 4 in 10 of them said they're already getting taxes deducted 
from their paychecks, and 70 percent said they'd be willing to pay 
back taxes to get legal status. More than 90 percent said they'd 
comply with other requirements, like paying a fine of $1,000, getting 
fingerprinted and submitting to a criminal background check.

Railing at them for breaking the law is not going to make them go 
home or stop others from following them here. Immigrants will cross 
the border one way or another. The more of them we let in legally, 
the better off everyone will be. Whether you welcome more immigrants, 
as I do, or whether you'd rather see fewer, there's no point in 
commanding the tide to ebb.
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake