InstructionsThe issue of Immigration Reform has been simmering f.docx

Instructions
The issue of Immigration Reform has been simmering for many
of the past presidential administrations. As we have seen during
this past election cycle, the politics that drive this debate are
both passionate and diverse. For this week's assignment read the
three attached articles and give your opinion whether your agree
or disagree with Douglas Massey's argument that "enforcement
without legalization won't work" Your second post should be a
response to your group members opinion
Read:
1.Fine - Galbraith Final Paper
2.Massey: Backfire at the Border
3.Meissner: U.S. Temporary Worker Programs-Lessons Learned
Forum:
Give your opinion whether your agree or disagree with Douglas
Massey's argument that "enforcement without legalization won't
work" Your second post should be a response to your group
members opinion.
Question 1: Explain why a border policy that relies solely on
enforcement is bound to fail.
Question 2: What is the weakness in a blockade strategy?
FIRST POST (50 points)
Explain why a border policy that relies solely on enforcement is
bound to fail [25 points]
Explain why a border policy that relies solely on enforcement is
bound to fail
20
Use and cite external sources
5

· What is the weakness in a blockade strategy [25 points]
Objective
Possible Points
Total Points
What is the weakness in a blockade strategy?
15
Explain why
5
Discuss the contributing factors
5
SECOND POST (50 points)
Objective
Possible Points
Total Points
Identifying your reaction (agreement, disagreement, etc.)
10
Focusing on a group member or members or the group as a
whole

10
Providing a substantive response
10
Providing evidence or anecdotal evidence
10
Quality of the writing
10
Reply to this student：1. A policy solely based on enforcement
is bound to fail for a simple reason, as long as America exists
(and is better in terms of opportunity than other lands) people
are bound to keep trying to come. No matter what enforcement
you use people will always try to find ways around it and
succeed. It is impossible to police every inch of our physical
border and keep track of everyone who enters legally and
overstays their visas. Another thing is the majority of
Americans do not want to do the hard manual labor the
immigrants do for us as said in Fine Galbraith Paper: "that U.S.
organized labor persistently opposed to immigration until a
sharp break in the late twentieth century." Since the twentieth
century, we have been reliant on people who are not in the
country legally to do a lot of hard labor because no American is
really willing to do it. So an enforcement policy is bound to fail
because its impossible to police everything, and our economy,
as well as way of life, depends on it.
2.A weakness in the blockade strategy is we fundamentally need
these people for our labor force and economy. Without them
there would be no one working on farms, in factories, etc
which our way of life and economy depends on to work.

· What is the weakness in a blockade strategy [25 points]
Objective
Possible Points
Total Points
What is the weakness in a blockade strategy?
15
Explain why
5
Discuss the contributing factors
5
SECOND POST (50 points)
Objective
Possible Points
Total Points
Identifying your reaction (agreement, disagreement, etc.)
10
Focusing on a group member or members or the group as a
whole
10

Providing a substantive response
10
Providing evidence or anecdotal evidence
10
Quality of the writing
10
Reply：1. A policy solely based on enforcement is bound to fail
for a simple reason, as long as America exists (and is better in
terms of opportunity than other lands) people are bound to keep
trying to come. No matter what enforcement you use people will
always try to find ways around it and succeed. It is impossible
to police every inch of our physical border and keep track of
everyone who enters legally and overstays their visas. Another
thing is the majority of Americans do not want to do the hard
manual labor the immigrants do for us as said in Fine Galbraith
Paper: "that U.S. organized labor persistently opposed to
immigration until a sharp break in the late twentieth century."
Since the twentieth century, we have been reliant on people who
are not in the country legally to do a lot of hard labor because
no American is really willing to do it. So an enforcement policy
is bound to fail because its impossible to police everything, and
our economy, as well as way of life, depends on it.
2.A weakness in the blockade strategy is we fundamentally need
these people for our labor force and economy. Without them
there would be no one working on farms, in factories, etc
which our way of life and economy depends on to work.
CIt!tLF. 1C=

MADE POLICY 57 .7')I r_
Bac re at the Border
Why Enforcement without Legalization
Cannot Stop Illegal Immigration
by Douglas S . Massey
Executive Summary
Despite increased enforcement at the
U.S.-Mexican border beginning in the
1980s, the number of foreign-born work-
ers entering the United States illegally
each year has not diminished . Today an
estimated 10 million or more people
reside in the United States without legal
documentation .
For the past two decades, the U.S . gov-
ernment has pursued a contradictory poli-
cy on North American integration . While
the U.S. government has pursued more
commercial integration through the North
American Free Trade Agreement, it has
sought to unilaterally curb the flow of
labor across the U.S.-Mexican border.
That policy has not only failed to reduce
illegal immigration; it has actually made
the problem worse
Increased border enforcement has only
succeeded in pushing immigration flows
into more remote regions . That has result-
ed in a tripling of the death rate at the bor-
der and, at the same time, a dramatic fall in

the rate of apprehension. As a result, the
cost to U.S. taxpayers of making one arrest
June 13, 2005
along the border increased from $300 in
1992 to $1,700 in 2002, an increase of 467
percent in just a decade .
Enforcement has driven up the cost of
crossing the border illegally, but that has had
the unintended consequence of encouraging
illegal immigrants to stay longer in the
United States to recoup the cost ofentry.The
result is that illegal immigrants are less likely
to return to their home country, causing an
increase in the number of illegal immigrants
remsmung in the United States Whatever
one thinks about the goal of reducing migra-
tion from Menace, US policies toward that
end have clearly failed, and at great cost to
U.S. taxpayers.
A border policy that relies solely on
enforcement is bound to fail. Congress should
build on President Bush's immigration initia-
tive to enact a temporary visa program that
would allow wodes from Canada, Mexico,
and other countries to work in the United
States without restriction for a certain limited
time. Undocumented workers already in the
United States who do not have a criminal
record should be given temporary, legal status .
andcoautY lrBeyond Smoke and (Mirror pMelxic Immigration in
an tE assof

INS!
Economic Integration (New York. Russell Sage Foundation,
2002) .
No. 29
Despite increased
enforcement at the
U.S: Mexican bor-
der beginning in the
1980s, the number
of foreign-born
workers entering
the United States
illegally each
year has not
diminished.
Introduction
One of the most important and challenging
problems facing the 109th Congress will be
immigration reform. Despite increased enforce-
ment at the U.S .-Mexican border beginning in
the 1980s, the number of foreign-born workers
entering the United States illegally each year has
not diminished . Today an estimated 10 million
or more people reside in the United States with-
out legal documentation, and that number con-
tinues to grow by 400,000 or more each years

In his State of the Union message on
February 2, 2005, President Bush challenged
Congress to fix the problem :
America's immigration system is . . .
outdated, unsuited to the needs of our
economy and to the values of our
country. We should not be content
with laws that punish hardworking
people who want only to provide for
their families and deny businesses
willing workers and invite chaos at our
border. It is time for an immigration
policy that permits temporary guest
workers to fill jobs Americans will not
take, that rejects amnesty, that tells us
who is entering and leaving our coun-
try, and that closes the border to drug
dealers and terrorists .
The issue of immigration reform has been
simmering throughout the Bush presidency .
When the president first assumed office four
years ago, it was already clear to most observers
that U.S. immigration policy toward Mexico
was not working. Despite a massive buildup of
enforcement resources along the border,
Mexican immigration continued apace
throughout the 1990s, and the undocumented
population grew at an unprecedented rate,
enabling Hispanics to overtake African
Americans as the nation's largest minority
much sooner than Census Bureau demogra-
phers had predicted? It was not surprising,
therefore, that early in its first term the Bush

administration began high-level talks on
immigration reform with officials in the newly
2
elected government of Mexican president
Vicente Fox .
By the summer of 2001, the discussions
were inching toward a consensus that involved
some kind of legalization program and a tem-
porary work visa for Mexican citizens.' The
terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, how-
ever, pushed immigration reform and Mexico
to the back burner of administration concerns .
The inability of president Fox to negotiate a
labor accord with the United States under-
mined his political position domestically, led to
the early resignation of his foreign minister,
and contributed to electoral losses for his party
during the midterm elections of 2003 .
Meanwhile, the problems associated with
undocumented migration continued to fester
The Bush administration finally renamed to
the issue of immigration reform in 2004 . In a
January 7, 2004, speech at the White House,
the president proposed creating a large tempo-
rary worker program to legalize present undoc-
umented migrants and accommodate new
entrants in the future . He would grant renew-
able three-year work visas to employers, which
would enable them to hire workers from
Mexico and other countries when suitable U.S .
workers could not be found Undocumented
migrants living in the United States would be

required to pay a one-time registration fee to be
eligible for the visa, but those who were still
abroad could register free of charge . The three-
year visa would be renewable, and, if in the
course of working in the United States a work-
er accumulated ties and characteristics that
qualified him or her for permanent residence,
he or she could apply for a green card confer-
ring permanent resident status. Although the
supply of residence visas would be increased to
handle such applications, special credits and
incentives would be implemented to encourage
the return of temporary workers .'
The president's proposal did not contain
specifics on the number of temporary worker
visas or new green cards to be authorized, but
his announcement set in motion a flurry of
alternative proposals for reform, including bills
introduced by Sens . McCain, Kennedy, Hagel,
Daschle, Craig, and Cornyn, as well as Reps .
Pelosi, Cannon, Flake, Kolbe, and Gutierrez .° Paso, followed
by Operation Gatekeeper in San
Although none of those proposals made Diego. Those operations
mobilized massive
progress in 2004, after the elections President resources, in two
border sectors to prevent
Bush restated his commitment to achieving undocumented
border crossings
e
immigration reform in his second term .

Thereafter the United States pursued an
To lay the groundwork for a reasoned con- increasingly
contradictory set of policies, rowing
sideration of policy options, this study toward integration while
insisting on separation,
describes how the United States got into its moving headlong
toward the consolidation of all
current predicament with respect to Mexican North American
markets save one: labor. In
immigration. It then outlines the sorts of poll- order to maintain
the pretense that such selective
des that that must be implemented if we are to integration could
be achieved and to demon-
get out
strate that the border was "under control," the
US. government devoted increasing financial
and human resources to a show of force along the
Roots of the Current Problem Mexico-US. border, a repressive
impulse that
only increased in the wake of September 11 .
The year 1986 was pivotal for the political Unfortunately, those
measures have not deterred
economy of North America Two things hap- Mexicans from
coming to die United States or
pened in that year that signaled the end of one prevented them
from settling her c .'
era and the beginning of another. In Mexico, a
new political elite succeeded in overcoming his- Moving toward
Integration
torical opposition within the ruling party to The adoption of

economic reforms in
secure the country's entry into the General Mexico in 1986
accelerated cross-border flows
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GAFF) . of all sorts, and those
flows increased dramati-
Building on that initiative, President Carlos cally after NAFTA
took effect in 1994 .
Saunas approached the United States in 1988 to Consider, for
example, trends in total trade
make the economic reforms permanent by forg- between Mexico
and the United States . From
ing a continentwide alliance to create a free trade 1986 to 2003
total trade between the two
zone stretching from Central America to the nations increased
by a factor of eight, reaching
Arctic, which ultimately resulted in the North $235
billion."Over the same period, the num-
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) .r
ber of Mexicans entering the United States on
While trade liberalization took a step for- business visas more
than tripled, from 128,000
ward in 1986, labor market mobility took a step to 438,000
annually, while the number of intra-
backward. Even as U.S . officials worked with company
transferees rose even more rapidly,
Mexican authorities to integrate North from 4,300 to 16,000.
From just 73 Mexican
American markets for goods, capital, informa- "treaty investors"
in 1986 the number grew
lion, raw materials, and services, they simulta- exponentially to
4,700 persons in 2003 . (Treaty
neously aced to prevent the integration of investors manage
operations of an enterprise

Mexican and American labor markets . Rather within the United
States in which they are an
than incorporating the movement of workers active investor.) "
into the new free trade agreement, the US gov- This growth of
trade and business migration
ernment sought to unilaterally restrict the was accompanied by
an expansion of other
movement ofworkers .To underscore its resolve, cross-border
movements. Over the same period,
in 1986 Congress passed die Immigration the number of
Mexican tourists entering the
Reform and Control Act, which criminalized United States
increased six-fold to 3 .6 million,
the hiring of undocumented workers by U.S. while the number
entering the United States as
employers and increased funding for the U.S . students doubled
to 22,500, and the number of
Border PatroL Then, in 1993, Border Patrol educational and
cultural exchange visitors more
officials launched Operation Blockade in El than doubled, from
about 3,000 to 6,600. 12 The
3
Even as U.S. offi-
cials worked with
Mexican authori-
ties to integrate
North American
markets, they
simultaneously
acted to prevent
the integration of
Mexican and
American labor

markets .
Between 1986 and
1996, Congress and
the president
undertook a
remarkable series of
actions to reassure
citizens that they
were working hard
to "regain control"
of the U.S:
Mexican border.
total number of individual border crossings by
car, bus, vain, and on foot also grew rapidly, ris-
ing from 114 million in 1986 to more than 290
million in 2000. Owing to the events of
September 11, 2001, and the US. economic
recession, the number of border crossings fell
between 2000 and 2002, but they were still 1 .7
times higher than their level in 1986?
Insisting on Separation
As the foregoing figures indicate, evidence
for the ongoing integration of the North
American economy is abundant, concrete, and
compelling. As envisioned by the proponents of
NAFTA, cross-border movements of people,

goods, and services have grown rapidly along a
variety of fronts . Although the United States has
committed itself to integrating most markets in
North America, however, it has paradoxically
sought to prevent the integration of its labor
markets. Indeed, since 1986 the United States
has embarked on a determined effort to restrict
Mexican immigration and tighten border
enforcement, an effort that intensified around
1994, just as NAFTA took effect.
During the 1980s, border control was framed
by U.S. politicians as an issue of"national secu-
rity," and illegal migration was portrayed as an
"alien invasion." As a result, between 1986 and
1996, the Congress and the president undertook
a remarkable series of actions to reassure citizens
that they were working hard to "regain control"
of theUS.-Mexican borderM 'Me arrival of the
new era was heralded by the passage of the
Immigration Reform and Control Act in
October 1986.
As advocated by its proponents, IRCA
sought to combat undocumented migration in
four ways . To eliminate the attraction of U.S.
jobs, it imposed sanctions on employers who
hired undocumented workers . To deter undoc-
umented migrants from entering the country, it
allocated additional resources to the Border
Patrol. To wipe the slate dean and begin afresh,
it authorized an amnesty for undocumented
migrants who could prove five years of contin-
uous residence in the United States and a legal-
ization program for migrant farm workers .
Finally, IRCA gave the president new authori-

ty to declare an "immigration emergency" if
large numbers of undocumented migrants had
embarked or were soon expected to embark for
the United States."
Despite expectations that IRCA would
somehow, slow unsanctioned Mcdcan immigra-
tion, both legal and illegal migration from
Mexico still rose, and Congress returned to the
drawing board in 1990 to pass another revision
of U.S. immigration law. That legislation
focused strongly on border control and autho-
rized funds for the hiring of additional Border
Patrol officers." Early in the Clinton adminis-
nation (1993-94), the Immigration and
Naturalization Service developed a new border
strategy that took full advantage of this
increased funding. Known as "prevention
through deterrence," the strategy aimed to pre-
vent Mexicans from crossing the border so that
they would not have to be deported later . The
strategy had its origins in September 1993,
when the Border Patrol chief in El Paso
launched "Operation Blockade"-an all-out
effort to prevent illegal border crossing within
that sector." Within a few months, immigrants
had been induced to go around the imposing
wall of enforcement, and traffic through El Paso
itself was reduced to a trickle ."
Officials in Washington took note of the
favorable outcome in El Paso and incorporated
the operation into the Border Patrol's national
strategic plan for 1994 . In October of that year,
a second border mobilization was authorized

for the busiest sector in San Diego . "Operation
Gatekeeper" installed high-intensity flood-
lights to illuminate the border day and night
and built an eight-foot steel fence along 14
miles of border from the Pacific Ocean to the
foothills of the Coastal Range . Border Patrol
officers were stationed every few hundred yards
behind this formidable steel wall, and a new
array of sophisticated hardware was deployed
in the no man's land it ficed'a
This buildup of enforcement resources was
further accelerated by Congress when it passed
the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant
Responsibility Act of 1996 . Once again, the leg-
islation focused heavily on deterrence, authoriz-
ing funds for the construction of two additional
layers of fencing in San Diego and enacting that posed no
conceivable strategic threat to the
tougher penalties for smugglers, undocumented country and
was, in fact, an ally and a large toad-
migrants, and visitors who entered the country ing partner.
Despite the fact that politicians sold
legally but then overstayed their visas. It also NAFTA as a ova,
for Mexico "to export goods
included funding for the purchase of new mill- and not people,"
everything that occurs in the
tary technology and provided funds for hiring course of
integrating the North American market
1,000 Border Patrol agents per year through rakes the cross-
border movement of people-
2001 to bring the total strength of the Border including
workers-more rather than less likely

Patrol up to 10,000 officers .
20
in the short and medium run . The expanding
In 1986 the budget of the Immigration and binational netunrk of
transportation and com-
Naturalization Service stood at just $474 mil- munication that
evolves to facilitate trade also
lion, and that of the Border Patrol was $151 makes the
movement of people easier and cheap-
million. IRCA began a modest acceleration of er. The
interpersonal connections formed
funding for border enforcement, but it was the between
Mexicans and Americans in the course
innovation of border blockades in 1993 that of daily business
transactions create a social infra-
really opened the spigot of money. By 2002 the structure
offiiendship and kinship that encourage
Border Patrol's budget had reached $1 .6 billion migration and
facilitate further movement.
and that of the INS stood at $6 .2 billion, 10
Moreover, it is not as if there were no move-
and 13 nines their 1986 values, respectively . meets of migrants
across the border when
With this additional revenue, more Border NAFTA took effea .
Large-scale migration
Patrol officers were hired. Between 1986 and from Mexico has
been a fact of life in North
2002 the number of Border Patrol officers America since 1942,
when the United States
tripled, and the number of hours they spent initiated the bracero

guest worker program that
patrolling the border ("linewatch hours") grew lasted 22 years
.$° That program ultimately spon-
by a factor of about eight 23
Bored the short-term entry of nearly five million
workers, and when it was shut down in 1964,
The Consequences of
movement continued through other channels .
Contradiction
Thousands of former guest workers simply
adjusted status to acquire permanent resident
As the foregoing data clearly show, the 1990s visas, and a
growing number migrated without
were a period of growing self-contradiction in documents .
From 1942 to the present, the circu-
U. S. policy toward Mexico. On the one hand, lation of labor
between Me,dco and the United
under NAFTA the United States committed States has been
widespread and continuous . By
itself to lowering barriers to the cross-border the end of the
20th century, two-thirds of all
movement of goods, capital, raw materials, Mexicans knew
someone who had been to the
information, and services. As a result, the vol- United States
and almost 60 percent were
none ofbinationaltrade increased dramatically as socially
connected to someone living in the

did cross-border movements of people. On the United States n
other hand, the United States attempted to This huge stock of
social capital connecting
harden the border against the movement of people in Mexico to
destinations in the United
labor by criminalizing the hiring of undocu- States, combined
with the acceleration of eco-
menred workers and fortifying the frontier with nomic
integration along multiple fronts, pre-
massive increases in money, personnel, and sents a huge
obstacle for U.S. efforts to seal the
equipment. By 2002 the Border Patrol was the border
selectively with respect to the move-
largest am s-bearing branch of the U.S govem- ment of
workers.That the policywould fail was
ment next to the military itself 'a almost preordained and should
not be surpris-
Few in Washington stopped to consider the ing to anyone who
understands the nature of
fundamental contradiction involved in militariz- markets and
their integration over time and
ing a long border with a friendly, peaceful nation across
international borders . What many do
5
Few in Washington
stopped to consider
the fundamental
contradiction
involved in milita-
rizing a long border
with a friendly,
peaceful nation that
posed no conceiv-

able strategic threat
to the country:
The fundamental
weakness of
blockading particu-
lar sectors of the
Mexican border is
that there are always
other, less-defended
sectors within which
to cross.
not realize, however, is that U .S . policies have
not simply failed: they have backfired-bring-
ing about outcomes precisely opposite those
they originally sought to achieve . Not only
have U.S. policies failed to deter Mexicans
from migrating to the United States, they have
promoted a more rapid growth of the nation's
undocumented population.
Failed Deterrence
The fundamental weakness of blockading
particular sectors of the Mexican border is that
there are always other less-defended sectors
within which to cross. The mobilization of
enforcement resources in El Paso and San
Diego simply diverted the flows into Arizona,
causing U.S. authorities to launch newblockades

there, which channeled movement into New
Mexico and the Rio Grande Valley of Texas,
bringing about a mobilization of enforcement
resources in those sectors?" Because the border
is 2,000 miles long, systematically blockading
this length in the manner of San Diego or El
Paso would be prohibitively expensive .
Ultimately, the net effect of the border block-
ades has been to push undocumented Mexican
migrants into crossing at more remote and less
accessible locations in mountains, deserts, and
untamed sections of the Rio Grande River . The
tragic result for undocumented migrants has
been a tripling of their death rare during entry.r'
But if migrants are more likely to die while
crossing remote sectors of the border, they are
also less likely to be caught, and a less-known
consequence of US . border policy has been that
it has decreased the odds that undocumented
Mexican migrants are apprehended while
attempting to enter the United States .28
Since 1982 the Mexican Migration Project
(now based at Princeton University) has under-
taken representative surveys of Mexican com-
munities and their U.S. destination areas to cre-
ate a database of detailed information on the
characteristics and behavior of documented and
undocumented migrants. At present, the MMP
database contains surveys of 93 binational com-
munities, yielding detailed information on
16,840 households." Each head of household
with migratory experience in the United States
6

is interviewed to obtain a complete history of
border crossings, where the crossings occurred,
and the number of attempted entries and appre-
hensions that took place.
Figure 1 draws on these data to show trends
in the locations of border crossings and the
probability of apprehension among undocu-
mented Mexican migrations from 1980 to
2002, the latest year for which reliable esti-
mates are available . 46 From 1980 through
1987, the proportion of migrants crossing in
either Tijuana-San Diego or Juarez-El Paso
increased By 1988 around 70 percent of all
border crossings occurred within these two
"traditional" sectors . The increased enforce-
ment at the border begun by IRCA in 1986
was naturally aimed at those high-volume
points of entry, a tendency that was amplified
in 1993-94 with the launching of various
blockades. As a result, beginning in 1988 the
proportion of migrants trussing at nontradi-
tional sectors along the border rose steadily
from 29 percent to reach 64 percent in 2002 .
Undocumented migrants simply went around
the hardened sectors of the border.
Through the 1970s and early 1980s, the
probability of apprehension along the border
was relatively steady, averaging about 33 per-
cent31 Thereafter, the probability of apprehen-
sion fell into the 20 to 30 percent range, and
following the implementation of Blockade and
Gatekeeper in 1993 and 1994, the likelihood of
arrest plummeted. By 2002 the probability of

apprehension had reached an all-time low of
just 5 percent . Rather than increasing the odds
of apprehension, U .S. border policies have
reduced them to record lows .
Given this fact, it is not surprising that U.S.
border policies have had little detectable effect in
deterring undocumented migrants from leaving
for the United States in the first place .
According to MMP data on the probability that
Mexican men and women took a first trip to the
United States from 1980 onward, there is little
evidence in either series that the border buildup
has dissuaded undocumented Mexicans from
heading northward . There is considerable tem-
poral variation in the Trend for males, whose
probabilities of making a fast attempt to enter
Figure 1
Trends in Use of Nontraditional Crossing Points and Probability
of
Apprehension, 1980-2002
Probability of Apprehension
- - Proportion of Nontraditional Crossings
70% 1
60/a IRCA Enacted y
50% -
40% -

-~
t0%-
Operation Blockade
Launched in El Paso
1980 1982 1984 1986 1988 1990 1992
Douglas S Mersey, Jmge Dmand and Nolan J . Merlons,
BejardSmoke and Minors Mexican Immigration in an Era of
Economic Integration (New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
2012), pp. 307 and 128 ; and con,putatious by the author
using Mexican Migration Ponied data
I
1994 1996 1998 2000 2002
the United States illegally fluctuate between 1 .5 ing than ever
before. The combination of huge
and 2.5 percent, with variations being closely budget increases
with rising migration rates sug-
bed to economic conditions on both sides of the gests a marked
deterioration in the efficiency of
border." Although the likelihood of female U.S border
enforcement operations . American
migration is much lower, the trend is virtually taxpayers are
spending vastly more to achieve lit-
de in the way of deterrence and much less in the
way of arrests along the border .
One measure of the efficiency of enforcement

is the cost of arresting one undocumented
migrant, estimated by dividing the Border Patrol's
annual budget by the number of apprehensions
achieved along the Mexico-US. border. Before
1986 the cost of one apprehension was roughly
constant at around $100 per arrest. Beginning
with the passage of IRCA in 1986, however, the
cost of enforcement began to rise, tri ' o
around $300 per arrest in 1989 before stabilizing
for a time . Beginning with the launching ofoper-
ations Blockade and Gatekeeper in 1993 and
1994, however, the cost of making one arrest
immediately jumped to more than $400 and then
gradually trended upward to reach $600 in 1999.
The events of September 11, 2001, brought
another huge infusion of resources to the Border
Patrol that was in no way connected to the threat
of either terrorism or undocumented migration
fat
The available data thus indicate that the
inflow ofundocumented migrants from Mexico
continues apace, albeit with variations linked to
economic cycles, but that once they are at the
border the odds of being apprehended are much
lower. As a result, more undocumented migrants
am gaining entry to the United States than ever
before. Over the same time period, legal immi-
gration from Mexico has also grown, despite
measures enacted by Congress to make it more
cult to qualify, for documents and to reduce
the rights and privileges of legal immigrants
once they are here .

Wasted Money
Thus, although the size of the Border Patrol's
budget increased by a factor of 10 between 1986
and 2002, and the number of Border Patrol
agents has tripled, more Mexican migrants-
both documented and undocumented--are arriv-
7
0%
Rather than
increasing the odds
of apprehension,
U.S. border policies
have reduced them
to record lows .
Whereas the cost of
making one arrest
along the border
stood at just $300 in
1992,10 years later
it reached $1,700,
an increase of 467
percent in just a

decade.
emanating from south of the border, and the mar-
ginal cost of apprehension skyrocketed . Whereas
the cost of making one unrest along the border
stood at just $300 in 1992, 10 years later it
reached $1,700, an increase of 467 percent in just
a decade . 3
If this increase in the cost of enforcement,
high as it was, had slowed the flow of undocu-
mented migrants, one might consider it money
well spent. But as we have already seen, in 2002
the probability of apprehension was lower than
at any point in the modem history of Mexico-
U.S. migration, and the number of Mexicans
entering the United States was greater than
ever. Whatever one thinks about the goal of
reducing migration from Mexico, US . policies
toward that end have clearly failed, and at great
cost to U.S. taxpayers . The allocation of funds
to border enforcement since 1986 has resulted
in the waste of billions of dollars .
Dam presented so far have shown that
despite massive increases in the personnel and
budget devoted to border enforcement and
congressional actions undertaken to discourage
legal immigration, the number of legal and ille-
gal entries from Mexco has continued to grow,
implying the waste of billions of dollars (not to
mention hundreds of lives each year) in the
futile effort to prevent the movement of labor
within a rapidly integrating North American
economy. As grim as this assessment may be, it

gets worse . Not only have U.S . policies failed to
reduce the inflow of people from Mexico, they
have perversely reduced the outflow to produce
an unprecedented increase in the undocument-
ed population of the United States' America's
unilateral effort to prevent a decades-old flow
from continuing has paradoxically transformed
a circular flow of Mexican workers into a set-
tled population of families and dependents .
More Settlement
The unilateral militarization of the U.S .-
Mexican border has been successful in achiev-
ing one outcome : it has dramatically increased
the costs and risks of border crossing . By chan-
neling undocumented flows into remote …
Labor, Business and the Historic “Future Flow” Compromise of
2013
Janice Fine, Rutgers University
In American labor’s response to immigration over time, one can
observe “a movement wrestling” between restrictionist and
solidaristic positions.[endnoteRef:1] Labor’s dilemma has
always been whether to advocate for restrictive policies to
protect labor markets and defend labor standards for the
existing native and naturalized workforce, or to champion more
open or solidaristic policies in order to organize immigrant
workers and preserve labor standards for all. Complicating the
picture further, in the past “two restrictionisms” have animated
the labor movement on questions of immigration—restriction on
the basis of defending labor standards and restriction on the
basis of racial and ethnic hierarchies—as well as “two

solidarities”—solidarity on the basis of defending labor
standards and solidarity on the basis of unifying diverse races
and ethnicities within one labor movement. [1: Janice Fine
and Daniel J. Tichenor A Movement Wrestling: American
Labor’s Enduring Struggle with Immigration 1866-2007,
Studies in American Political Development, Volume 23
(October 2009), 218–248. ]
Daniel Tichenor and I argue that there have been moments in
history when the U.S. labor movement has followed a strategy
of sweeping restriction, times when it expressed
solidarity[endnoteRef:2] with new immigrants, and still other
periods when it has combined restrictive and expansive stances
toward newcomers. These findings revise familiar conclusions
of scholars who presume that U.S. organized labor persistently
opposed to immigration until a sharp break in the late twentieth
century. Rather we argue that the American labor movement
underwent a gradual evolution, from predominantly
restrictionist positions on immigrant admissions and
membership to more expansive ones, because of policy learning
and legacies, especially during between the 1930’s and 1950’s
that proved durable and conditioned the movement’s responses
in later periods. In recent years for example, despite the
profound labor market dislocations dealt to labor unions by lean
production and globalization, the increasingly entrenched anti-
union stance of employers, and unprecedented inflows of
undocumented workers, the labor movement has become a
linchpin of the national immigrant rights movement, rejecting
employer sanctions and enforcement-only strategies, bringing
landmark litigation to defend the employment rights of the
undocumented and strongly supporting a broad legalization
program. [2: Strictly speaking, one might propose
“expansionism” as a conceptual opposite to “restrictionism.”
Though “expansion” is used when that is an aim in itself, more
often American labor has found itself divided over how to

respond to labor market changes it does not control. Thus
“solidarity”—in either the material or ethnic sense—is the
primary strategic alternative to restricting entry to the nation or
the labor market. This analytical choice is thus consistent with
these authors’ efforts to foreground union strategy in this
analysis.]
Over the past decade in particular, the AFL-CIO has tried to
stand in the breach: fighting both for justice for native and
naturalized workers as well as for the undocumented. Even as it
has embraced the cause of undocumented workers however, it
has never adopted the ideological justifications and rhetorical
devices of many in the business community. Perhaps no other
phrase more epitomizes the difference between labor and others
in the pro-immigration camp than “they are doing the work no
one else wants to do”. To the person on the street, this may
seem to be a simple truth and to some in the business
community a handy heuristic, but from labor’s perspective, it is
a justification for exploitation. The objection is that this type
of thinking suggests that there is a natural law of labor markets
that says that immigrants and especially those who are illegally
present are destined for certain jobs. From labor’s perspective,
wages are what make a job attractive—when they are higher,
more workers will choose to do them.
Whether one comes out of the labor movement or not and even
if one thinks that wages alone do not dictate the status of a job,
the rejection of market fundamentalism—in this case the
assumption that somehow the status quo position of
undocumented and low skill immigrants doing the so called
“3D” jobs is inevitable—is a useful counter-factual. From
labor’s perspective, there is nothing inherent in a job that makes
it good or bad--all jobs can be good jobs—if the workers who
do them have negotiating power. Labor history is replete with
examples of workers—garbage collectors, grave diggers,

meatpackers, hospital orderlies and janitors—to name but a few,
who have elevated their conditions through organization. From
labor’s point of view, immigrant workers get stuck in the worst
jobs because they lack legal status or English language skills
and are forced to accept the worst conditions in exchange for an
opportunity to work. The movement’s more nuanced view of
migrant labor and low wage work is an important corrective to
what Tichenor in other work has labeled the “free market
expansionists”[endnoteRef:3] who support large-scale
immigration to meet the labor needs of business interests but
have less concern about seeing that labor and employment rights
are followed or improved upon. In standing up for the wages
and working conditions of all workers, resisting the
commodification of labor and refusing to accept the “jobs no
one else will do” fallacy, the unions’ stance must be viewed as
something more than simply another interest group protecting
its members. This is why we stand to learn so much from
observing the immigration debate from a union vantage point.
With this in mind, the remainder of this short paper will focus
on the current debate over how levels of employment-based
temporary and permanent immigrant admissions would be set
going forward. [3: See Daniel Tichenor, Dividing Lines: The
Politics of Immigration Control in America (Princeton:
Princeton University Press) 2002, p. 35.]
The liberalization of admissions policies that followed the
passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965,
overturned four decades of racially and ethnically
discriminatory national origins quotas and led to a dramatic
shift in immigration sources to the United States. Latin
Americans and Asians began to make up a large majority of
immigrants arriving in the country after 1970. However, while
the 1965 law ended discriminatory country quotas it placed

limits on migration from the western hemisphere for the first
time. The INA, or Hart Celler Act also privileged family
reunification above all other categories for US admission,
providing far fewer employment than family visas. In 1964, the
US temporary worker, or bracero program with Mexico ended,
abolishing a major pathway into the US for less skilled
immigrants.[endnoteRef:4] Later policy changes placed Mexico
under a 20,000 per year country quota, abolished the right of
minor children to sponsor the immigration of parents and
repealed the “Texas Proviso” that had exempted employers from
prosecution for hiring undocumented workers. Nevertheless, in
the ten years between 1980 and 1990, the number of Mexican
immigrants living in the US doubled and then doubled again
between 1990 and 2000.[endnoteRef:5] By 1980, Warren and
Passel estimate that fully half of all Mexicans who were living
in the US were undocumented. [endnoteRef:6] [4: Kitty
Calavita, Inside the State: the Bracero Program, Immigration
and the I.N.S., (Louisiana: Quid Pro Quo Books) 2010. ] [5:
Jeffrey Passel, D’Vera Cohn & Ana Gonzalez-Barrera, Net
Migration from Mexico Falls to Zero-and Perhaps Less
(Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2012).] [6: Robert E.
Warren and Jeffrey S. Passel “A Count of the Uncountable:
Estimate of Undocumented Aliens Counted in the 1980 Census”
Demography 24, (3) 1987: 375-393. ]
The passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA) in 1994 and structural adjustment policies had a
devastating impact on Mexican agriculture as well as certain
domestic manufacturing sectors, leading to increased levels of
migration even while avenues for legal admission and to
legalization once in the country, were increasingly
restricted[endnoteRef:7]. All of these policy changes
contributed to drastic increases in the undocumented immigrant
population in the US, and most, without comprehensive
immigration reform have had very little chance to get on the

vaunted pathway to citizenship. Employment-based admission
essentially excludes unskilled workers. Nevertheless, large
numbers of Mexican workers—the most sizeable wave of
immigration from a single country in the history of the US,
along with smaller but significant numbers from Central
America, migrated to work in the United States from the 1970’s
until the late 2000’s when net migration fell to
zero.[endnoteRef:8] [7: Douglas S. Massey, “The New
Immigration and Ethnicity in the United States,”Population and
Development Review 21, no.3 (1995), 631; Pierrette
Hondagneu-Sotelo, Gendered Transitions: Mexican Experiences
of Immigration (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
2004), 19-33.] [8: Jeffrey Passel, D’Vera Cohn & Ana
Gonzalez-Barrera, Net Migration from Mexico Falls to Zero-and
Perhaps Less (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2012),
21.
Migrant numbers from Mexico have decreased since 2007.
Explanations for this range from the efficacy of government
enforcement such as increased deportations and heightened
border control to social and economic factors like lower
birthrates and greater opportunities in Mexico combined with
the lasting downturn in the U.S. ]
By 2009, foreign-born workers accounted for 15.7 percent of
the civilian labor force, but eight million of them were
undocumented immigrants accounting for over five percent of
the labor force[endnoteRef:9]. The last large-scale amnesty
had taken place in 1986 with the passage of the Immigration
Reform and Control Act and whereas there had previously been
mechanisms such as 245i, for undocumented immigrants to
come forward and regularize their status, with the passage of
the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility
Act of 1996, penalties for immigrants found to be illegally in
the country were drastically increased, subjecting them to three
and ten year bars. For the estimated 11.5 to 12 million

undocumented immigrants in the US today, excluding young
people who have recently been offered temporary legal status
through President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood
Arrivals (DACA) memo of 2012, comprehensive immigration
reform is the only pathway to some kind of immigration status
and eventual citizenship. [9: Rakesh Kochhar, C. Soledad
Espinoza & Rebecca Hinze-Pifer, After the Great Recession:
Foreign Born Gain Jobs; Native Born Lose Jobs (Washington,
DC: Pew Hispanic Center Report 2010). ]
With immigration reform again on the table (after failed efforts
in 2003 and 2007) along with considerations of what various
“earned legalization” programs would look like, over the past
few years questions about “future flow”--how levels of
employment-based temporary and permanent immigrant
admissions would be set going forward—have come to the fore.
Finding a workable approach to future flow is important; it is
reasonable to assume that even after the estimated 11.5 million
undocumented workers in the US today are provided some kind
of legal status, immigrant workers will continue to enter the
country and a new build-up of undocumented workers will be
the inevitable result, unless a better system is put into place that
provides a practical, legal way of entering the country to work.
To see evidence for this point of view, one need only look at the
Pew estimate of unauthorized immigration that was released on
September 23rd of 2013, which found that after a sharp decline
from 12.2 million in 2007 to 11.3 million in 2009, presumed to
be caused by the Great Recession, the number in 2012 had risen
to 11.7 million.[endnoteRef:10] As it had been a significant
player in previous immigration policy moments,[endnoteRef:11]
the national labor movement has been integral to the most
recent conversation about future flow. [10: “Population
Decline of Unauthorized Stalls, May Have Reversed: New
Estimate 11;7 million in 2012” Pew Research Center’s Hispanic
Trends Project, September 23, 2013.] [11: ” Janice Fine and

Daniel J. Tichenor “A Movement Wrestling: American Labor’s
Enduring Struggle with Immigration 1866-2007 Studies in
American Political Development, Volume 23, Number 1, pp. 84-
113, April 2009.]
The Obama Administration, in analyzing Congress’s failure to
pass immigration reform in 2007, concluded that the disunity
among unions that had occurred during the previous effort,
while certainly not the proximate cause, had complicated
matters and needed to be avoided. The Federation was strongly
encouraged to try to unite all of labor behind one immigration
proposal. Despite declining membership and a deeply hostile
climate in recent years, heavy participation in politics and
public policy still enables labor to fight above its weight
class[endnoteRef:12] and the Obama Administration felt that a
united labor movement needed to be satisfied with any
immigration policy initiative in order to put labor’s strength
behind it. The AFL-CIO, despite having been weakened by the
defection of five of its largest and most dynamic
affiliates[endnoteRef:13], was still viewed as the central
convener of the labor movement regarding many issues
including immigration and was continuing to play an important
role on immigrant worker rights issues.[endnoteRef:14] So the
AFL-CIO, working with the Economic Policy Institute (EPI),
brought in Ray Marshall, an economist and former Secretary of
Labor under President Carter to help develop a proposal that
could satisfy unions as disparate in their interests as the
building trades, white collar professional organizations and
those representing low wage service workers.[endnoteRef:15]
[12: National exit polls have consistently shown voters from
union households to have made up between one-fourth to one-
fifth of the electorate in presidential elections since 1992.
Taylor E. Dark, The unions and the Democrats: An enduring

alliance. Cornell University Press, 2001.] [13: Four of the five
founding unions of the new Change to Win Coalition had the
largest numbers of foreign-born workers in their membership
bases of the entire Federation and had ambitions to organize
millions more. ] [14: “New Forms to Settle Old Scores:
Updating the Worker Centre Story in the United States” Vol. 66
(4), 2011 of Relations Industrielles/Industrial Relations (RI/IR)]
[15: Marshall, Ray “Getting Immigration Reform Right” EPI
Briefing Paper, March 15, 2007
http://www.sharedprosperity.org/bp186/bp186.pdf]
As key players at the Federation saw it, there needed to be a
legalization program for the 10-12 million undocumented
residing in the country along with the establishment of a system
for future flow—which would address how levels of
employment-based temporary and permanent immigrant
admissions would be set going forward. The AFL-CIO asked
Marshall to chair a special committee on immigration that had
as its mission bringing unions together around development and
adoption of a common position on immigration
reform.[endnoteRef:16] Well known for his efforts to raise
labor standards, Marshall had the standing to visit with the
principals of many national unions including construction
unions like the bricklayers, ironworkers and electricians who
felt that construction was being disproportionately impacted by
immigration and had historically been hostile to the
Federation’s support for reform and bring them into a process.
Marshall also met with agricultural unions including the Farm
Labor Organizing Committee that had long been working to
unionize migrant workers in the fields including those who were
working for R.J. Reynolds. [16: The Labor Movement’s
Framework for Comprehensive Immigration Reform, AF L-CIO
and Change to Win, April 2009
http://www.aflcio.org/issues/civilrights/immigration/upload/im
migrationreform041409.pdf]

Among some of the building trades unions there was a view that
immigration itself, rather than industry or government, was
responsible for rampant misclassification of workers as
independent contractors by employers and that the way to
curtail it was to require employers to verify the immigration
status of workers through e-verify. The white collar union
International Federation of Professional and Technical
Engineers (IFPTE) had been campaigning for reform of the H-
1B and L-1 visa programs, arguing that employers were hungry
for these visas because they made it possible to hire skilled
foreign workers for less money—not because there was a
shortage of similarly qualified domestic
workers.[endnoteRef:17] The common thread running through
Marshall’s conversations with national unions was the
perception that immigration was undermining labor standards.
[17: “Guest Worker Programs and the STEM Workforce” , Fact
Sheet 2011, IFPTE]
Weighing all of the different issues raised by the various
national unions, Marshall developed the framework that would
comprise the basis for labor’s new immigration policy
consensus. The basic tenets of the policy were:
1. An independent commission to assess and manage future
flows, based on labor market shortages that are determined on
the basis of actual need;
2. A secure and effective worker authorization mechanism;
3. Rational operational control of the border;
4. Adjustment of status for the current undocumented
population and
5. Improvement, not expansion, of temporary worker
programs, limited to temporary or seasonal, not permanent,
jobs.

For the AFL-CIO, the future flow component was the linchpin
of the entire framework because it addressed how immigration
would be managed going forward (once undocumented workers
and their families had a pathway to legalization and visa back-
logs were cleared) and would replace what they viewed as a
ineffectually regulated, no-hold’s barred market-driven system
with a government run commission of experts for determining
the numbers of permanent and temporary workers admitted into
the U.S. The Marshall framework placed the setting of
temporary and permanent employment visas in the hands of an
independent commission that would assess labor market needs
on an ongoing basis, examine the impact of immigration on the
economy, wages, the workforce and business and, utilizing a
methodology approved by the Congress, set the numbers of
foreign workers to be admitted on employment visas. There
would be no country caps or what is referred to as “arbitrary”
caps on occupational classifications; admission numbers would
be set based upon a determination of a long-term labor shortage
in an industry. Employers would be required to prove that they
had made a strong effort to hire US workers and to “fill those
jobs at the prevailing wage and other conditions that will not
cause a depression in wages or working conditions in that
industry.”[endnoteRef:18] Prevailing wages would be set by
state labor departments with geographically specific data and
workers would be covered by all US labor and employment
laws. Once an employer’s petition to hire a foreign worker was
approved, the job would be listed on a computerized job bank
list available through US consulates across the globe; workers
would send in applications while living in their home countries
and employers would hire based upon these applications. [18:
“AFL-CIO’s Model for Future Flow: Foreign Workers Must
Have Full Rights” p. 2.]
Hired workers would come into the US with a conditional green

card that would turn into a standard green card once the
government processed a worker’s petition to remain in the US.
As unscrupulous practices on the part of recruiters has been a
source of worker exploitation, no employer or labor contractor
would be allowed to recruit abroad. To function properly, the
system required congress to appropriate adequate funds to
ensure against backlogs, which have been a major problem
under the current system, and that “all visas that can be
distributed each year are actually distributed, under both
employment and family classifications.”[endnoteRef:19]
Finally, the proposal called for reforms to existing temporary
worker programs beginning from the principle that they apply
only to seasonal labor shortages, are limited in size and scope,
require employers to pay the adverse wage level set by state
workforce agencies and to bear the costs of recruitment fees,
hiring, subsistence and travel “so that workers are not exposed
to large debts that hinder their ability to enforce their
rights”.[endnoteRef:20] To aid workers in recovering pay they
are owed, the proposal required employers to post a bond that is
“at least sufficient in value to cover the worker’s legal
wages…” and mandated creation of a system that facilitated
workers making claims against the bonds.[endnoteRef:21] The
AFL-CIO and Change to Win adopted the Marshall framework
in 2009. [19: Ibid.] [20: Ibid] [21: Ibid p. 3.]
Not surprisingly, several prominent employer groups opposed
the framework ideas arguing for a market-based rather than
regulatory solution. The Essential Worker Immigration
Coalition (EWIC), a group comprised of many of the largest
employers in the fast food industry, denounced the proposal to
have a commission. Instead, EWIC has argued for a provisional
visa program that “gives employers, not government, the
primary say in which workers they need to man their businesses
and gives the US labor market, not Congress or a commission,
the primary say in how many workers enter the country annually

in a legal program”.[endnoteRef:22] The US Chamber of
Commerce echoed EWIC’s position, asserting that “the free
market is by far the best tool for setting immigration quotas and
picking immigrants…Employers need and will continue to fight
for a market-based immigration system.”[endnoteRef:23] A
Republican-oriented pro-immigration think-tank, the National
Foundation for American Policy (NFAP) issued its own policy
brief critiquing the commission idea, concluding that a
commission would “…likely harm US competitiveness, push
more work outside the United States, fail to reduce illegal
immigration and will increase the number of immigrants who
die each year at the border due to a lack of legal avenues to
work in America.” Strikingly, despite major philosophical
disagreement, the Chamber was to become the Federation’s
partner in forging a compromise. [22: “Business Group
Disappointed by Immigration Proposal, Looking Forward to
Congressional Debate on Reform” Essential Worker
Immigration Coalition, December 16, 2009.] [23: Press
Release, US Chamber of Commerce, June 2009.]
In 2012, the “Gang of Eight”, the bi-partisan group in the
Senate that was working on developing a comprehensive
immigration reform proposal that could move through congress,
made another request of labor: that the AFL-CIO work with the
US Chamber of Commerce on developing a compromise
proposal for regulating the future flow of low wage workers
into the US after some form of legalization was extended to the
unauthorized currently in the US, which would address how
levels of employment-based temporary and permanent
immigrant admissions would be set going forward.
With its labor consensus plan in hand, the AFL-CIO began
negotiations with the Chamber.Such an attempt to bring

together labor and business around immigration policy was not
unprecedented but certainly rare and had not been approached
since 1990, when a potent left/right coalition supported the
expansion of legal immigrant admissions.[endnoteRef:24] The
stakes were high: if a future flow component was not included
in the Gang of Eight’s proposal, there was fear that it could be
dismissed by some as another short-term fix that did not address
the underlying causes of high numbers of undocumented
immigration. [24: See Daniel Tichenor, Dividing Lines: The
Politics of Immigration Control in America (Princeton:
Princeton University Press) 2002, pp. 281.]
During the period that the AFL-CIO had been developing the
labor consensus proposal, the Chamber had developed its own
future flow proposal for less skilled immigrants that would
cover “any non-farm, low skilled job that does not require a
college degree as standard preparation, including year-round
employment”[endnoteRef:25] which became the basis for its
negotiations. It proposed a new kind of two track program in
which employers who demonstrated that they have made a
“good faith” effort[endnoteRef:26] to hire US workers would be
given permission to hire foreign workers for specific, registered
jobs and foreign workers would obtain visas through a separate
visa application process that is not job specific. Foreign
workers would be granted visas based on initial job offers, but
would then be free to change jobs within the US and to accept
work from any employer who has gone through the process of
demonstrating a labor need and registering with the program.
While the initial visa would be for two years and could be
renewed twice, the Chamber labeled it “dual intent” saying that
visa holders should be able to transition to permanent visas by
“earning the right to get in line for a green card.” Wages would
be based on the “actual wage paid to similarly situated US
workers in the same location OR an agreed upon prevailing
wage, whichever is greater.” A major proposal underwriting the

program was for a demand-based visa cap that would float up
and down in response to employer demand up to 400,000 per
annum. [25: Chamber of Commerce, “Less Skilled Worker
Visa Program” February 5, 2013, p. 3.] [26: In its support for
attestation which simply requires employers to attest that they
tried to find US workers, as opposed to labor certification,
which involves a determination of whether qualified workers are
available to do the work and whether the hiring of foreign
workers will adversely effect the wages and working conditions
of similarly employed US workers, the Chamber’s sense of
what a “good faith” effort entailed certainly differed from
labor’s.]
Important business actors (as well as some scholarly and public
policy organizations such as the Cato and Manhattan Institutes)
in the future flow debate assert the argument that international
migration to the US rises and falls with the market and that
government is limited in terms of its ability to regulate it. In
synch with the Chamber’s proposal, they argue for an approach
that, rather than trying to staunch the flow would focus instead
on providing a legal way for the same numbers to come. Those
who support this approach are not a heterogeneous bunch, while
some are motivated by poverty alleviation and worker rights and
believe that if workers come legally they will have more
standing in the labor market, others are more motivated by
ensuring a robust low wage labor supply in specific sectors.
Whatever the motivation, these groups are united in their belief
in a “market-based solution” or “logic” that would transform the
flow from illegal to legal by drastically raising the number of
temporary visas available to workers and making them easy to
get so that all are able to access the labor market legally rather
than trying to restrict the flow. The Chamber, and these other
proponents are inclined to argue for a flexible visa cap that
would accommodate all who applied—in economic terms, one
that would “clear demand”. [endnoteRef:27] [27: See for

example, Stuart Anderson, “Making the Transition from Illegal
to Legal Migration” National Foundation for American Policy,
November, 2003. Daniel Griswold “Willing Workers: Fixing
the Problem of Illegal Mexican Migration to the United States”
the Cato Institute, October 15, 2002, Douglas S. Massey, Jorge
Durand and Nolan J. Malone, Beyond Smoke and Mirrors:
Mexican Immigration in an Era of Economic Integration, pp.
142-164, New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002. and Janice
Fine et al “The W Visa: A Workable Compromise in a Difficult
Situation”, proposal prepared for Center for Community Change
and SEIU, 2007. ]
Other actors in the debate, principally labor and some
prominent labor economists, reject the market premise on both
empirical and normative grounds. They believe that business
will always claim labor shortages and seek to import higher
numbers of lower cost workers. In their view, markets must …

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