Getting real about illegal immigration

I want to stake out some right-wing talking points and convince you that they're correct: Illegal immigration is a serious problem in the US, and our porous borders must be secured.

The Center for Migration Studies (CMS) collects data from the US Census Bureau's annual American Community Survey and monthly Current Population Survey. It has published reports on the number of undocumented immigrants in the US and their participation in the US workforce.

The Census Bureau's Population Clock lets you pick a date and see the total US population as of then.

The numbers I present here are from July 2023. The CMS reports are reliable and consistent for that date. The absolute numbers have no doubt changed since, but the scale of the problem won't have.

In July 2023, then, the total US population was 337 million people, of whom 11.7 million were undocumented. That means that just under 3.5% of the US population was undocumented. CMS reports that about 5% of the US workforce is undocumented, so undocumented immigrants are more likely to be working age adults (or, maybe, to hold multiple jobs) than the population in general.

If one person in thirty in the country is here in violation of the law – if one in twenty of US workers has that status – it's a serious problem.

It's obviously a problem for those people. They can't be confident in getting and holding jobs, attending school, seeking medical care, reporting crimes to the police. They might be apprehended and expelled. They are marginalized and exploitable. Thanks to the 14th Amendment, parents without papers may have children who are citizens.

It's a problem for employers. If your workers are subject to deportation without notice, if they fear INS raids at the factory or job site, you can't count on their labor to make your products or deliver your services.

It's a problem for the rest of us, as well. The current unemployment rate in the US is at a historically low 4%. If you take away the 5% of the workforce we refuse to permit, then there aren't enough people in the country to fill the newly-empty jobs. Those jobs are concentrated in the construction, restaurant, agriculture, landscaping, food processing and manufacturing sectors. Loss of that labor will absolutely hurt the economy.

Finally, it's a moral failure. These are workers that the US relies upon. We've failed to acknowledge that for decades. We allow these families to live alongside us, to contribute their labor and pay taxes without the protections that the rest of us enjoy. We require that they live in fear. We tolerate – in an era of "mass deportations," some of us celebrate – the cruelty of arrest, confinement, expulsion of families.

Those 11.7 million people weren't taken out of Central and South American prisons and trucked to the US border by evil genius governments dumping their criminals on us. The vast majority were chasing economic opportunity or fleeing intolerable conditions at home or both. Violence, poverty and persecution drive migrant flows in the Americas just as they do in the rest of the world. As long as home is hell, desperation will drive migration.

Home is hell for lots of reasons. Local corruption is a big factor. The flow of guns from the US to criminal gangs in the region drastically increases the danger. The money to be made from making, transporting and selling illegal drugs feeds criminal cartels whose very existence threatens law-abiding families. And so on.

We simply don't know how many immigrants successfully enter the United States illegally. We have some proxies for that measure, including the number of people that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) encounters at and between legal ports of entry. In 2024, those encounters dropped to about a quarter million per month (I say again, dropped to that level – it's a lot!):

I encourage you to click through to the full USAFacts article from which that chart is taken. The numbers have nuance that talk of bad hombres and racists misses entirely.

Those CBP encounters are evidence that our border force is trying to doing its job. Each of those encounters means CBP stopped a migrant's entry. They are also evidence that more must be done. We need border agents and lawyers and judges sufficient to the scale of the problem. We need technological infrastructure – surveillance drones, detection hardware, physical barriers – that make policing effective.

A sovereign nation has both the right and the obligation to secure its borders. The US should absolutely know who is entering and leaving the country. It should grant or deny permission to do so in keeping with its laws.

A country founded on ideals of equality and freedom ought also to treat everyone in a principled and ethical way. We ought not to exploit the workers on whom our economy relies. We ought not to tolerate cruelty to parents and children whom we admit to our communities, treating them as if they were lesser. That is an ugly stain on all of us.

MAGA blames Democrats, and Obama and Biden in particular, for the current situation. The left assails the cruelty of Trump's proposed mass deportations. None of that solves the problems we face. And whatever the failings of the executive branch, the Congress is responsible for passing the laws and funding the programs that could fix our broken immigration system.

Here, then, is a modest proposal for how to fix immigration.

First, we have a large undocumented workforce in America. Let's document it. Let's create a guest worker category that removes the immediate threat of deportation. Define a legal review process that allows us to verify that people are otherwise complying with our laws and contributing to the communities they live in. Make sensible and compassionate choices about their families.

We have programs like this already for students and various groups of high-skilled workers, administered by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. We know how to do it.

Require currently-undocumented workers to register. Limit the program to those with no meaningful criminal record. Failure to comply would leave them at the same risk of deportation and exploitation that they run now, so the program is strictly better than the current situation.

Second, strengthen and enforce penalties on employers who hire undocumented workers. If the managers who hire them are at real legal risk, and if the companies suffered real legal and financial consequences for exploiting an undocumented labor force, they would have an incentive to get workers documented in compliance with the new program and the law.

I'm not proposing an amnesty or a grant of citizenship. I merely want to be realistic about the workforce we obviously need, since we already allow it to exist. Perhaps the Congress would choose to allow productive and contributing guest worker immigrants to become residents and to apply for citizenship after some time. Solving the immediate crisis does not require we do that right now.

Third, during Obama's two terms, the Congress passed the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Act, which created a pathway to citizenship for people who had been brought to America by their parents when they were small children. It required that they be good members of the societies they lived in, with rules about criminal backgrounds, education and service. Congress should reaffirm and advance that policy. It seems to me cruel and unnecessary to deport someone who's grown up here, never lived in a foreign country, has no connections there, doesn't speak the language.

Fourth, Congress should revive and enact the Republican-led bipartisan border bill from the waning days of the Biden administration. That bill funded enforcement and adjudication, and allocated money for physical border security. We need money for border agents and judges to secure the border and to rule on cases quickly.

Finally, any long-term solution to illegal immigration has to consider its root causes. As long as families are threatened by violence, they will seek safety. We have existing asylum laws that extend protection to immigrants who legitimately need it. We don't have enough judges and lawyers to handle that caseload today, so more border funding would help. The real answer, though, is regional action to reduce corruption and violence.

We should demand good governance when we deal with our neighbors. We should cooperate with regional governments to interdict and punish gun dealers selling weapons to drug cartels and others across our southern border. We should promote trade and economic development in the region and with bilateral cooperation with individual countries.

All of that, of course, would be comprehensive immigration reform. Making it happen will take time, money and hard work. Congress has an abysmal recent record at that sort of effort.

That failure is why simple slogans like "mass deportations now" and "build the wall" are so attractive. Everything else seems too hard. Focused, aggressive action on simpler things feels like, well, doing something. But those simple solutions hurt real people – those deported, those of us left behind where housing can't be built, crops can't be picked. An impenetrable border slows or stops commerce, makes it harder to maintain ties of family and friendship and commerce.

I expect that if those simple things do happen, the unintended consequences will shock and dismay many who supported them. We'll have done a great deal of damage. We will have to undo it, and we will still have to build an immigration policy that serves our economic and humane interests.

In the end, I am sure, something like the framework I propose will happen. The question is, how much harm will we do on the way there?