The recent defeat of the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act by a Republican filibuster in the Senate has cast new light on the sorry condition of immigration politics in the United States. While the bill does nothing more than temporarily set up a path to citizenship for undocumented college students and armed service members, it has been described by Sen. David Vitter, R-La., as an "amnesty measure" and by others as inviting greater competition for jobs against already financially-stressed American workers. While such hyperbolic assertions are effective in rallying conservative opposition to the DREAM Act, they do not hold up against the light of analysis.
Central to the rationale of the opposition to the DREAM Act is the idea that any reform that would ultimately grant legal status to a relatively small proportion of undocumented immigrants constitutes an admission of defeat in the effort to discourage illegal immigration. Case in point: Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., recently asked the Associated Press, "What am I going to tell people in South Carolina when I legalize 2 million people here, when we haven't secured the border?"
In typical fashion, Graham misses the point entirely. Despite his and other Republicans' claims to stand on a platform of fiscal responsibility, the fact of the matter is that the border security that they espouse is horrifically inefficient. The total cost to taxpayers of the new border fence between the United States and Mexico is set to reach $49 billion over 25 years, with other enforcement costs driving the overall price of border security much higher.
This expense could be justifiable if the fence were capable of deterring undocumented immigrants by the tens of millions, but according to a recently released study by the Pew Hispanic Center, annual illegal immigration to the United States fell from 800,000 to 350,000 between 2000 and 2009. This amounts to more than $30,000 per deterred migrant — or more, considering the potential deterrent influence of the recession and the draconian enforcement tactics of figures like Arizona's Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
The Republican stance on this issue therefore becomes contradictory. While it is the conservative pastime to decry the inefficiency of bureaucracy, it becomes painfully obvious that extending rudimentary bureaucratic structures to undocumented immigrants would not only be cheaper, but would also provide the United States government with a greater degree of information with which to control the immigration problem.
One could predict a conservative response that such spending is defensible because it serves to protect American workers from having to compete for wages with undocumented immigrants. They're taking our jobs, as it were. Let us ignore for a moment that protecting lower income Americans from economic shocks is uncannily similar in principle to legislation that the Republican Party has already decisively rejected: the stimulus package.
Aside from the fact that such an expansion of the benefits of bureaucracy would enable the government to enforce labor laws in the case of immigrants, the fact remains that such objections simply do not apply to the domain of the DREAM Act. Because the DREAM Act only extends potential legal status to college students (i.e., skilled labor) and soldiers, the number of Americans who would be subjected to wage competition with undocumented immigrants would be minimal.
In addition, while introducing more employees into an economy during a period of high unemployment seems on the surface to be bad policy, such an observation ignores that income inequality between skilled and unskilled labor in the United States has climbed steadily for the last 40 years and that recessions do not affect these two groups equally. While some citizens and legal immigrants — mainly those with college degrees — will face greater competition for jobs as a result of the DREAM Act, the ones subjected to this competition will be the ones best economically capable of handling it. The economic result, therefore, will be to slow the rising tide of income inequality while no longer denying the American economy output from the brilliant minds enabled by the DREAM Act to actively participate in a knowledge-based economy.
The opposition to the DREAM Act is, therefore, largely unwarranted. To echo the sentiments of a recent letter to the editor ("Pass the DREAM Act now," Oct. 4), the DREAM Act must be reintroduced as a stand-alone measure. It is laudable that Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., has done so. While the Defense Department's quiet endorsement of the DREAM Act makes its inclusion into the National Defense Reauthorization Act legitimate, the DREAM Act is too good a policy to be weakened by accusations of playing politics with defense.
