Detention for Illegal Aliens

The proposal of economists Barry and Carmel Chiswick to imprison “illegal” immigrants as a way of deterring them from coming into the United States is flawed, to say the least. Here are a few things they don’t consider.

First of all, anyone who is apprehended and charged with a crime bears a presumption of innocence, which means that before they can be imprisoned they must be found guilty in a court of law. Under current Immigration and Naturalization Service practice “illegal” detainees are allowed to sign a voluntary departure form, and are not deported, as the Chiswicks mistakenly say they are. One of the main reasons they are not prosecuted is that our overburdened court system cannot bear this additional strain.

If detainees were prosecuted, presumably most of them would require public defenders. The Chiswicks do not tell us what the cost of prosecuting 1 million such cases would be. But assume that all these detainees could be convicted., The question then arises, where are 1 million prisoners going to be incarcerated for the length of “a key harvest season,” which is the sentence they suggest--that’s about 3 months. Let’s say it costs $20 a day to create facilities and house these 1 million prisoners for 90 days., That comes to upwards of $2 billion a year. Who going to pay for that at a time when the U.S. prison system is already severely overcrowded?

The Chiswicks also are ignorant of the supply side of migration economics. Many migrants come to the United States on money borrowed at 5% to 20% a month; three months out of work would put them deeply in debt. With hourly wages in the United States comparable to daily wages in Mexico, the incentive to try coming again to earn money to pay these debts would for many migrants offset the uncertain possibility of apprehension and imprisonment.

For the families of the imprisoned such an event would be an economic disaster that in many cases would have to be offset by another member of the family coming to take the job of the imprisoned man or women. In other words, a policy of imprisonment could actually increase the total migrant flow from Mexico.

While imperfect, the present system of supply and demand works reasonably well. Migrants come to sell their labor to U.S. employers who want to buy it. It’s ironic that the Chiswicks, writing from that bastion of free enterprise, the Hoover Institution, want to impose such heavy-handed government fetters on an economic system that has evolved to meet the needs of productive people on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.

MICHAEL KEARNEY

Riverside