Too Much Immigration ?

[djk]

(cont)

Dani Rodrik, a trade economist at Harvard University, has independently reached similar conclusions. Gaps in the prices of traded goods have become much smaller after many years of liberalisation. Not so gaps in the wages of similarly qualified individuals in different parts of the world. So the gains from liberalising immigration restrictions are vastly greater than those from further freeing the movement of goods or capital.

Both Mr Winters and Mr Rodrik agree that the biggest gains are from freeing the movement of unskilled rather than skilled labour, for there the wage gaps among countries are greatest. In addition, the loss of skilled people may do greater damage to the developing countries that have trained them. So both economists independently reach another conclusion: to minimise harm to sending countries, migration should be temporary.

More migration will not be popular. But neither, says Mr Rodrik, is liberalising trade. And indeed, the plight of the miner in Wales or the farmer in Japan whose way of life is destroyed by cheaper imports is not so different from that of the old lady in downtown Los Angeles whose neighbourhood has become Hispanic. All, in different ways, are victims of the march of globalisation. The best remedy is to redistribute some of globalisation's gains to its victims.

(end)

 

[djk]

SURVEY: MIGRATION

The longest journey

Oct 31st 2002
From The Economist print edition

Freeing migration could enrich humanity even more than freeing trade. But only if the social and political costs are contained, says Frances Cairncross

“WITH two friends I started a journey to Greece, the most horrendous of all journeys. It had all the details of a nightmare: barefoot walking in rough roads, risking death in the dark, police dogs hunting us, drinking water from the rain pools in the road and a rude awakening at gunpoint from the police under a bridge. My parents were terrified and decided that it would be better to pay someone to hide me in the back of a car.”

This 16-year-old Albanian high-school drop-out, desperate to leave his impoverished country for the nirvana of clearing tables in an Athens restaurant, might equally well have been a Mexican heading for Texas or an Algerian youngster sneaking into France. He had the misfortune to be born on the wrong side of a line that now divides the world: the line between those whose passports allow them to move and settle reasonably freely across the richer world's borders, and those who can do so only hidden in the back of a truck, and with forged papers.

Tearing down that divide would be one of the fastest ways to boost global economic growth. The gap between labour's rewards in the poor world and the rich, even for something as menial as clearing tables, dwarfs the gap between the prices of traded goods from different parts of the world. The potential gains from liberalising migration therefore dwarf those from removing barriers to world trade. But those gains can be made only at great political cost. Countries rarely welcome strangers into their midst.

Everywhere, international migration has shot up the list of political concerns. The horror of September 11th has toughened America's approach to immigrants, especially students from Muslim countries, and blocked the agreement being negotiated with Mexico. In Europe, the far right has flourished in elections in Austria, Denmark and the Netherlands. In Australia, the plight of the Tampa and its human cargo made asylum a top issue last year.

Although many more immigrants arrive legally than hidden in trucks or boats, voters fret that governments have lost control of who enters their country. The result has been a string of measures to try to tighten and enforce immigration rules. But however much governments clamp down, both immigration and immigrants are here to stay. Powerful economic forces are at work. It is impossible to separate the globalisation of trade and capital from the global movement of people. Borders will leak; companies will want to be able to move staff; and liberal democracies will balk at introducing the draconian measures required to make controls truly watertight. If the European Union admits ten new members, it will eventually need to accept not just their goods but their workers too.

Technology also aids migration. The fall in transport costs has made it cheaper to risk a trip, and cheap international telephone calls allow Bulgarians in Spain to tip off their cousins back home that there are fruit-picking jobs available. The United States shares a long border with a developing country; Europe is a bus-ride from the former Soviet block and a boat-ride across the Mediterranean from the world's poorest continent. The rich economies create millions of jobs that the underemployed young in the poor world willingly fill. So demand and supply will constantly conspire to undermine even the most determined restrictions on immigration.

For would-be immigrants, the prize is huge. It may include a life free of danger and an escape from ubiquitous corruption, or the hope of a chance for their children. But mainly it comes in the form of an immense boost to earnings potential. James Smith of Rand, a Californian think-tank, is undertaking a longitudinal survey of recent immigrants to America. Those who get the famous green card, allowing them to work and stay indefinitely, are being asked what they earned before and after. “They gain on average $20,000 a year, or $300,000 over a lifetime in net-present-value terms,” he reports. “Not many things you do in your life have such an effect.”

Such a prize explains not only why the potential gains from liberalising immigration are so great. It explains, too, why so many people try so hard to come—and why immigration is so difficult to control. The rewards to the successful immigrant are often so large, and the penalties for failure so devastating, that they create a huge temptation to take risks, to bend the rules and to lie. That, inevitably, adds to the hostility felt by many rich-world voters.

(cont)

 

[djk]

This hostility is milder in the four countries—the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand—that are built on immigration. On the whole, their people accept that a well-managed flow of eager newcomers adds to economic strength and cultural interest. When your ancestors arrived penniless to better themselves, it is hard to object when others want to follow. In Europe and Japan, immigration is new, or feels new, and societies are older and less receptive to change.

Even so, a growing number of European governments now accept that there is an economic case for immigration. This striking change is apparent even in Germany, which has recently been receiving more foreigners, relative to the size of its population, than has America. Last year, a commission headed by a leading politician, Rita Süssmuth, began its report with the revolutionary words: “Germany needs immigrants.” Recent legislation based on the report (and hotly attacked by the opposition) streamlines entry procedures.


But there is a gulf between merely accepting the economic case and delighting in the social transformation that immigrants create. Immigrants bring new customs, new foods, new ideas, new ways of doing things. Does that make towns more interesting or more threatening? They enhance baseball and football teams, give a new twang to popular music and open new businesses. Some immigrants transform drifting institutions, as Mexicans have done with American Catholicism, according to Gregory Rodriguez, a Latino journalist in Los Angeles. And some commit disproportionate numbers of crimes.

They also profoundly test a country's sense of itself, forcing people to define what they value. That is especially true in Europe, where many incomers are Muslims. America's 1.2m-1.5m or so Muslim immigrants tend to be better educated and wealthier than Americans in general. Many are Iranians, who fled extremist Islam. By contrast, some of the children of Germany's Turks, Britain's Pakistanis and France's North Africans seem more attracted to fundamentalism than their parents are. If Muslims take their austere religion seriously, is that deplorable or admirable? If Islam constrains women and attacks homosexuality, what are the boundaries to freedom of speech and religion? Even societies that feel at ease with change will find such questions hard.



No but, maybe yes

Immigration poses two main challenges for the rich world's governments. One is how to manage the inflow of migrants; the other, how to integrate those who are already there.

Whom, for example, to allow in? Already, many governments have realised that the market for top talent is global and competitive. Led by Canada and Australia, they are redesigning migration policies not just to admit, but actively to attract highly skilled immigrants. Germany, for instance, tentatively introduced a green card of its own two years ago for information-technology staff—only to find that a mere 12,000 of the available 20,000 visas were taken up. “Given the higher wages and warmer welcome, no Indians in their right minds would rather go to Germany than to the United States,” scoffs Susan Martin, an immigration expert at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.

Whereas the case for attracting the highly skilled is fast becoming conventional wisdom, a thornier issue is what to do about the unskilled. Because the difference in earnings is greatest in this sector, migration of the unskilled delivers the largest global economic gains. Moreover, wealthy, well-educated, ageing economies create lots of jobs for which their own workers have little appetite.

So immigrants tend to cluster at the upper and lower ends of the skill spectrum. Immigrants either have university degrees or no high-school education. Mr Smith's survey makes the point: among immigrants to America, the proportion with a postgraduate education, at 21%, is almost three times as high as in the native population; equally, the proportion with less than nine years of schooling, at 20%, is more than three times as high as that of the native-born (and probably higher still among illegal Mexican immigrants).

All this means that some immigrants do far better than others. The unskilled are the problem. Research by George Borjas, a Harvard University professor whose parents were unskilled Cuban immigrants, has drawn attention to the fact that the unskilled account for a growing proportion of America's foreign-born. (The same is probably true of Europe's.) Newcomers without high-school education not only drag down the wages of the poorest Americans (some of whom are themselves recent immigrants); their children are also disproportionately likely to fail at school.

(cont)

 

[djk]

(cont)

These youngsters are there to stay. “The toothpaste is out of the tube,” says Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Centre for Immigration Studies, a think-tank in Washington, DC. And their numbers will grow. Because the rich world's women spurn motherhood, immigrants give birth to many of the rich world's babies. Foreign mothers account for one birth in five in Switzerland and one in eight in Germany and Britain. If these children grow up underprivileged and undereducated, they will create a new underclass that may take many years to emerge from poverty.

For Europe, immigration creates particular problems. Europe needs it even more than the United States because the continent is ageing faster than any other region. Immigration is not a permanent cure (immigrants grow old too), but it will buy time. And migration can “grease the wheels” of Europe's sclerotic labour markets, argues Tito Boeri in a report for the Fondazione Rodolfo Debenedetti, published in July. However, thanks to the generosity of Europe's welfare states, migration is also a sort of tax on immobile labour. And the more immobile Europeans are—the older, the less educated—the more xenophobic they are too.

The barriers need to be dismantled with honesty and care. It is no accident that they began to go up when universal suffrage was introduced. Poor voters know that immigration threatens their living standards. And as long as voters believe that immigration is out of control, they will oppose it. Governments must persuade them that it is being managed in their interests. This survey will suggest some ways in which that might be done.

(end)

 

[djk]

SURVEY: MIGRATION

Irresistible attraction

Oct 31st 2002
From The Economist print edition


Who moves, and why

LEAVING one's home to settle in a foreign land requires courage or desperation. No wonder only a tiny fraction of humanity does so. Most migration takes place within countries, not between them, part of the great procession of people from country to town and from agriculture to industry. International migrants, defined as people who have lived outside their homeland for a year or more, account for under 3% of the world's population: a total, in 2000, of maybe 150m people, or rather less than the population of Brazil. Many more people—a much faster-growing group—move temporarily: to study, as tourists, or to work abroad under some special scheme for a while. However, the 1990s saw rapid growth in immigration almost everywhere, and because population growth is slowing sharply in many countries, immigrants and their children account for a rising share of it.


Counting migrants is horrendously difficult, even when they are legal. Definitions vary. Some countries keep population registers, others do not. The visitor who comes for a holiday may stay (legally or illegally) to work. Counting those who come is hard, and only Australia and New Zealand rigorously try to count those who leave. So nobody knows whether the rejected asylum-seeker or the illegal who has been told to leave has gone or stayed. But the overall picture is one of continuing growth in the late 1990s.

Between 1989 and 1998, gross flows of immigrants into America and into Europe (from outside the EU) were similar, relative to population size. About 1m people a year enter America legally, and some 500,000 illegally; about 1.2m a year enter the EU legally, and perhaps 500,000 illegally. In both America and Europe, immigration has become the main driver of population growth. In some places, the effects are dramatic. Some 36% of New York's present population is foreign-born, says Andrew Beveridge, a sociology professor at Queens College, New York: “It hasn't been that high since 1910,” the last peak.

America at least thinks of itself as an immigrant land. But for many European countries the surge of arrivals in the 1990s came as a shock. For example, the Greek census of 2001 found that, of the 1m rise in the population in the previous decade (to 11m), only 40,000 was due to natural increase. “In a decade, Greece has jumped from being one of the world's least immigrant-dense countries to being nearly as immigrant-dense as the United States,” notes Demetrios Papademetriou, co-director of the newly created Migration Policy Institute in Washington, DC.

Asia too saw a burst of immigration in the 1990s, propelled initially by the region's economic boom. Foreign workers accounted for an increasing share of the growth in the labour supply in the decade to the mid-1990s. Chris Manning, an economist at the Australian National University in Canberra, reckons that foreign workers made up more than half the growth in the less-skilled labour force in Malaysia, perhaps one-third of the growth in Thailand and 15-20% of the growth in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

What makes all these people move? In the past, governments often imported them. In Europe, migration in the 1950s and 1960s was by invitation: Britain's West Indians and Asians, for example, first came at the government's request. Britain's worst racial problems descend from the planned import of textile and industrial workers to northern England. Now the market lures the incomers, which may produce less disastrous results.

Three forces often combine to drive people abroad. The most powerful is the hope of economic gain. Alone, though, that may not be enough: a failing state, as in Somalia, Sri Lanka, Iraq or Afghanistan, also creates a powerful incentive to leave. Lastly, a network of friends and relatives lowers the barriers to migrating. Britain has many Bangladeshi immigrants, but most come from the single rural district of Sylhet. Many host countries “specialise” in importing people from particular areas: in Portugal, Brazilians account for 11% of foreigners settling there; in France, Moroccans and Algerians together make up 30% of incomers; and in Canada, the Chinese share of immigrants is more than 15%.

Most very poor countries send few people abroad. Immigration seems to start in earnest with the onset of industrialisation. It costs money to travel, and factory jobs provide it. That pattern emerges strikingly from a study by Frank Pieke of Oxford University of emigration from China's Fujian province. He describes how internal and overseas migration are intertwined. Typically, a woman from a family will go to work in a factory in a nearby province, supporting a man who then goes abroad and probably needs a few months to find himself a job.

(cont)

 

[djk]

(cont)

Incentives to go, incentives to stay

Net immigration flows continue as long as there is a wide gap in income per head between sending and receiving countries. Calculations by the OECD for 1997 looked at GDP per head, adjusted for purchasing power, in the countries that sent immigrants to its rich members, and compared that figure with GDP per head in the host country. In all but one of its seven largest members, average annual income per person in the sending countries was less than half that of the host country.

Migrant flows peter out as incomes in sending and host country converge. Philip Martin, an economist from the University of California at Davis, talks of a “migration hump”: emigration first rises in line with GDP per head and then begins to fall. Migration patterns in southern Europe in the 1980s suggested that the turning point at that time came at just under $4,000 a head. In a study for the European Commission last year of the prospective labour-market effect of EU enlargement, Herbert Brücker, of Berlin's German Institute for Economic Research (DIW), estimated that initially 335,000 people from the new members might move west each year, but that after ten years the flow would drop below 150,000 as incomes converged and the most footloose had gone. Net labour migration usually ends long before wages equalise in sending and host countries.

Migrants do not necessarily come to stay. They may want to work or study for a few months or years and then go home. But perversely, they are more likely to remain if they think that it will be hard to get back once they have left. “If you are very strict, you have more illegals,” observes Germany's Ms Süssmuth.

There has always been a return flow of migrants, even when going home meant a perilous return crossing of the Atlantic. According to Dan Griswold of the Cato Institute, a right-of-centre American think-tank, even in the first decade of the 20th century 25-30% of migrants eventually went home. And where migrants are free to come and go, many do not come in the first place. There is no significant net migration between the United States and Puerto Rico, despite free movement of labour. “It's expensive to be underemployed in America,” explains Mr Griswold. But in Europe, with its safety net of welfare benefits, the incentives to have a go are greater.

Tougher border controls deter immigrants from returning home. A book co-authored by Douglas Massey of the University of Pennsylvania, “Beyond Smoke and Mirrors”, describes how in the early 1960s the end of a programme to allow Mexicans to work temporarily in America led to a sharp rise in illegal immigrants. Another recent study, published in Population and Development Review, also links tighter enforcement to a switch from temporary to permanent migration. Its author, Wayne Cornelius, says the fees paid to coyotes, people who smuggle migrants, have risen sharply. He found that, when the median cost of a coyote's services was $237, 50% of male Mexican migrants went home after two years in the United States; but when it had risen to $711, only 38% went back. And, whereas the cost of getting in has risen(as have the numbers who die in the attempt), the cost of staying put has declined, because workplace inspections to catch illegals have almost ceased. The chance of being caught once in the country is a mere 1-2% a year, Mr Cornelius reckons. So “The current strategy of border enforcement is keeping more unauthorised migrants in the US than it is keeping out.”

Tighter controls in Europe are probably creating similar incentives to stay rather than to commute or return. A complex, bureaucratic system designed to keep many willing workers away from eager employers is bound to breed corruption and distortion. And the way that rich countries select immigrants makes matters worse.

(end)

 

[powerman]

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm

I suspect everyone but the native indians are immigrants in one way or another.

uhoh. I hope I didn't open a new can of worms.



However, I suspect if the native 'canadians' (i.e. the native indians) read all this they would just chuckle to themselves.

 

[mr. x]

IMbob:

i was going to mention the diane francis book - i just finished reading it. like the stoffman, book, it too spends a great deal of time compalining about the laxness of our regugee policy, and the appeals process, and the difficulty dpeorting people, and the general lack of enforcement due to budget cuts.

djk: thaks for posting the economist stuff - but i will read it later.

as for the whole thing about canada needing immigrants to offset an aging population, the stoffman book debunks this - and in any case, canada is in a much better position to deal with aging than europe or japan - the US is slightly better than us because of a higher birthrate.

but the thing is, if we are worried about the ratio of workers under 65 to those over 65 until the baby boomers have died, we should be cutting immigration now and then boosting it later, when the need arises - because many of the immigrants we let in now will themselves retire before most of the baby boomers are dead - the last baby boomers are 37 - if they live to be 87 on average, that is 50 years from now until they die off - if the immigrant who cares for that person retires at 65, that means we should be letting in people who would be 15 years old today - of course - as most skilled immigrants are in their late 20s, to early 30s, it means that we should put cut immigration for 10 to 15 years, then boost it up!

as for productivity, the comparisons between first world and third world people have more to do with the relative values of currencies, education, capital investment and with technology, than they do with anything else - if i move to india, my income would obviously decline proportonately.

there is a tie in between labour and productivity - if you have an excess of labour, labour tends to stay cheap, and this reduces the incentive to replace peole with technology (take secutiry guards, in india you wouldn't buy a lot of expensive high tech cameras because labour is so cheap that the cameras and stuff wouldn't pay for itself). the other tie in is that, if you have a country with lots of cheap labour, inefficient industries survive and even grow - if labour is short, the price of labour goes up and labour intensive industries cannot compete - thus, overall productivity increases.

my point, if you go back to the start of this thread, was that i think there is a connection between high immigration rates and 3 things: the low dollar, low increases in canadian productivity, and low rates of income growth.

perhaps my point was made in todays paper - suddenly, montreal looks like it is doing better than toronto - the unemployment rate in montreal is now lower than toronto. why, you ask? well, the PQ cut back immigration for political reasons (immigrants don't vote yes) whereas toronto still gets massive amounts of immigration.

 

[Bobzilla]

immigration

Personally, I think the major problem with Canada (and probably with the rest of the West as well) is entitlement. How many people these days (whether immigrants or not) think that the world owes them something for nothing? In my job, I deal with immigrants who come to Canada, rip off creditors for 1000's of $, refuse to pay it back, and when they're sued, they bugger off back to wherever they came from, leaving the creditor with no recourse. Not only that, but they freely admit they came here just to do this. Now, this doesn't just apply to immigrants...there are also 1000's of home-grown Canadians who do exactly the same thing, without leaving the country, of course. Their response is to become career welfare recipients. How can they get away with this? BECAUSE THEY ARE ALLOWED TO!!! Canada has a bureaucracy whose standard is not excellence, but apathy. Why should any of them do anything to correct this situation? They get paid (and paid well) either way! Meanwhile, I'm paying Rev Can $ to support these bozos, immigrant & non-immigrant alike! I think a solution is to limit welfare benefits for everyone to a time period. If you don't have a job & your benefits run out, that's your problem! Why is it that we reward women for having children that they cannot support? Not only that, but a lot of these women don't have the parenting skills to teach their children self-sufficiency, because they haven't learned it themselves. I don't think immigration should be stopped, I just think that people (whether they're immigrants or not) should start to be held accountable for their actions and the choices they make. However, as long as Canada continues to reward indolence, people will continue to point to immigration as the problem, when in fact, it isn't. After all, how many immigrants came to Canada in the mid-1800's? The difference then was they had to make their own way. Now, they know they can always fall back on welfare, and so do the people already here who just don't feel like working!

Just my 2 cents.

 

[mr. x]

bobzilla:

the diance francis book goes intosome of the details of how canada is an easy mark - and how we are known for this in many other countries... one scam was that people from central and south america were coming here for a vacation - they would come, apply for refugge status, and go on welfare for a few months, then leave.

one of the points is that the idea of the welfare state and open immigration cannot exist - as a country becomes a magnet for those who want to take advantage of the entitlements - but eventually the system will collapse under the weight of too many taking and not giving.

another point is the fact that, 100 years ago, many of the immigrants to canada ended up going back because they didn't succeed here - something like 1/3rd - and this was when immgrants mostly came from britain and so spoke the language and were of a similar culture!

i would like to correct something - my points, and of others who have taken the same side, has said NOT TO STOP immigration, but to REDUCE it to realistic levels (we take in 2-3 times per capita more immigrants than the US, Australia, etc.), and to eliminate all of the various shortcomings of our existing system.... and that our conventional wisdom of how beneficial immigration is is not supported by facts, but is more like a form of political correctness.

 

[Bobzilla]

Immigration

Mr. X:

I too have said the solution is not to stop immigration, see my above post. However, you indicated that in the 1800's, the 1/3 of immigrants who failed to make it here went back to their mother country. That certainly isn't the case now, when they can stay here and suckle at the welfare teat.

 

[mr. x]

bob:

thats the point that diance francis makes - that not only does our welfare system encourage people to come here, it keeps them from leaving should not they be successful in getting a good job, starting a business, etc. and this isn't just welfare, its our health care system too - we let in all sorts of parents/grandparents over 65, and they are expensive to keep healthy - we do not require the families to pay for private health insurance.

now, i think of her as being a right-wing writer, but her points are valid - unless we have a tight immigration policy, we will get ripped off - if we want an open door, we can't afford to keep our government paid social services - i choose keeping our services.

even the US is much more restricitvive about allowing refugees to work or collect welfare. here, immigrants are supposed to be supported by the sponsors, but it is not enforced, and in fact, we have people on welfare sponsoring other family members - and the government doesn't check... it downloads the costs on the cities and provinces.

anyway, i suggest reading her book - it will make you angry!

 

[gala]

territories, visas, and citizenship

My own $0.02:

-- Canada should open up the flood gates to temporary migrants (ie- work/study visas). These should be doled out to all comers without much red tape provided only that they show the following: a standing job offer or sufficient funds to cover their stay, and no criminal record.

-- Canada should be a lot stingier handing out landed status and citizenship. This is a GREAT privilege, and one which we should jealously award only to the very best.

-- We should check for immigration violations inside the country MUCH more aggressively than we do now, and we should adopt a "zero tolerance" approach to crimes committed by people on work visas: commit a small crime? get out and stay out.

-- Temporary workers should be forced to purchase insurance, the proceeds of which pay for health care and other basic services. These should be really basic: Get the person well enough to return to their home country, or to go back to work. No long-term care provision for temporary workers.

-- Eliminate the minimum wage in Canada, at least for temporary workers (which will effectively eliminate it for anybody anyway)

-- Spend aggressively on education and skills building for Canadian citizens,

Why all this?

Companies are going to use cheap international labour for their factories ANYWAY. Better they keep the factories here and import the workers, rather than export the factories and import the products.

That way we can keep the higher paid service and management jobs for Canadians, keep the taxes, and the profits from running the business.

The downside of this will be crime--temporary migrants may try and earn extra money on the side criminally. We will have to be really tough on that. We may have to give the police the right to terminate a visa for mere suspicion, something we would never tolerate WRT a citizen or landed immigrant.

I'm not sure Canadian's would stomach the measures that would be necessary to make it work. We may be thin skinned folks who would prefer it if the temporary workers were exploited for our benefit in their own country, rather than here.

The truth is the temporary workers would jump at the chance--they'd earn good money here that they'd send back home. Billions would flow to developing nations not as charity, but as hard earned wages flowing home. Skills would return with the workers as they returned home.

But, as I said, I'm not sure Canada could stomach it. We'd see a more representative world on our streets, with rich and poor living side by side. Perhaps Canada only wants to watch the real world on TV.

Note that in this scheme I expect Canadian *citizens* to do rather well: we would benefit from cheaper local labour, we'd find it easier to hire cleaning help, nannies, and people to do the jobs no Canadian wants. We'd have more opportunities for people with higher level skills managing factories and supervising large teams of workers. We'd maximize the value of our service economy through proximity to the lower level activities that benefit from it.

 

[Bobzilla]

immigration

Mr. X:

We seem to be in near total agreement. I too would like to see it be harder for people to enter the country, with follow-up once they're here so they're not sucking the system dry. As for Ms. Francis' book, it sounds like an interesting read, but as you can maybe tell, I deal with this crap every day of my working life, so I'm already angry about it! I could tell you stories that would straighten your pubic hair!

 

[gala]

Re: immigration

One problem with getting tough at the border is that it actually encourages people to go black once inside the country.

If it's relatively easy to get in and out of the country (legally or illegally) then most migrants will come AND go. They will earn money for awhile, then head home. They'll figure it's easy to come back if they want to come back.

If you get real tough on the border then once people are inside they won't risk leaving--even though they might want to go home, they'll stay in order to protect their investment (the high cost of getting in).

It's much better, I think, to have a relatively loose border controls so that migrants feel there's no harm in leaving. Then impose very strict controls inside the country to catch people working illegally--spot check all workplaces for visas, etc., something we hardly ever do these days. That'll make it more risky to be in the country--and if you come down hardest on the employer for this violation then illegals will find it difficult to get a job.

There should be a huge fine, maybe $20k, for hiring someone without the proper paperwork.

 

[mr. x]

gala:

i find your reasoning falls so short in so many areas, i do not know where to start! so i won't say anything for now - maybe when i have some spare time!