Manage Immigration As a Resource, Not an Enforcement Matter

Everyone agrees the immigration system is broken, and the current debate is about how best to repair it. For Congress, the question has come down to this: do we pursue an enforcement-only strategy focusing solely on keeping people out, or do we adopt a more comprehensive approach that includes new enforcement strategies but also improves our ability to let people into the country legally?

For at least the past 15 years we’ve been using the enforcement-only strategy, and it has been a complete failure. Since the early 1990s, the border-enforcement budget has more than quintupled to more than $4 billion a year. At the same time, the number of Border Patrol agents has nearly tripled from just under 4,000 to just over 11,000. What do we have to show for it? The pace of undocumented immigration has increased, apprehension rates are down, more people are dying every day at our Southern border, and human smuggling and document fraud have been transformed from relatively small operations into billion-dollar enterprises.

Our enforcement strategies have failed in part because we’ve become fixated on fortifying the Southern border. In the process, we’ve ignored other critical components of enforcement, like an effective employment verification system and more personnel, training and resources to deal with the tens of thousands of applications that are stuck in endless delays and backlogs. But even with significant improvements in our enforcement strategies and adjudication capabilities, staunching the flow of undocumented immigration will continue to be a Sisyphean effort, until we reform the legal channels for admitting people into the country.

The bottom line is, immigration isn’t just a law-enforcement issue. It’s a valuable resource for our economy and we must start treating it as such and manage it on an ongoing basis. The ability to use our immigration system to supplement and fill gaps in our labor force across the skill spectrum is one of the principal reasons the U.S. has been able to create the most diverse, dynamic and flexible workforce the world has ever seen. Unfortunately, distracted by our overriding enforcement mentality, what we haven't done for the last 15 years is engage in an honest debate about how to create an immigration system that will help us respond to the economic and labor market realities we face today.

Over the last two decades globalization and technological advancements have radically altered our economy. In response to this new environment, Congress has made dramatic changes to our policies on telecommunication, trade and banking, but so far, it hasn’t made a concerted effort to modernize our immigration policies. In fact, we seem to be moving in the opposite direction. While more and more countries invest billions of dollars to attract foreign students and highly skilled immigrants, we’re making it more difficult for foreign students to enroll in U.S. universities and for highly skilled immigrants to get visas. This trend raises serious questions about the United States’ ability to effectively compete in the increasingly global battle for talent and maintain its competitive advantage in research, science and technology.

At the other end of the skill spectrum, current policies fail to provide effective channels of legal immigration for less-skilled workers. Moreover, the backlogs in visas for family-based immigration are now so huge immigrants are forced to wait five to seven years to be legally reunited with a spouse or child. It’s the failure of policy on these two issues that’s the primary reason for the high levels of undocumented immigration today.

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