Immigration & the War on Drugs

Erik Kain

Erik writes about video games at Forbes and politics at Mother Jones. He's the contributor of The League though he hasn't written much here lately. He can be found occasionally composing 140 character cultural analysis on Twitter.

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19 Responses

  1. Will says:

    I also think there are serious concerns about assimilating newly-arrived immigrants. I don’t find the economic arguments against immigration terribly persuasive, but I do worry that an overwhelming number of new arrivals won’t be able to adapt to American cultural, political, and social norms.Report

    • Trumwill in reply to Will says:

      @Will, I find myself far more concerned with the economic ramifications of immigration than the cultural. I think our good track record on assimilation remains will continue. American society is too seductive (and flexible) to live here for too long without immigrants “losing their children” to American culture, for better and worse. Economically, though, in these hard times I find myself increasingly concerned with unemployment numbers and the prospect of low-skill wages being depressed further by a glut in labor supply.Report

  2. Sam M says:

    Thanks for the lengthy response. And for the record, I agree with you 100 percent about the Drug War. Although I think that certainty on my own side colors that debate as well. I often hear my libertarian friends talk about this utopia where drugs are legalized but people don’t use any more of them. I disagree. Lower the price of something (in terms of risk and/or price) and people will buy more of t. I think legalization is the right thing to do anyway.

    As for immigration, I see some of those parallels, but not as many as you do. I don’t think checking citizenship status of workers would require the same level of invasiveness that the Drug War requires. I don’t regularly file paperwork with the federal government telling me what I do on Saturday nights. But companies do file paperwork about whom they hire, for taxes and other purposes.

    And finally, for what it’s worth, I think that workplace enforcement would be a FAR more effective means of immigration policing than a border fence.Report

    • gregiank in reply to Sam M says:

      @Sam M, I think you are correct it noting that legalizing drugs will not create some sort of non-drug using utopia. My ex lives in the Netherlands. As i’m sure we all know they have quite different drug laws. But they also have crime problems in some places due to people from other countries coming to buy drugs and significant addiction problems. I support legalization of most drugs but that would create its own problems.Report

      • Trumwill in reply to gregiank says:

        @gregiank, Montana has medicinal marijuana and it’s causing quite a few problems out that way. Of course, it’s one of those rorschach things where people see in it what they want to see. Pro-legalizers blame the fact that it’s not completely legal while prohibitionists blame the fact that it’s even kinda-sorta legal.

        One of the reasons that I am sympathetic towards state power is that I would love to see different states try different things and see what causes the most and the least in the way of problems.Report

        • gregiank in reply to Trumwill says:

          @Trumwill, here in Alaska pot has a quasi legal status where you are allowed to posses some but can’t buy it. Most people really don’t what the law is. In fact i work in court house and have asked some judicial officials and they aren’t always clear.

          I think the state by state police would be a raging fustercluck. There would be endless conflicts and problems over people transporting over state lines. There would be just as many raids to see if people in North West statesilvania had drugs they got in South East statesilvania. North Dakota would blame those damn South Dakotans for all their problems.Report

  3. Trumwill says:

    Right now the real obstacle to meaningful immigration reform is political – it’s a fight that will take place in congress and in the realm of public opinion, not in the Arizona desert.

    I really agree with this. We (by which I mean basically pro-immigration people) have really done a lousy job on the public opinion front. I think we’ve been far too dismissive of border hawk concerns and far too likely to question the motives of the opposition rather than recognize that there is a mixture of motivations and some of them quite legitimate.

    Regarding the War on Drugs, I favor the legalization of pot and experimenting with the decriminalization of other substances with pilot programs to see what happens. I think that Sam is right that demand is an elastic thing and I’m not sure how much you can base policy around the demand that exists with such limited supply. The drugs that are most in demand are the legal ones and I think that the availability (you can buy them without worrying about getting arrested) and contribute significantly to that.

    I think that calling off the drug war (which I mostly support doing – even if we keep a lot of it illegal I have serious problems with how we go about combating it) would be a benefit, largely, but it wouldn’t necessarily come without costs. People who know more about it than I do can chime in… but wouldn’t taking away such a substantial portion of their economic output put an economic strain on the country and make the relative prosperity of the US more attractive? I understand the argument that without the drug cartels Mexico would have a better chance of rebuilding their economy, but that doesn’t strike me as a given that they will. While the decreased violence would be a boon to Mexican way-of-life, I’m not sure how many people are risking their lives to come here as second-class cohabitants and work for safety reasons and non-material standard-of-life.Report

  4. Simon K says:

    Regarding Sam M’s second comment – nearly half of the guesstimated number of people present illegally in the US entered on a visa or visa waiver and simply never left. So 10 million over a 15 year period is probably a huge overestimate of the number of people who try to walk across the desert. Many of those illegally present who don’t sneak across the border are not Latino, and not hanging around outside Home Depot looking for day labour jobs. They are however far more likely to be “stealing American jobs”, since they’re likely to be doing jobs Americans actually want to do.Report

    • Sam M in reply to Simon K says:

      @Simon K,

      Simon K,

      Fair enough. I tried to find numbers about how many are crossing the border, but that’s even harder to find than estimates of the number of illegals living here. The best estimate I could find was something like 850,000 a year entering illegally since 2000. But that seems low, no? If there are 11 million illegals here, it would require more crossing than that to maintain such a population.

      If you have a better number, fine by me. But it would have to be pretty low to make “crossing the border” profoundly more dangerous than “living in New Orleans.”Report

      • Sam M in reply to Sam M says:

        @Sam M,

        This article says that in 2004, right around the time the linked study started counting bodies, the Border Patrol was detaining about 113,000 people PER MONTH.

        http://legacy.signonsandiego.com/news/state/20040323-1500-cnsillegal.html

        I have seen estimates that maybe one-in-four people who try to cross get caught. So maybe 500,000 per month? Let’s be conservative and reduce that by 3/4, and say 125 illegal crossers per month. Or even just 100,000. That means 1.2 million per year, about twicw what I used to make my estimate.

        This makes sense. There are a lot of people who cross illegally to do seasonal work, then cross back over. So a lot of people are jumping whatever fence exists. So many, I would still argue, that a death toll of 5,000, while tragic, is hardly out of line with what you would expect. And you would certainly expect more if enforcement measures were in fact draconian.Report

      • Simon K in reply to Sam M says:

        @Sam M, Agreed it probably isn’t all that dangerous relatively speaking. The point I was driving at really is that I think the border is generally a distraction from sensible immigration reform. Actual numbers of course are impossible to come by, but I don’t think they really have much impact on anyone’s thinking either. Given that crossing the border in general is quite expensive and risky (albeit not that risky) it ought to be pretty easy to deter people from doing it if we firstly made it easier to hire Americans to do the kinds of jobs illegal immigrants tend to do, and secondly made it easier for people to move to the US to take the jobs Americans won’t do.Report

    • Sam M in reply to Simon K says:

      @Simon K,

      Go to:

      http://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/141/include/sectorsoutherntab.html

      This seems like pretty solid evidence that I substantially UNDERESTIMATED the number of people crossing the Southern Border.Report

  5. M. Farmer says:

    So, in other words, border enforcement per se is not the cause of increased deaths, but rather fundamental problems related to statism, like drug laws and the war on drugs and failure to enforce laws which make it illegal to employ illegal immigrants. We will still have a problem have the border, even if empoyers are raided and drugs are legalized, because Mexico is imploding — so unless there is strong border control, immigrants will still take the risk of finding something better here, especially if they can form an influential voting block for the Democrats. Mabe not, but it seems so.Report

  6. Kyle says:

    There are a few comments that touch on this but I think the holistic view of problem solving is more helpful. One of the things overlooked by the let ’em all in, there are jobs aplenty advocates is the way that affects the economies of the Americas.

    It can’t be healthy for economic development and growth in Latin America to continually send millions to the US to work and to become increasingly reliant on money shipped home from those who do. Immigration is good for us but not at the expense of independent, stronger economies south of us, economies that would undoubtedly improve if they didn’t have to shoulder the burden of fighting our war on drugs.Report