[Mb-civic] King Canute at the Border By JOHN TIERNEY

[Michael Butler]

The New York Times
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April 1, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
King Canute at the Border
By JOHN TIERNEY

George Bush is the King Canute of the immigration debate, and I mean that in
a nice way.

Canute has an image problem today because so many people think of him as
that batty old English king who thought he could command the tide to recede.
But that's the wrong spin on his legend.

In the original tale, he was a sensible ruler who was tired of hearing
flattery from his courtiers about his great powers. When they told him that
even the tides would obey his command, he went down to the sea to teach them
a lesson in limits.

Today's courtiers are the Republicans in Congress and the others demanding
that America "secure the border." They're furious at Bush for suggesting
that a crackdown at the border will not stop the tide of illegal immigrants.

"When you make something illegal that people want, there's a way around it,"
he said, pointing out an inconvenient reality that would remain even if a
2,000-mile fence were built on the southern border. People would keep going
under it, through it or around it to other borders.

The Border Patrol has tried building fences and adding thousands of agents,
and in some places it has made smuggling harder. Yet the overall flow of
immigrants hasn't slowed. No matter how hard they work, the agents can't
outlaw basic economics.

In San Diego, for instance, agents took pride that their concentrated
efforts had caused local smugglers to raise their fee to $1,500. But that's
still a small price next to what immigrants stand to gain. Chinese
immigrants are already paying $20,000 apiece to be smuggled into America.

It's the same kind of economic quandary that has stymied the war on drugs.
For more than a quarter-century, federal and local authorities have tried to
solve America's drug problem by making smuggling and dealing prohibitively
expensive.

They've stepped up enforcement at the borders, promising that more agents
and new technology would make a difference. They've taken the fight to
countries supplying drugs. They filled prisons with dealers and addicts. But
even though they raised the cost of smuggling and dealing, the increase was
never enough to make a difference.

"Seizing drugs has not had any perceptible impact on the availability of
drugs," says Peter Reuter, an economist at the University of Maryland who's
an expert on drugs and other black markets. "Even though enforcement has
gotten tougher by any measure, the prices of drugs have been falling
steadily."

I'm not suggesting that stopping drugs is the same as stopping the flow of
illegal immigrants. In many ways the drug war is easier because it enjoys
more popular support. Most people would like to see less drug use. No one
wants a drug market on the corner, and people will urge the police to round
up dealers and addicts there.

They're not about to turn in the illegal immigrants working in their stores,
their neighborhoods and their homes. They know how hard immigrants work and
how much they contribute. They may tell pollsters there's too much
immigration, but they like the immigrants they know.

Americans are understandably angry to see immigrants' breaking the law, but
they're not going to be assuaged when a crackdown simply creates more
illegality. The only practical way to reduce lawbreaking is to change the
law so more immigrants can enter legally and the ones here can stop hiding,
the approach favored by Bush and Senators John McCain and Edward Kennedy.

Some skeptics doubt that illegal immigrants want to come forward and start
paying taxes. But most immigrants claim to be willing, at least according to
a new survey of more than 200 undocumented workers in Los Angeles, Chicago
and Miami conducted for the Manhattan Institute and the National Immigration
Forum.

About 4 in 10 of them said they're already getting taxes deducted from their
paychecks, and 70 percent said they'd be willing to pay back taxes to get
legal status. More than 90 percent said they'd comply with other
requirements, like paying a fine of $1,000, getting fingerprinted and
submitting to a criminal background check.

Railing at them for breaking the law is not going to make them go home or
stop others from following them here. Immigrants will cross the border one
way or another. The more of them we let in legally, the better off everyone
will be. Whether you welcome more immigrants, as I do, or whether you'd
rather see fewer, there's no point in commanding the tide to ebb.

Maureen Dowd is on a book leave.

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