In addition to the excitement of the election season, I'm also very keen to observe how Arizona's plan to punish the employers of illegal immigrants works out for the state. One of the great benefits of our federal system of government is that one state can try out a concept before the rest of us buy into it.
As you know, I'm a strong advocate for controlled and reduced immigration. A lot of people claim that it's impossible to stem the tide of illegal immigrants to our country without mass deportations, and that even if we could reduce the flow it would destroy our economy. Well, Arizona is poised to find out.
The law, passed days after a federal immigration overhaul died in the U.S. Senate in June, punishes first-time violators who knowingly hire undocumented workers with a 10-day suspension of their business licenses.A second offense means they lose it.
The measure also requires employers to use an online federal database, dubbed "E-Verify," to check the employment eligibility of new hires in the border state, which is home to an estimated 500,000 illegal immigrants.
Many employers like Bailey say they are pruning their workforce of illegal immigrants to avoid prosecution, or have outsourced some operations to neighboring states and even over the border to Mexico.
Other businesses have put a freeze on expansion in Arizona out of fear they will face prosecution should they inadvertently hire an illegal immigrant.
That's the main wrinkle in Arizona's plan: going off illegal immigrant labor cold-turkey might reduce the state's competitiveness in relation to other American states. National enforcement of immigration laws would ensure that all states are playing on an even field. This factor might distort the results of this experiment, but there's still a lot we will learn despite this headwind.
For example, not mentioned in the article is the enormous amount of money that Arizonans will save by not having to educate and care for illegal immigrants and their children. The theory is that though illegal immigrants do provide some benefits for an economy, they're a net drain and Arizona should reap benefits from their disappearance. If the theory is wrong, we should be able to see it in the Arizona data in a few years.
In either event, the most significant result of this experiment can already be seen: illegal immigrants are already leaving the state. If it turns out that Arizona needs their cheap labor to survive, then the solution isn't to re-enable illegal immigration, but to set up a tightly controlled framework for legal immigration and temporary workers. We might be willing to trust the federal government with this responsibility once it demonstrates to us that it's serious about ejecting the people who are already here illegally and opening our doors to aspiring immigrants in a fair and controllable manner.
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