"Reform INS": A Familiar Refrain

In the last two decades some 15 million immigrants have entered our country to live, with a current backlog of some two million awaiting naturalization. Most resident aliens are not criminals, and most future immigrants will not turn out to be criminals either. But many are, and it is the responsibility of the federal government, working with states and localities, to deport those who are criminals as quickly as possible, barring unusual circumstances.

Calls by members of Congress and other critics to "reform INS" are legion. But there are realistic limits as to how much can be accomplished so long as basic immigration policies remain intact. The INS is a bureaucracy bound by statutory mandate. Whatever the agency can do to secure more funding and legal authority, it can do no more than what Congress allows it to do. Reorganizing INS to perform its functions more efficiently will have only limited effect, in lieu of action on the part of Congress to reduce immigration. A number of critics of INS have proposed splitting the agency into separate admissions and enforcement components. Rep. Rogers of Kentucky remarked on the need for this following the release of INS crime data by his subcommittee in March 2000. While campaigning last June President George W. Bush recommended similar action, calling for an associate attorney general to head each agency.⁷⁰  But beyond symbolism, it is uncertain how effective this reorganization would be. It would leave the agency with a limited capacity to investigate, arrest, and remove criminals. A split INS bureaucracy may result in inconsistencies in data collection and other operations. Worse, the agency would have an implicitly schizophrenic mission, with the service portion of the agency placing out a welcome mat at the same time the enforcement section wields a heavy stick.

Controlling the "Uncontrollable"

The greatest challenge facing INS is what it can’t control — namely, the currently allowable levels of immigration, and by extension, the illegal entry and visa overstays these levels invite. The current annual legal immigration level of close to one million, not to mention hundreds of thousands of "temporary" admissions, has placed a strain on the agency’s capacity to fulfill its basic mission. Statutory retroactive amnesty has made things worse. The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act granted general amnesty (legal resident status) to illegal immigrants who could prove they were in the U.S. on or before December 31, 1981, or to certain farm workers; more than 2.8 million aliens subsequently received amnesty over the following several years.⁷¹  President Clinton, after threatening to veto the fiscal 2001 budget deal unless more than a million extra immigrants were allowed a chance of becoming legal residents, agreed last fall to an immigration package that will help roughly half that many.⁷²  But even a half-measure for blanket amnesty would seem to invite crime. Unconditional amnesty rests on the premise that immigrants, skilled or not, are an asset to the nation. The new provision likely will further undermine INS’s authority to enforce the law, and require ever-rising levels of necessary federal intrusion into state and local law enforcement functions.

The main challenge is to discourage entry and residence by criminals without treating all immigrants as though they were criminals. Beyond more thorough law enforcement, Congress needs to change the main basis of entry from family reunification to education and job skills and reduce annual legal immigration ceilings. Canada in 1994 did both; there is no reason why the U.S. cannot do likewise.

Employment Skills as a Brake on Crime

Admitting mainly skilled immigrants would to some extent act as a de facto brake on immigrant crime. There is no mystery in this. The very process of acquiring and building skills appeals to a person willing to forgo the short-term gratification crime provides; someone who has taken years to become educated and employable at a high level of responsibility is typically not the sort of person who will see crime as a short-cut to riches. By contrast, a career criminal, often having a short time horizon, will view education and training as a diversion from "real" moneymaking ventures. From his standpoint, it makes little sense to spend months, let alone years, gaining skills to acquire the good things in life that can be acquired through force or stealth.⁷³ To require a college degree and requisite skills likely would produce the unintended benefit of locking out many career criminals.

The criminal element can be seen as the paramount example of what economist and cultural historian Thomas Sowell terms "negative human capital." Human capital is a process by which people, whether acting as individuals, communities, nations, or civilizations, transmit a complex set of cultural values from one generation to the next. It is less economic assets than knowledge that creates wealth; two ethnic groups in a similar geographic setting can have vastly differing outcomes based on the accumulation of knowledge and the values that enable knowledge to flourish.⁷⁴  People who commit crimes, or raise children who do the same, are in a sense robbing a nation of its capital just as surely as those who engage in productive, legal enterprise are building capital. Harvard labor economist George Borjas has used this idea of human capital to advocate a shift in immigration policy that favors newcomers who have tangible employment skills.⁷⁵  Though ethnic groups do differ in the types of skills they lend to a particular culture, a skills-based immigration policy need not invoke ethnic exclusion. It rests on the premise that admitting people with economic skills would serve this nation better in the long run than admitting people without economic skills.

But let us understand that making employment skills the main basis for immigration is not sufficient to deter crime. Many immigrants already come here literate, gainfully employed — and knee-deep in crime. "Many of today’s foremost Russian mobsters have Ph.D.s in mathematics, engineering, or physics, helping them to acquire an expertise in advanced encryption and computer technology," writes Robert Friedman.⁷⁶ Some mobsters bluntly admit that their purpose in coming here is to get rich by any means, legal or not.⁷⁷  Written testimony before Congress in 1987 on the impact of the Mariel boatlift immigrants on South Florida described these people this way: "They generally possess education and skill levels above the average for those remaining in Cuba and about the same as those who arrived in the 1970s."⁷⁸  To be sure, not all or even most of the refugees were criminals, but the boatlift contained an alarming number of people who were. Butcher and Piehl found that the most recent foreign-born, though doing less well in the labor market, committed fewer crimes relative to earlier immigrants compared to the native-born.⁷⁹

Restrict Immigration, Legal and Illegal

Congress must restrict the number of immigrants who may enter this nation legally in a given year to make major headway in crime control. Such action most likely would reduce immigrant crime in proportional as well as absolute numbers. In other words, a smaller percentage of immigrants at any given time would be involved in crime. This is because high levels of legal immigration act as a spur for high levels of illegal immigration⁸⁰ — and it is members of the latter category, by definition already lawbreakers, who have the least to lose by committing felonies.

If lowering legal levels also triggers a drop in illegal entries, an overworked INS may be better able to enforce immigration laws, especially as it concerns the growing problem of illegal incursions from across the Mexican border. Border Patrol officials have cracked down on such entries in the mid-1990s, successfully, in the key urban entry points of San Diego and El Paso.⁸¹  But the effect of restricting entry in key selected locations has produced a "balloon effect," in which a large portion of illegal entries occur elsewhere in sparsely populated areas. "Cut down the flow of illegals in El Paso or San Diego," observes anthropologist Glynn Custred, "and it moves to places like Douglas [Ariz.] and from there to ranch lands and even deeper into the desert beyond."⁸²  Indeed, as Custred noted, in the first six months of 2000 U.S. Border Patrol agents apprehended 176,655 illegal aliens in the 21-mile Douglas section of the border alone. Much of the incentive to enter is encouraged by smugglers now charging $1,500 a head. To combat the problem the Border Patrol is building up to 1,300 miles of road and installing fences, surveillance cameras, and thousands of stadium-style lights along the border in order to combat drug traffickers, thieves, and undocumented aliens from entering.⁸³

While such actions require support, there is no substitute in the long run for action on the one thing that can drive down illegal immigration: Less legal immigration. This means not only lowering annual ceilings, but resisting calls for an expansion of general amnesty for the foreign-born, the latter of which induces more illegal immigration. Until such action is taken, potential illegal entrants (including visa overstays) will view expanded amnesty as a case of "when" rather than "if."

A Clear Message

That most immigrants live within the law is neither disputable nor enlightening. Most native-born Americans aren’t criminals either. But though we cannot deport or keep out citizens, we can apply the principle of exclusion to immigrants. It is a matter of public safety that immigrants with a history of felony arrests and convictions in their native countries are kept out of the U.S., and those who commit crimes here are removed and kept outside our borders. It is a triumph of hope over experience to imagine that a career criminal will exhibit a capacity for self-reform if coaxed to try harder. The criminal does not view human relations through the same prism that non-criminals do. The gangster who runs credit-card and cigarette tax scams, the mob enforcer, the wife beater who invokes "tradition" and uses his spouse’s immigrant status to keep her in line — for them, crime is a vehicle to exalt an inflated sense of infallibility. They are predators, and most people instinctively avoid challenging them because they do not want to be prey. Predators do not change without intensive therapy, and even then the odds are against it.⁸⁴  The United States can ill afford to serve as the world’s crime control and rehabilitation center. It is a message we ought to be sending other nations, as we keep doors open to the law-abiding only.

Back to Table of Contents

End Notes

⁷⁰ Terry M. Neal, "Bush Proposes Splitting Duties of INS," Washington Post, June 27, 2000. Significantly, Bush unveiled his proposal in a speech before the national convention of the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC, in Washington. He made clear his intent to step up federal outreach efforts to Hispanics. The speech focused less on the INS’s basic function of enforcing our borders than on finding ways to provide a more user-friendly way of welcoming new arrivals.

⁷¹ The total figure as of the summer of 2000 was 2,829,655. But this figure does not include immigrants who have benefitted from other forms of Congressionally-granted amnesties. Taking these into account, the grand total of amnesties was 4,055,805. See "The Amnesty Tote Board," FAIR Immigration Report, July/August 2000, p. 5.

⁷²In the original administration proposal, immigrants from El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, and Honduras would enjoy the same amnesty provisions as those now enjoyed by nationals from Nicaragua and Cuba.

⁷³ See Stanton Samenow, Inside the Criminal Mind, New York: Times Books, 1984, pp. 67-93; William Tucker, Vigilante: The Backlash Against Crime in America, Briarcliff Manor, N.Y.: Stein and Day, 1985, pp. 173-96.

⁷⁴ Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures: An International History, New York: Basic Books, 1998, pp. 334-41.

⁷⁵ George J. Borjas, Heaven’s Door: Immigration Policy and the American Economy, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999.

⁷⁶ Friedman, Red Mafiya, p. xviii. The author on the same page quotes a senior Treasury Department official: "Hell, it took them about a week to figure out how to counterfeit the $100 Super Note," unveiled in 1997 as "tamper-proof."

⁷⁷A police detective in Brighton Beach (Brooklyn) puts it this way: "The Russian gangsters have told me that they’ve come here to suck our country dry." See Friedman, ibid., p. 286.

⁷⁸Written testimony by Janet Reno, Florida State Attorney General, in Illegal Alien Felons: A Federal Responsibility, p. 61.

⁷⁹ Butcher and Piehl, "Recent Immigrants."

⁸⁰See Mark Krikorian, "Legal and Illegal Immigration," The New York Post, February 26, 1997.

⁸¹ See Glynn Custred, "Alien Crossings," The American Spectator, October 2000, pp. 38-43, especially pp. 39-40.

⁸²Ibid., p. 40.

⁸³ Dane Schiller, "Patrol Pushes Border Defense," San Antonio Express-News, October 6, 2000.

⁸⁴ Samenow, Inside the Criminal Mind, pp. 95-137.