Different Amnesty Designs Would Impact Profile of Beneficiaries

By David North on September 8, 2014

Different designs of amnesty programs would produce different sets of characteristics for the newly amnestied.

While all massive amnesties should be avoided, particularly those done by executive decree with no congressional input, it is useful to remind observers that establishing different sets of qualifications for those who receive some form of legalization would inevitably lead to granting those benefits to different subgroups of the illegal population.

In fact, it is more complicated than that because different program designs will not only consciously qualify different groups of people, they will also make it easier or harder for certain groups to effectively cheat the system.

Let's use the rules of the current (and deplorable) Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program to illustrate these points.

DACA is for people who can claim that they came to the United States illegally prior to June 15, 2007, and had not passed their 31st birthday by June 12, 2012. One has to be over 15 at the time of application.

Thus DACA — quite openly — aimed at giving legal status to those, at least initially, in the 15-31 age group. That was well known and played into the hands of the propaganda of the mas-migration types and their discussion of "dreamers".

But DACA also carried a subtext — the program could relatively easily be cheated by people from Mexico and Central America, but it would be much harder for someone from India or Iceland, for example, to do so.

Bear in mind two different patterns of migration, legal and illegal. There is something of a tradition of teenagers from the Hispanic nations sneaking across the southern border; they would be EWIs, those entering without inspection. By definition there is no record of successful EWI attempts.

Meanwhile there is little evidence of unaccompanied minors from India (or Iceland) coming to the United States in the same age groups. And had they done so, they would be highly likely to arrive by plane, bearing a visitor's visa telling exactly when they arrived.

So the Mexican male who claimed to have crossed the Rio Grande in the middle of the night before his 16th birthday may be lying, but it is hard to disprove (and USCIS has shown no signs of much care in these decisions); but supposing a lad from Iceland were to say that he had used a kayak to cross the St. Lawrence into one of the Indian reservations in Upstate New York, before his 16th birthday, with his story being equally false as that of the Mexican kid. He would face a lot of official skepticism, on the grounds that this is not a well-known path for illegals. Further, he would need, at the very least, some proof of the air travel and the visa, that got him from Reykjavik to Montreal, all in the right time period.

The DACA design, then, was deliberately and openly created to aid the young, and its features (either purposefully or accidentally) also make it much easier for North American Hispanics to both qualify for, and to cheat the system, than anyone else. As a result of these factors, the percentage of DACA requests filed by people from Mexico were 76 percent, with another 10 percent coming from three Central American nations, for a total of 86 percent according to USCIS statistics.

All of this came to mind when I read of a proposal to manipulate the governmental program of voluntary departures to create an amnesty for presumably hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens. Voluntary departure (it is not all that voluntary) is a status created by the government for an illegal alien that forces him or her to leave the country within a set time frame, and at his or her own expense.

An alien might want that status because it avoids the penalties that go with deportation; the government finds the status useful because it causes the departure of the illegal alien with less cost and with a more streamlined procedure than that of deportation. It is used frequently, but not for those with really serious criminal records.

Now, what would be the characteristics of a newly amnestied population if it consisted only of those who had been through voluntary departure? How would it differ from a cross-section of the illegal alien population generally?

From what we know of the voluntary departure process and the operations of our current immigration policy, that population would be different from the entire illegal alien population in these ways:

  1. It would have had more contact with law enforcement;

  2. It would have a larger percentage of males (as they are more likely to get stopped than women);

  3. There would be a larger than usual percentage of Hispanics, because of the concentration of agents on the border, and the lack of interior enforcement; and

  4. It would have a lower level of education and income than illegals generally, for the same reasons.

These tendencies would, of course, not be mentioned should such a policy be put in place; the White House would talk about all aliens who had experienced voluntary departure, without spelling out the fact that some illegals are much more likely to experience it than others.

Further, were an amnesty to be designed around the voluntary departure process, it would have the extra added feature of granting legal status to some people who are not even in the country at the time that they become eligible for the benefit.

Incidentally, the only group that could cheat this particular system would have to be those who had been through the voluntary departure process, but did not qualify for the to-be-created amnesty, and thus they would have the same characteristics as noted at A through D above.

One of the presumed attractions of a voluntary departure-based amnesty, at least to the White House, would be that there is an existing government program that they think can be manipulated to create legal status for those in one kind of illegal status, thus a sort of specialized "prosecutorial discretion".

It should be borne in mind, however, that designing an executive amnesty involving such legal considerations inevitably involves granting legal status to some illegals and not to others and, in this case, to a group with less social capital than illegals generally.

All of this supports our position that if there is to be an amnesty of any kind (not that one is needed at all), it should be worked out narrowly and carefully, and with the Congress.