A "What if..." Scenario about Congress and Immigration

What if Congress decided to give a potential free immigration pass to a group of about 250,000 aliens with limited educations?

And then Congress guessed that most of the resulting migrants would settle in four specific American jurisdictions?

And then agreed to pay for some of the financial impacts of the new migrants, but only in those four jurisdictions?

How would the four jurisdictions handle and measure the impact of the newcomers, and what else would happen?

While this sounds like either a specialized, sick joke, or another questionable machination of the Senate's Gang of Eight, those events all came to pass — they really did — and the answers to those questions are all known, if not well known.

The four jurisdictions, by the way, are not the four states that border Mexico, though that would have been a good guess.

Some time ago, Congress worked out America's relationships with three lightly populated, multi-island, nations in the middle of the Pacific. All former Japanese colonies, all former United Nations mandates, and all former de facto U.S. colonies, these are the Federated States of Micronesia and the Republics of the Marshall Islands and of Palau.

None have any natural wealth, beyond their beaches, all were deeply subsidized while U.S. colonies, and some (e.g., Bikini in the Marshalls) were scarred by our post-WWII atomic testing programs.

Our government, with the assent of Congress, negotiated Compacts of Free Association with these three nations, continued some financial assistance, and insisted that none of these little nations allow their islands to be used for military purposes by any other country. As to migration, Congress figured that their populations were so small (though growing through high rates of fertility) that all residents could come to the United States on a permanent basis as nonimmigrants with working privileges, but with no path to citizenship.

To my knowledge, no one has made a connection between this "you can work here and stay here but you don't get to be-citizens" posture with regard to these islands and the pending immigration legislation.

So what happened in this case?

First, a large proportion of the island populations, nearly 24 percent of the eligibles, moved to the United States. or its island territories in a matter of a few years despite the fact that they knew that they never would become citizens. A recent Government Accountability Office document with one of those catchy GAO titles - "Compact of Free Association: Guidelines Needed to Support Reliable Estimates of Cost Impacts of Growing Migration" - lays out the numbers. It places the population of the three Freely Associated States at 179,000 in 2008, and the Freely Associated States (FAS) migrants to the United States at the same time at 56,000, providing a total of 235,000. So 23.8 percent of the last number had moved to U.S. flag areas. Interestingly, that means that more than three quarters stayed in the islands despite the attractions of the United States.

Second, Congress figured that most of the migrants would go to four jurisdictions and would help finance their impact in those places only. The list that follows shows where the largest portion of the 56,000 went, with the four favored jurisdictions in italics:

• Guam: 18,305
• Hawaii: 12,060
• California: 2,920
• Washington state: 2,800
• Oregon: 2,210
• CNMI: 2,100

and, at the very bottom of the list

• American Samoa: 15

American Samoa is both poverty-stricken and nowhere near any of the Freely Associated States and was presumably put on the list by the Congress in response to the arguments by its non-voting delegate in the House, Eni Faleomavaega. The formula for the distribution of the aid funds was based on FAS migrant populations in the four jurisdictions.

CNMI stands for the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, which lie just north of Guam, and is much, much closer to the FAS than Samoa, which is on the other side of the equator. CNMI, where racial arrangements are close to those of the Old South, with the Chamorros in the role of the Mississippi whites of two generations ago, has a small and diminishing population from the FAS as a result. It is also not as prosperous as Guam or Hawaii.

One gets a sense of the differing priorities of the governments of Hawaii and CNMI in their Compact Impact expenditures from this GAO table:

Only a small portion of those expenses — $30 million a year for all three jurisdictions — was met by Congress, the rest fell on local taxpayers or other federal programs meant for other uses.

In a pattern that might be repeated among Mainland states, in similar circumstances, the CNMI reported spending much more on law enforcement regarding the migrants from the FAS than on their health while Hawaii reported spending 31 times as much on their health as on law enforcement. Obviously priorities differ from place to place.

Part, but only part, of that dramatic difference may relate to reporting practices in the two jurisdictions; as GAO noted in the title of its report, the estimating techniques in the islands left something to be desired.

The bottom line for all this is that migrations of low-education populations, even from one tropical location to another, are expensive and their impacts are hard to quantify. We might bear that in mind as the nation contemplates "immigration reform" on a much, much broader basis.

The billion-dollar figure (perhaps inflated a bit by the island governments) shown above, is for about 32,500 people over a six-year period.

In the first 10 years or so under the Senate-passed S.744, should it become law, the nation would be absorbing (legalizing and admitting on temporary or permanent bases) about 1,000 times as many people.

Think about the resulting expenses!