[cunninglinguist]

The problem that this article doesn't point out and nobody wants to talk about: California is burdened with the largest reservoir of undocumented/illegal workers in the country. Until these people are brought into the system, until we see some true immigration reform (either by naturalizing every worker or, conversely, by getting serious about border policy) the state is in an untenable position. Things will get worse before they get better.

California and US immigration policy are a mammoth case of "walk on left side, okay; walk on right side, okay; walk in middle - squish! just like grape" which you Karate Kid fans might remember...

[michaelkeenan]

How do illegal workers contribute to the problem? I understand that they don't pay income tax, but at their typically low incomes, I'd expect that they wouldn't be paying much tax anyway, and would more likely qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit (i.e. negative income tax) if they were legal.

I'm reminded of the difference between the view of economists on the economic non-problem of immigrants as described by Bryan Caplan: "Economists are vastly more optimistic about its economic effects than the general public. The Survey of Americans and Economists on the Economy asks respondents to say whether “too many immigrants” is a major, minor, or non-reason why the economy is not doing better than it is. 47% of non-economists think it is a major reason; 80% of economists think it is not a reason at all."

http://www.cato-unbound.org/2006/11/06/bryan-caplan/the-myth...

[TheElder]

One idea: Illegal immigrants contribute to the problem by creating social conditions that are unfavorable for optimal living conditions, causing the people with money (big taxpayers), to move, leaving behind cities with an unskilled workforce and a high reproduction rate. Anybody capable of moving away from areas and cities with huge illegal immigration populations will move. Once they are gone and the businesses move with them, what you have left is an area that consumes taxes at a high rate and contributes very little back.

Is it racism that causes people to move? It could be, but there are valid reasons to flee such areas. There are huge gang problems and schools start to under perform. Hispanic students are some of the worst performing students in the country, often not even finishing high school. Now you have unskilled people competing for unskilled jobs, which few exist anymore.

[jacquesm]

Without those illegal immigrants / undocumented workers the economy would collapse completely.

[kingkongrevenge]

What about deporting all the illegals? That would be far the most fiscally effective solution.

[cunninglinguist]

Is it that simple? I can't tell if your comment is tongue in cheek. But if you consider the hundreds of billions of dollars it would take to locate, process, and deport every illegal, if you consider increased labor costs for local businesses many of whom would go under without a plentiful supply of cheap labor, and if you consider that America has never really been about "deporting people" (quite the opposite) it seems like simply deporting every illegal is a horrible solution.

Equally horrible is to have to provide ever-increasing social and welfare benefits to millions upon millions of undocumented, non-tax-paying workers who are now also unemployed. There is no quick fix here. But if you were to naturalize those workers, give them SSNs and DLs, encourage them to partake of the "American dream" or what's left of it...maybe in ten or twenty years you'd find things had started to improve.

I don't really know. If this were a game of chess, I'd simply resign.

[kingkongrevenge]

It is totally feasible. Ike did it in the 50s, right before he fired the whole border patrol and immigration control apparatus and reformed it.

It would be very cheap right now because there is a lot of idle shipping. You load the illegals on boats and drop them off at a home port. In the case of Mexico you take them to the far south, not just over the border.

This can be done and it would have massive popular support.

Naturalization is a horrible idea. We need to get the illegals out and seal the borders. America needs zero immigrants with less than a high school diploma, especially right now. Nobody making less than $90K should be let in this country to work, period.

[jhancock]

> "You load the illegals on boats and drop them off at a home port"

And the receiving country is just supposed to take our word for it? "Hell, he sure looks Guatemalan!!!"...."Dear China, We are sending you 50,000 'orientals' on the next 3 OOCL container ships, they have no passports but they sure as hell don't speak American." Yeah, this will go over well with all our trading partners.

> "In the case of Mexico you take them to the far south, not just over the border."

I'm pretty sure Mexico won't go for this.

> "get the illegals out and seal the borders"

Have nanotech magic-growth fences been invented and I didn't notice? Precisely how do you plan to do this? Oh I know, hire cheap Mexican labor? Or maybe bring over some Chinese to build the fences like we used them to build our railroads?

> "Nobody making less than $90K should be let in this country to work"

Aren't immigrants making over $90k taking $90k jobs away from people already here? Or do you mean we figure out what our real skill shortage is and manage it much better than we ever have been able to?

[catzaa]

> Have nanotech magic-growth fences been invented and I didn't notice? Precisely how do you plan to do this? Oh I know, hire cheap Mexican labor? Or maybe bring over some Chinese to build the fences like we used them to build our railroads?

I do not have a problem with the rest of your post - but this statement isn't correct. A lot of countries have in the past successfully secured their borders. Even in lower technology times this was successfully done.

[kingkongrevenge]

What would Mexico or China do about it? Nothing. Be realistic. The US still comes from a position of strength (for now).

> Have nanotech magic-growth fences been invented and I didn't notice?

The border was fairly tight for most of US history. Don't pretend this is a technology problem. This is a corruption and lack of will problem. It could be solved in short order given the will. As I alluded to, Ike responded to a growing problem and effectively dealt with it in the space of about three months. It remained solved pretty much until the early 70s.

[jhancock]

I would like to see meaningful data on how both "The border was fairly tight for most of US history" and how "Ike" cleaned things up so efficiently.

You may be able to solve your fence problem by having extremely strict laws punishing U.S. citizens that engage in employing illegals. I doubt any other approach would work.

I also don't know what the economic impact of losing the gray/black market labor would be and how long it would take to recover from it the changes.

[ahlatimer]

You obviously sound like someone who is doing a large amount of armchair posturing. How do I know? looks out window Oh, hey! Mexico. I can even see the border wall from where I sit. I've met a number of illegal immigrants, I even went to school (in America!) with a few of them. The fact of the matter is that you have miles and miles of border that is damn near impossible to secure. Short of militarizing the border with some sort of armed computer-operated sentry, you aren't going to keep people from getting in. Building a wall simply forces people to either go over or under it.

If you can't get keep people from getting in, how do you spot them once they're here? I work with a Mexican national (he's legal, though). Without knowing better, I wouldn't be able to tell that he's an immigrant while some other person is not, and I've lived my entire life, save for one year, on the border. You could, of course, try to document the legal people (with, I don't know, some sort of passport) and force every person that looks like they could be illegal to present identification. I know I for one would love to live in a place that unfairly persecutes anyone that isn't white! </sarcasm>

Get real, the only way to ease the problem with illegal immigration (and with borders the size of the US, you'll never get rid of it) is to make the process of becoming legal a sane experience. It takes something like 18 years just to have the chance to get into this country if they're from a Latin country. It's no wonder people would rather hop a fence.

[kingkongrevenge]

Funny how there wasn't an illegal alien problem up through the 60s. Wonder how they managed that if it's impossible.

People's attempt make this about a physical wall is absurd. It's not about a wall. It's about many measures. Also, it is rather easy to prove that someone is an illegal alien. Hey, Japan makes foreigners carry an alien registration card and if you can't produce one you might find yourself on a flight out of the country. Not that I recommend this approach, but it's quite ridiculous to assert it's impossible.

[philwelch]

The difference is, Japan is openly and honestly racist about the process. You can tell whether or not someone looks Japanese really easily, and there's almost no such thing as a naturalized Japanese. If you see a white dude in Japan, you can be damn sure he's not Japanese.

But a Japanese-looking dude in the United States might be an American citizen, or he might not be. The same is true of Mexican-looking people, black people, and even white people. A white dude with a funny English accent might be an immigrant, or he might be the second coming of William F. Buckley.

[ahlatimer]

There wasn't? There's been an illegal immigration problem in the States since we started clamping down on immigration. There was a large problem with Chinese immigrants in the late 1800's, early 1900's. In fact, El Paso (my hometown) was a focal point of that as well.

For a large part of the history of El Paso, Juarez (our sister city across the border) and El Paso flowed naturally. There wasn't really much of a divide between the two cities, up until the 1920's when a fear of lice caused Mayor Tom Lea to cut back on immigration which eventually spawned the Bath Riots. Even still, it wasn't really difficult to get into El Paso as a Hispanic individual. You simply had to go through a delousing process (designs of which Hitler used to exterminate the Jews) that sprayed you with Zyklon B and steam bathed your clothing. Not exactly the most honoring thing to go through, but you were still permitted access afterwards.

You could say there was even illegal immigration starting during the Mexican revolution when the States became a launching point for some of the revolutionaries. The U.S. still had this idea of neutrality and wanted those people to stay out. They came in anyway.

Flash forward to the WWII era and you have a program (I forget the name) that brought in Mexican citizens to work in the U.S.

So...you saying that there wasn't a problem until the 60's is simply misguided on one hand (there wasn't a problem because a lot of people were largely encouraged, or at least not stopped, from coming in) or horribly wrong on the other (there's been illegal immigration in this country since the quota system was introduced).

Like I said, you sound like someone who doesn't know jack about this subject. You're obviously entitled to your opinions, but your opinions are still wrong.

[KirinDave]

Yeah, I'm sure that's an action that would basically pay for itself.</sarcasm>

I can think of no greater economic nightmare than a nice racially motivated witch-hunt against the states most-exploited worker class.

[yummyfajitas]

How is enforcing existing laws against a group which is predominantly white a "racially motivated witch-hunt"?

You are also horribly misusing the term "witch hunt". The problem with a witch-hunt is that witches don't exist. Anyone you catch in a witch-hunt is innocent. By contrast, rounding up illegals is highly likely to catch a bunch of existing criminals and will probably have a low false positive rate.

[kingkongrevenge]

Japan did a big immigration enforcement round up last year as the economy slowed and shipped a lot of people out. They seem ok.

[alexgartrell]

And send every single California farm into bankruptcy?

"Those damn illegals" are pretty critical, in real life.

[anamax]

Not at all. They'd merely have to pay a "living wage".

Moreover, we have a lot of legal residents and citizens on "aid". Lots of them can do farm work. (Yes, I know how hard farm labor is. I've done it. Have you?)

As to child care, the ones who can't do farm labor can provide it. After all, we trust them with their kids, so surely we can tell some of them that their aid depends on them taking care of other people's kids. (Of course, we'd have to break the social workers hold on such activities. Welfare programs are pretty much designed for the providers.)

Farm labor costs are a very small fraction of total food costs.

[kingkongrevenge]

> send every single California farm into bankruptcy?

Bollocks. You're repeating industry propaganda. Some farms on the margin may go, but so what.

How about silicon valley takes a hiatus from frivolous social apps and make some good fruit picking robots so nobody has to do it? It wouldn't make business sense now, but post deportation it might.

[science4sail]

> How about silicon valley takes a hiatus from frivolous social apps and make some good fruit picking robots so nobody has to do it? It wouldn't make business sense now, but post deportation it might.

Frivolous social apps exist because a market for them exists. Furthermore, the manufacture of web apps is significantly easier than the manufacture of machines with image processing and manipulation skills capable of matching an immigrant.

The initial cost of purchasing robots capable of harvesting fruit would be astronomical, probably enough to send more than a few farms on the margin into deep debt or bankruptcy. I can't imagine what the support costs for such an operation would be.

[jhancock]

I don't have an answer, but I doubt you can prove its the most fiscally effective solution.

I'm sure there's been studies on the costs of doing this. These are just off the top of my head.

1 - finding and sending them home. This will be huge. There're not all from Mexico, not always an easy/cheap trip. Cost of finding them will put cost pressures on local law enforcement. Cost to detainment while you send them home. Some you won't be able to prove to the receiving country that actually is their home which increases detainment time, sometimes indefinitely.

2 - lost low cost labor would increase business costs resulting in inflation and business failures. This may also be huge. Its an unknown economic shift.

[foulmouthboy]

Because the cost of doing that is free?

[kingkongrevenge]

It's a cent or two on the dollar to task the existing police and federal apparatus vs pay out the social benefits the typical illegal alien consumes.

[jhancock]

Our gov isn't too great at estimating costs. The ongoing Iraq war was initially estimated at around $60 Billion or so. Current estimates have it at $3 trillion.

[potatolicious]

[citation needed]