The new law to build a fence on the Mexican border, which President Bush signed this week, reminds me of those barriers that Mayor Rudy Giuliani put up in midtown Manhattan in 1998 to try to stop people from jaywalking.
Every New Yorker understands why the barriers --and even the short-lived attempt at ticketing people that accompanied them---didn't keep people from jaywalking. If people did not jaywalk in Manhattan, where there are vastly more pedestrians than cars, sidewalk congestion would virtually shut the city down.
The only way people might follow the law is if the city were laid out entirely differently. In other American cities, people are far more likely to wait for the walk sign and use crosswalks because there is enough space for everyone and because cars rule the road. In other words, the way things are set up makes it possible and sensible to respect the law.
The difference between Manhattan jaywalking and immigrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border is that in Manhattan, with so many people and so little sidewalk space, it is almost impossible to picture a scenario whereby following jaywalking laws to the letter would make sense. Where
illegal border crossings are concerned, there is a solution: provide a better way for the workers we need to come in through the front door. That is not easy, but it would be simpler than razing Manhattan's skyscrapers or creating an intricate set of tunnels and overhead walkways.
U.S. immigration laws today are a lot like jaywalking rules in Manhattan, where lawmakers have granted an implicit pardon and failed to provide a reasonable way to follow the law. This makes it both impossible, and often unfair, to enforce the law.
Imagine arresting everyone who's jaywalked in New York City in the last twenty years. Not many folks would stand for punishing millions of individuals for doing something that clearly was illegal on paper only. When policies send the message that laws are on paper only, it becomes pointless to argue about whether or not to grant "amnesty." You can't have amnesty without an offense, and if it is widely agreed that a behavior is not a crime, there's nothing to pardon.
Two decades ago, in return for granting outright amnesty to three million immigrants, the 1986 Immigration Reform & Control Act (IRCA) supposedly made it harder to work here without legal papers. In reality, it contained so many loopholes that it was an open invitation to employers and to immigrants to ignore its provisions. For example, only employers who "knowingly" hired illegal aliens would be punished; without a reliable verification system, they could plead ignorance. As if this
was not enough to ensure that the law would fail, IRCA also neglected to provide a legal way to hire new workers --in effect, making it all but impossible to follow the law and still stay in business.
Until America creates a system that allows needed workers to come here to work legally, any immigration laws will continue to be a sham. It won't matter how high the penalties are or whether or not we legalize those already here under our broken laws.
As Mayor Giuliani discovered the hard way, trying to enforce a law is no solution unless there is a reasonable way to follow it. Creating realistic immigration laws would mean providing enough visas so that the immigrants we need can work here legally /and/ enforcing laws against employers and workers who break them. Either one alone, without the other, would fail.
That's why building a border fence and cracking down on immigrants will work no better than New York City's ill-fated jaywalking enforcement experiment.
This fence won't keep people out; it's no secret that the fence will not seal the border. It will cost at least $2.2 billion, and likely much more, considering that the Israel-Palestine fence cost an estimated $1.87 million per mile and we're talking about 700 miles here. Yet it will cover only about one-third of the border, so people can still get across. About half of the illegal aliens in this country arrived legally and overstayed; a wall won't do anything about them.
But the biggest reason that the plan will not work is that without change to the root causes of our immigration mess, the fence will be far worse than a waste of money. It will only make people take the law even less seriously than they already do.