Another Brick

Yesterday evening, President Trump addressed the nation. I am told that the purpose of this was to broaden support for his wall along the border with Mexico beyond his relatively small base of hardcore supporters. I didn't bother to watch.

I've always been of the impression that physical barriers aren't really the best solution to the problem. After all, we see how well that worked out for the former East Germans. And for Hadrian, for that matter. On the other hand, once "the Great Recession" started going, net illegal migration to the United States was negative. Hmmm...

The simple fact of the matter is that the majority of people who are coming to the United States are coming here looking for work. And most of the work that they end up with are in sectors of the economy that the nation as a whole have more or less decided should be exempted from the American Dream. (As much as people complain that they need illegal immigrants because "Americans don't want those jobs," the fact of the matter is that immigrants don't raise their children to want them, either. They're low status and low pay. I suspect that almost no-one genuinely wants those jobs. They're simply the best that some people can get, and they're an improvement over what would otherwise be available.)

But if the problem is that destitute migrants from Latin America are showing up to compete for low-skill, low-wage and low-status jobs that people do want (or are lowering the wages and status of those jobs by expanding the pool of available applicants), the answer to that is simple: remove their ability to take those jobs. And there is a much simpler way to do that than attempting to physically bar people from entering the country.

There is a doctrine in tort law, normally applied to children, termed "attractive nuisance."The general idea is to establish liability when property owners leave things lying about that are likely to attract children. Instead of the children being liable for trespassing, the property owner bears the liability for not making their property unattractive enough. Were one to combine this principle with the concept of civil asset forfeiture, you could put in place a legal regime in which law enforcement could seize property, including businesses, that attracted people in the country illegally by providing them with jobs. Unless the property owners could then prove that no wrongdoing (hiring of people not eligible to work in this country) occurred, the government would then auction off the property. You could even go a step further and hold businesses liable for the acts of businesses that they contracted with who brought people onto their premises. So an office building could be seized if the property owners contracted with a company that couldn't prove its workers were legally allowed to work.

I would suspect that, if a law like this could be passed, that the market for migrant labor would collapse fairly rapidly, especially if enforcement was even moderately pursued. No property would likely even need to be auctioned, the expense of defending the property alone (and recall, in civil asset forfeiture, it's the property, not the owner, that's involved in the dispute with law enforcement0 would be the deterrent.

Of course, this would create problems of its own. But they likely wouldn't be much more serious than what would happen if, somehow, the United States Government could manage to catch and deport every single person who wasn't authorized to be here and keep them out. And reducing the incentives to have people migrate for economic reasons would make policing the border easier. People who saw themselves as refugees wouldn't have to worry as much about being mistaken for would-be sub-minimum-wage laborers, there would be enough resources to manage them and you could be pretty sure that someone who decided to go way out into the middle of nowhere to attempt a crossing was likely up to something shady.

The wall is an idea of a way of keeping people out that would likely still allow enough people in that the United States could support its current standards of living by importing poverty. Which is what we have already.