The San Francisco Chronicle reported Monday that Sen. Barack
Obama has been highlighting his campaign’s support of driver’s licenses for
undocumented immigrants. I do not question Mr. Obama’s sincerity on this issue.
Unlike Sen. Hillary Clinton, he has not waffled on being for or against the
idea in public. Rather, what makes me distraught is the actual policy he
supports, not to mention his lack of political solutions to the issue of
illegal immigration.

Illegal immigration’s significance results first from its scale. According to a
2006 Pew Hispanic Center study, the estimated population of undocumented
immigrants living in the U.S. ranged from 11.5 to 12 million people. The rate
of illegal immigration is not insubstantial, either. The U.S. Government Accountability
Office estimated in 2006 that ?between 400,000 and 700,000 illegal immigrants
have entered the United States each year since 1992.?

Second, illegal immigration affects us through its problematic relevance to a
wide array of domestic policy areas: economics, security, equality before the
law, human rights, education, health care, crime, and fiscal policy.

Unfortunately, political solutions to illegal immigration typically attack its
symptoms, as epitomized in the areas above, but not its cause. Policies like
Mr. Obama’s  or Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner?s, R-WI, makes illegal immigration
a criminal offense and legal immigration more difficult to obtain. As a result,
such solutions can even exacerbate the problem. In Mr. Obama’s case, it can do
so by encouraging further illegal immigration; whereas in Mr. Sensenbrenner’s,
it can do so by creating an overwhelming fiscal, logistical and legal
obligation for the federal government.

Now it is necessary to ask what causes illegal immigration to occur in the United
States. For most undocumented immigrants, the answer is illegal immigration’s
net benefit relative to the legal alternative. For many, immigrating illegally
? even with all its risks ? is worth it for being cheaper, faster and without
paperwork.

So how can we tip the incentives in favor of legal immigration? The answer is
to make legal immigration as easy and cheap as possible ? without foregoing
national security precautions ? and to make illegal immigration as difficult as
possible, without having the required enforcement mechanisms overwhelm our law
enforcement and justice system.

For most would-be undocumented immigrants ? driven to immigrate to the U.S. by
poverty or a lack of economic mobility in their home country ? the current U.S.
immigration visas are not practically attainable. The legal and logistical
exceptions to this rule are few: An immigrant’s family or employer is able to
help him or her with the fees and legal work required, and/or the immigrant has
at least an undergraduate education ? an educational level not attained by most
would-be undocumented immigrants.   

Visa reform is required to remove these obstacles to legal immigration.
Otherwise, the visa system will continue to possess barriers that reward
illegal immigration and are unfair to those who immigrate legally. Moreover,
illegal immigration can have its incentives deconstructed through the expansion
and improvement of border security, along U.S. borders and coasts.
Simultaneously, outside of violent criminals or potential terrorists who are
undocumented immigrants, it makes more sense to focus law enforcement on border
security rather than deportation.

After all, tipping the incentives in favor of legal immigration for new
immigrants is a lot easier than kicking out millions of undocumented immigrants
already here. Then, once the border is something closer to ?sealed? by these
forces, we can focus on those undocumented immigrants still residing in the
United States. In this manner, we can avoid the mistakes of the 1986 amnesty
provision by attacking the cause of the problem first and then the leftover
side effects.

Unfortunately, the alternatives to this approach are variations of failure
comparable to the disastrous status quo. The hundreds of thousands of new,
undocumented immigrants entering the United States every year constitute a
security, economic, humanitarian, fiscal and law enforcement crisis. Comparable
crises would continue under the Obama approach of rewarding illegal immigration
with policies like allowing driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants, or
the Sensenbrenner approach of making legal immigration more difficult while
overwhelming the U.S. legal system with criminalized illegal immigration.
Instead, in order to solve one of the greatest policy challenges of our time,
it is preferable to attack illegal immigration?s cause, not its symptoms.

David Lapidus ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in
economics and mathematics.