Illegal detour: thinking reasonably about immigration.

ILLEGAL immigration is not a big problem in America. Okay, let me amend that before pots and pans and worse things come flying at me. America has some serious immigration problems, but they are not distinctively problems of illegal immigration. If we focus narrowly on illegal immigration, we are likely to come up with counterproductive solutions.

Almost all of the things that cause people to complain about illegal immigration are true of much legal immigration as well. If your worry is that illegal immigrants tend to raise government spending, for example, then you ought to be worried about legal immigrants, too. Half of legal immigrants have not gone past high school. Like illegal immigrants, they cost federal and state governments billions of dollars each year.

Or perhaps you're concerned that illegal immigrants hurt low-income workers by driving low-end wages down. If so, you should be almost as concerned about legal immigration. Illegal immigrants tend to be paid less than legal immigrants, but the difference is small and largely reflects the fact that on average illegal immigrants have slightly less education than legal immigrants.

Maybe you're afraid that the United States is importing social problems through illegal immigration. Without illegal immigration, we would have fewer poor people and fewer people without health insurance. There would be less strain on our health-care system and less likelihood that your taxes will go up in the future to take care of these problems. The difference with legal immigration, especially the unskilled kind, is one of degree.

If what most disturbs you is the possibility that illegal immigrants will not assimilate to our society, again, you have to have qualms about legal immigration. An immigrant who lacks legal status will probably not assimilate as easily as someone who has it, since he will not participate as fully in American life. But the sheer number of immigrants, legal and illegal, is probably a more important determinant of assimilation (especially when so many of them come from the same place). The immigrant population grows by about 1 million people annually. Half are legal, half illegal.

And if you're concerned about immigrant voting patterns, as many Republicans are, at least in private, then you ought to object much more to legal than to illegal immigration. Illegal immigrants can't vote for tax-raising, big-government politicians (although they can slightly increase the number of Democratic legislators through their effect on apportionment and districting).

The national-security argument for cracking down on illegal immigration is that "we need to know who's here." But our immigration bureaucracy is not extraordinarily competent or well supported. It does not do a great job of processing the existing flow of legal immigrants through the system. If that legal flow stays at its current volume, there is a limit to how helpful that bureaucracy can be to law enforcement.

In practice, legal and illegal immigration are pretty closely linked. Legal and illegal immigrants come from the same places, both categories being dominated by Mexicans. They live in many of the same neighborhoods, even the same households, and often work for the same employers. James Edwards of the Hudson Institute points out that the numbers for both categories have risen in tandem. People sometimes make it sound as though increases in legal immigration will meet businesses' needs and thus drive down their demand for illegal-immigrant labor. But any such effect is hard to see in the numbers.

The best argument for considering illegal immigration a distinctive problem is that it undermines respect for the law. But this harm is pretty abstract. It drives popular anxiety about illegal immigration only in the sense that illegal immigration is a symbol of a larger immigration policy that cannot command respect. It points to our political elites' failure to take seriously the responsibility to determine how many people, and which people, we will let in--and that is something that people are capable of getting plenty mad about.

So why do so many people say that they are against illegal immigration but for legal immigration? In part, it's because the distinction creates a handy rhetorical club for the person who makes it. It puts the other side in the position of defending, or seeming to defend, illegality. But I suspect that it's mostly because making the distinction is a way to look reasonable, moderate, and non-racist. "I have no problem with immigrants. My grandparents were immigrants! I just have a problem with the ones who come here illegally." You're objecting to a type of behavior, not a type of person.

And since illegal immigrants have done something bad--broken the law--it is more acceptable to think ill of them than of legal immigrants. Thus it is easy to blame them for the failures of our immigration policy.

There are better ways to be humanitarian. Illegal immigrants come here for the same reasons legal immigrants do: chiefly, to make a better life for themselves and their families. That is not an ignoble ambition; it is one that deserves sympathy and even admiration. The illegal immigrant's law-breaking is wrong, but understandable, and not gravely wrong.

My point here is not to make a case for an immigration policy but to offer some notes on how to think (and how not to think) about immigration. But I do have some views on what that policy should be. I think that America would assimilate its immigrants better, more easily, and faster if the total number of immigrants each year--legal and illegal--were brought down. I think that more assimilation would bring a range of benefits to native-born Americans, to those immigrants we let in, and to future immigrants. I don't think that it is necessary to be angry at immigrants, legal or illegal, to believe these things.

To come up with a rational immigration policy, we have to be able to hold two thoughts simultaneously. Immigrants, including illegal immigrants, are human beings with rights, dignity, and legitimate interests. And there is no reason to be apologetic about pursuing our national interest. If we think (as I do) that reducing immigration would be good for the country and even, in the long run, for immigrants themselves, we should not feel that we are anti-immigrant. We should protest, in fact, if others say that we are.

If, instead, we continue to obsess about illegal immigration to the exclusion of larger concerns, we are apt to make mistakes. That obsession has distorted the debate over President Bush's immigration proposals, causing both opponents and supporters to focus on the wrong things.

Objections have centered on the "amnesty" that critics say he would give to illegal immigrants already here. But it's the invitation to new "temporary guest workers," not the alleged amnesty to previous migrants, that is the truly momentous feature of Bush's plan. We have a de facto amnesty already, since we're not enforcing immigration laws. We don't have a temporary-worker program.

Some supporters of the president's plan speculate that it could bring total immigration levels down. The argument is that illegal immigrants never leave the U.S. because they are afraid they would have trouble coming back. Let them come and go legally, and fewer of them would settle here. I'm skeptical. But whether Bush's plan has this effect is a more important question than the endlessly disputed question of whether the plan's treatment of illegal immigrants in this country amounts to an amnesty.

The supporters, meanwhile, use an exaggerated horror at illegal immigration to recruit allies. The presence of millions of illegal immigrants in this country is intolerable, they say. But if deporting all of them is off the table, the only solution left is something like what the president proposes. Creating a legal channel for illegal immigrants to stay here and work--call it an amnesty if you want--is the only way to solve the problem.

As it happens, there is an alternative to deportation and amnesty. Mark Krikorian, the head of the Center for Immigration Studies, argues for an "attrition strategy." Every year, something like 700-800,000 illegal immigrants come here, 50,000 are deported, 150,000 leave, and 25,000 die. (I owe these rough estimates to Krikorian's colleague Steven Camarota.) Stepped-up enforcement of immigration laws, especially at workplaces that tend to use illegal labor, will decrease the first number and increase the second and third. Over time, such tactics could cause the illegal population to shrink.

One of the strengths of Krikorian's strategy, to my mind, is that it does not attempt to bring about an instant solution to a problem that has been decades in the making. It accepts that millions of illegal immigrants will continue to live here while trying to foster improved conditions. But the more intolerable we regard the presence of illegal immigrants, the more we will look on this strength as a weakness--and the more we will be tempted by a quick fix. Define the problem the wrong way, and you'll get the wrong solution.

Mr. Ponnuru is an NR senior editor and the author of Party of Death, forthcoming from Regnery Publishing in late April.