Consequences of No Immigration Reform

Remember when immigration reform was on the front burner? Presidential politics not only removed it from that burner, immigration reform became an expletive to many politicians and regular Americans. The consequences have been dire.

Given the hostility to reform and the insistence that immigrants be prosecuted and deported, federal prosecutions of immigration crimes almost doubled last year, according to interviews with judges and prosecutors by the New York Times. The result is the siphoning of resources from other crimes, declining of morale of government lawyers, and overloading the federal court system.

White-collar prosecutions have fallen by 18%, weapons prosecutions by 19%, organized crime prosecutions by 20%, public corruption prosecutions by 14%, and illegal drug prosecutions by 20%. This raises the question of whether clamping down on illegal immigrants is worth the resulting cost. Many politicians and regular Americans still say yes, although some of them may be smoking some of the extra drugs making their way into the country while immigrants are rounded up.

Federal prosecutors aren’t highly paid, but one reason good lawyers have always been found in their ranks is that they were provided the extraordinary opportunity to take down multigenerational crime families, dishonest executives, fraudulent public officials, and drug trafficking syndicates. Running a bunch of people from Central America, Brazil, and Mexico through the federal courts in assembly line fashion isn’t what most prosecutors sign up for.

President Obama is expected to change prosecutorial priorities. But that’s hardly immigration reform. Few people want to encourage immigrants to come into the United States illegally, but all the prosecutorial resources used to thwart their entry have failed to stem the tide. There must be an answer, but it’s still a mystery. Meanwhile, law-abiding employers are caught with immigrants in a dysfunctional system.