Supply and Demand

"These failures not only impede the fight against illegal immigrants, but will also harm our nation's efforts to stem the flow of drugs across our borders," protested Reps. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, and Elton Gallegly, R-Calif., in a letter to Reno earlier this year.

On both the drug and immigration fronts, however, the serious question is whether it is sufficient to simply interrupt supply pipelines. The nation has invested heavily in narcotics interdiction strategies, special task forces to prosecute drug kingpins and harsh mandatory sentences for small-time dope peddlers. But the demand for narcotics hasn't slackened. The overall rate of drug use has not budged for 10 years, and consumption of heroin and methamphetamines is up among young people.

Prominent law-and-order conservatives are now considering strategies to reduce demand. Former Reagan administration Attorney General Edwin Meese III, for one, has spoken favorably of treatment programs, rather than jail, for low-level drug offenders.

Similar shifts of thinking are occurring with respect to illegal immigration. Smith and Gallegly, in their scolding of Reno, called for tougher enforcement strategies in the interior of the country to curb American employers' voracious appetite for unauthorized foreign workers.

Nowhere is the demand more evident than in California's Central Valley, where low-paying, part-time jobs in the fields and orchards are largely filled by immigrants. Upwards of 40 percent of them are believed to be here illegally. Since enforcement has been tightened at the border, growers have complained of labor shortages during harvest seasons and are clamoring for enactment of more liberal rules to let immigrant farm workers temporarily enter the country.

But the idea of easing admission standards for so-called "guest workers" alarms many area leaders. Fresno County Supervisor Juan Arambula notes that the valley already suffers high chronic rates of unemployment "even during the peak of the harvest season." The problem, he maintains, is not an inadequate labor supply, but the disinclination of growers to pay adequate wages and provide decent working conditions.

As population growth outpaces job creation, poverty is rising in the traditionally prosperous agricultural valley. The Fresno Bee reports that roughly a quarter of the residents in six valley counties-more than a half million people-have incomes below the poverty threshold.

Some scholars say the increases in unemployment and underemployment reflect a perverse and unintended consequence of tighter border controls. Because unlawful entry has become more difficult, more costly and more hazardous, migrants stay longer once they get here. The University of San Diego's Wayne Cornelius has written that "sojourners"-single males who traditionally entered the country for limited periods of time-are being replaced by "settlers" (complete family units who arrive with no plans to leave).

That's why Smith and Gallegly want the Immigration and Naturalization Service to crack down on employers. Their letter complained that the INS lacks a comprehensive work site enforcement strategy and charged that the agency "provides ample warnings to employers" in advance of raids. As a result, they wrote, undocumented workers "simply move on to find new jobs."

What congressional critics don't mention is that major employers-especially giant agribusiness and meatpacking firms that rely heavily on immigrant labor-wield considerable political clout and have the wherewithal to make generous campaign contributions. Therefore, it's perhaps not surprising that the INS has chosen to concentrate its limited interior enforcement resources on the deportation of immigrants who have committed crimes and crackdowns on alien smuggling rings and producers of fraudulent documents.

For that matter, when it has come to appropriating funds for the INS, both Congress and the White House have signaled that they clearly place higher priority on tightening the border than sanctioning employers for hiring illegal immigrants. From 1993 to 1998, the Border Patrol's annual budget has more than doubled, from $354 million to $877 million, while funding for interior enforcement has risen more modestly, from $149 million to $275 million.

Lawmakers have similarly been niggardly in arming the Labor Department for enforcing employment standards in low-paying sectors of the economy. Labor's Wage and Hour Division has a staff of just 950 inspectors to police the entire nation.

As Smith argued at a March hearing, "controlling the border is not enough." But it will be exceedingly difficult to stem the supply of illegal immigrants without doing more to dampen the demand of American employers who've become addicted to hiring and, in many cases, exploiting them.

Dick Kirschten, a contributing editor for National Journal, has covered Congress and the government for more than 20 years. He has also worked as a congressional aide and public affairs director on Capitol Hill.