The Dreamer Problem
Series: Welcome the Stranger
To listen to this post, click here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LSeyHEofJw0ks7bMateunrqpk9QOqAKH/view?usp=sharing
They live among us. Some have accents, some don't. They go to our schools, attend our churches, and are our friends and neighbors. Sometimes we know who they are, sometimes we don't. If we do, we probably don't mind. They have little to fear from us, personally, if we find out. They do more than their fair share of the manual labor in our society. Some pick our strawberries, grapes and lettuce. Some build our houses. Some care for our most prized possessions: our children. Others work as entrepreneurs, businesspeople, and managers, or as software developers, technologists, and scientists. One in particular, Pulitzer Prize winner Jose Antonio Vargas, works as a reporter.
They are the undocumented immigrants, over ten million strong according to the most oft-cited estimates at any given time for almost thirty years. Of these, one subset enjoys a particularly high degree of public sympathy: the “Dreamers,” named after the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, which was proposed in 2001 but has never been passed, despite several attempts. The latest attempt, the Dream Act of 2023, sponsored by Senators Dick Durbin and Lindsay Graham, follows the previous versions in proposing to give a specific subset of undocumented immigrants protection from deportation and a path to citizenship. What sets the Dreamers apart is that they were brought to America before the age of accountability, some of them as very young children, and some of them without knowing at the time, or for years afterwards, that they were doing anything illegal.
Obviously, for the Dreamers, America is just home. Obviously, the only decent thing to do is to let them stay. They illustrate the absurdity of the US immigration regime, proving every day how indefensible it is. A consistent supermajority of Americans, most recently 71% in a 2023 poll, have always supported letting the Dreamers stay, as sense and fairness and the nation’s duty clearly demand. But they've had a long wait, and in the meantime, undocumented status-- for Dreamers and other undocumented immigrants alike--is quite inconvenient.
From working, to getting around, to applying for basic services, nothing is frictionless. Most states won't issue driver's licenses or government IDs to undocumented immigrants. That means they aren’t allowed to fly, nor are they allowed to drive. When Jose Antonio Vargas needed a driver's license to get an internship, he arranged to have his friends send him mail at the house of a friend of a friend in Oregon, which he was able to use as proof of residency to get a driver's license there. The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which was instituted for 2012, has mitigated most of these barriers for hundreds of thousands of Dreamers, but it was instituted as a temporary executive branch program that could expire, so long-term security is still lacking, and it has ceased taking first-time applications because of a court order. Most undocumented immigrants, including many Dreamers, do not enjoy the benefit.
Working is another problem. Most undocumented immigrants cannot legally work. DACA participants, again, are an exception, for now, enjoying the right to work. Hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans were also granted Temporary Protected Status (TPS) by the Biden administration in 2023, including the right to work. Most other undocumented immigrants still do work, but they either need to be paid unofficially, or, if they're hired as employees, they have to use a fake Social Security number. Sometimes authorities detect the use of fake Social Security numbers which can lead to job loss or even deportation. Employers know that it's illegal to hire undocumented immigrants, so either they must be deceived, or they must be complicit. There also seems to be a kind of “don't ask, don't tell” gray area in some industries, where employers don't exactly know that their employees are illegal, but they suspect it and deliberately don't find out for the sake of plausible deniability. At any rate, being undocumented is certainly a disadvantage in the labor market. The employers most willing to run the risk of hiring illegal workers tend to be those who have the most difficulty recruiting US citizen workers, because the jobs they offer are the most undesirable in terms of pay, working conditions, and/or opportunities for skills development and promotion. And what do you do if you're undocumented and the employer simply doesn't pay you? You can't sue without revealing too much about yourself to the government.
Above all, there is the constant fear of deportation. All sorts of things might trigger it. A simple traffic stop, say for speeding five miles over the limit, might lead to an identity check which reveals your lack of a legal right to live in the country. And then you have to disappear. There's usually, though not always, enough due process even for suspected undocumented immigrants to slow down the deportation machine so you have the opportunity to disappear. But that means all your relationships have an uncertain future. It's bad enough if it's just a job and a house and some friends and a car and some things that are at risk. But the real horror is that you may have family here: parents, young children, a husband, a wife. US immigration law does treat the blood relatives of US citizens more generously than others, but it falls very far short of guaranteeing a right to family togetherness. Many, many immigrants, amounting to at least hundreds of thousands by one estimate in just 2011-2013 and probably millions over the course of recent decades, have been forcibly separated from family members by deportation.
Why would anyone choose to live like this? Why don't the undocumented immigrants just go home? For the Dreamers, America is home. But what about the rest?
For one thing, despite all the inconvenience and uncertainty, many undocumented immigrants, much of the time, get to lead fairly normal American lives. And that's a wonderful thing, more wonderful than many Americans could ever imagine because they take it for granted. Many Americans live out their whole lives without ever feeling much fear of going hungry or suffering violence. In America, people have rights. Everyone can speak his mind. Everyone can practice her faith. The vast consumer cornucopia of capitalism is all around us, and it has plenty to offer even to those with small budgets. People treat each other pretty well too. There has been no warfare in the vast territory of the United States for well over a century. Friendly customer service is the norm, and almost every clerk and waiter gives warm and eager help to all comers. Even at the low end of the wage distribution, the amount of comfortable housing in leafy, fairly safe neighborhoods, basic foodstuffs, clothes and other necessities, candy and smartphones and other luxuries, that can be had for an hour's work in modern America dwarfs what is available in most countries in the world, or was available in most eras of human history. Much inconvenience and uncertainty might be worth enduring for the sake of all that. The streets aren't paved with gold in America, but there's peace and plenty galore, and even undocumented immigrants enjoy the trickle-down effects of that.
Some undocumented immigrants live in the shadows to better the lives of their children. The 14th Amendment of the US Constitution grants US citizenship to anyone born on US soil. So from an intergenerational perspective, undocumented immigration can be a pretty good deal even for those who never escape the shadows of undocumented status themselves, and are doomed to stay at the bottom of American society doing hard manual labor for a pittance and scurrying to dodge the law. They may gain little from living in the world's most opulent large country, but their children will inherit it as equal citizens, secure for life in the land of opportunity. It's an old, old story, and a noble one: parents making sacrifices for the sake of their children's futures, loving their children more than themselves.
But of all the undocumented immigrants, the Dreamers are the clearest rebuke to US immigration laws, the walking proof of their injustice, because they are innocent in a particularly obvious and uncomplicated way. They didn't just come here, they were brought. They are not criminals, not even by the standards of flawed human laws. Illegal entry is a crime, but children can't be held accountable for it, and mere presence in the country, even if unauthorized, is not a crime. They obeyed their parents, as children ought to do, and then found themselves in an awkward, absurd situation, with no way out, other than, perhaps, to exile themselves to countries that are not their homes, where they might not be safe, or know anyone, or know how to make a living, countries of which some Dreamers have no memories.
Most Americans, though they support the DREAM Act, have no real idea of the Dreamers’ plight. Jose Antonio Vargas, the undocumented immigrant journalist, has, after publicly “coming out” as undocumented in 2011, toured the country telling his story and advocating justice for the Dreamers. He wrote, in his 2018 book Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen, how he was struck by the utter ignorance of most Americans, including nationally prominent pundits, of what our immigration laws are like, and of the complete nonexistence of ways for even the most obviously eligible undocumented immigrants to earn a path to citizenship. Americans are used to their laws being reasonable, and American laws are generally reasonable because the people who live under those laws have a say in what they are, through voting and elections. But no voting Americans are personally subject to any of the handicaps and inconveniences immigrants face, so they have little reason, and perhaps little opportunity, to learn about them and realize how unreasonable they are. They assume there must be a way for people like Vargas to become legal, but there isn't.
But the lack of a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers is so counterintuitive because the Dreamers seem so American.
Intuitively, an American is, at one level, someone who acts and talks in a certain way, and at a higher level, someone who shares a certain ethos and believes in certain ideals.
At one level, a typical American is someone who says “Please” and “Thank you” and “Excuse me.” He knows about Thanksgiving and Halloween and the 4th of July and cheeseburgers and root beer and breakfast cereal and “The Simpsons” and “The Wizard of Oz,” and can watch a football or baseball or basketball game and follow the action, and feels at home in a leafy suburb with well-mown lawns and cars in driveways and garages, or among the broad busy streets and soaring skyscrapers of New York City, or probably both, and so on. All these quotidian experiences are somewhat related to socioeconomic class, and for a different, more struggling class of Americans, a different kind of street, with boarded up windows, broken glass, and a nervous alertness for gang colors, would be more familiar. Yet these classes overlap somewhat, and Americans have some notion, if less than in the past, of how the other half lives, making for a national community of a sort, if not always a happy sort.
At a deeper level, typical Americans feel exhilarated by the slogan “all men are created equal” and try to live by it, and are democratic and egalitarian and meritocratic. They like innovation and think freedom is so important that it is worth dying for, disapprove of kings and aristocrats and probably feel a certain smug superiority to nations that tolerate them, admire pioneers and entrepreneurs and self-made men and women more than ancient lineages and hereditary honors, and insist upon free speech for themselves while resolutely tolerating it in others.
But if we are going to exclude the Dreamers from being American, all such intuitive and holistic definitions of Americanness must be thrown out the window. No such definition of what it is to be American would include the vast majority of native-born American citizens without also including most of the Dreamers. If the Dreamers are not Americans, then being American is nothing but the bare legal fact of having been born in America or legally naturalized, and the rest is sentimental hogwash. That's a statist, unpatriotic, unsatisfying position, and in supporting the Dream Act, Americans overwhelmingly and rightly reject such nihilistic reductionism about their country. Americans know it's wrong for the Dreamers, whose home is here, not to have a right to stay, and they want to make it right.
What are we waiting for, then? Why weren't the Dreamers legalized long ago? If legalizing the Dreamers is the right thing to do, and if a majority of Americans has long recognized this, how is it that we have left them in legal limbo for over 20 years?
It's partly just inertia, the weight of the status quo. Sometimes, politicians find it more electorally advantageous to let a problem fester and motivate voters to come to the polls than to solve it, and Democrats have missed several opportunities for legislative compromises that would have helped a group that they claim to sympathize with. It's partly that American democracy can sometimes be dominated by impassioned minorities of single issue voters. Broad majority support for the DREAM Act may be tepid, while the minority opposition is intense, and politicians are attentive to “wedge issues” that can change people's votes.
But the biggest reason why the DREAM Act never passed is that letting the Dreamers stay would incentivize more people to come.
People respond to incentives. Economists have built a science around that truth, but it's a common sense point that everyone can appreciate, even though non-economists sometimes make naive mistakes by forgetting it. Economists, by contrast, sometimes exaggerate how reliably people respond to incentives, and become puzzled when some incentive fails to alter behavior as much as, in theory, it should. But while it's not completely reliable, it's a good generalization, and it applies here. Most immigrants come because America's peace and plenty, and the good life it affords to the vast majority of the population, even many of the poor, create an incentive to do so. The inconveniences and indignities of undocumented status mitigate and weaken that incentive. Any possibility of escape from those inconveniences and indignities will make the incentive for undocumented immigration stronger, and induce more to come.
We've seen people respond to similar incentives created before. In 1986, for example, about three million undocumented immigrants were given an amnesty and a path to citizenship. Within the next twenty years, twelve million more undocumented immigrants had come. Then the inflow slowed, and even went a little bit into reverse, so that throughout the 2010s, the number of undocumented immigrants was below its 2006 peak. But at the time of writing, two years of surging migrant encounters at the border point to a rise of millions in the undocumented immigrant population, which is likely at its highest-ever level.
The earlier surge of undocumented immigration, back in the 1990s, was influenced by a financial crisis in Mexico and a booming economy in the United States. Also, enforcement of immigration restrictions was laxer than it later became. But a big reason for the surge was surely that the 1986 amnesty set a precedent that seemed likely to be repeated at some point, so people positioned themselves to benefit from it. As more time passed, no new amnesty came, and political resistance to proposals for a new amnesty proved to be resolute and fierce, expectations diminished that the 1986 amnesty would be repeated, and undocumented immigration became a less appealing option, so the inflow slowed down.
In recent years, changes in US laws, enforcement practices, or, more subtly, expectations about US laws or enforcement practices, seem sometimes to have altered undocumented immigration flows.
For example, two legal changes seem to have helped precipitate an “unaccompanied minors” surge in 2014. First, a law passed under President George W. Bush, meant to combat human trafficking, had a provision by which unaccompanied minors from countries other than Canada and Mexico would be allowed to stay with families, if possible relatives, until there could be a hearing. Second, as mentioned above, the DACA program, which permitted many undocumented young people who had come to the United States as children to get protection from deportation and work permits, had been enacted in 2012. After the 2008 law, and especially after DACA, there was a surge in unaccompanied minors, in particular, trying to cross the US border, with nearly 70,000 children being apprehended in 2014. While these new arrivals did not actually qualify for DACA, the DACA policy and the popularity of the DREAM Act probably signaled that the political climate in the US, while hostile to a comprehensive amnesty like that of 1986, was favorable to an amnesty specifically targeted towards immigrants who arrived before the age of responsibility, and so minors, who might be among the beneficiaries of a coming DREAM Act, or the next iteration of DACA, had a stronger incentive to come. Similarly, after the suspension of family separations during summer 2018, there was a substantial increase in the number of unaccompanied child entries across the border.
The recent surge in undocumented entry has occurred as the pandemic lockdowns have faded in the United States, and may also reflect a response to the fact that the Biden administration has deported a lot fewer people each year than its predecessor. It also reflects the strength with which the US economy weathered the pandemic, relative to most other countries. It may be in part a response to increased war and other troubling trends around the world. In general, undocumented immigration responds to incentives, including relative conditions in the United States and abroad, and enforcement measures.
Incentives are important to keep track of, because the undocumented immigrants in the United States are the tip of a very large iceberg. Far more will come if conditions look favorable. Gallup estimates, on the basis of international poll data, have long showed that hundreds of millions of people– most recently, 900 million in a 2021 poll– would like to emigrate from their home countries. Of those, an estimated 160 million people would pick the United States as the destination country to emigrate to, making it the top choice, though slightly down from past years. That may still sound mind-bogglingly high, yet from the perspective of an economist, it's actually puzzlingly low. Most of the human race lives in developing countries, and most people in developing countries could increase their wages by multiples, often tenfold or more, by moving to the US.
Some economists have attempted, by merging real data with theoretical models, to estimate how many people would move if the world's borders were completely open to free migration. Unless the models are deliberately designed to avoid it, they generally predict that billions of people would emigrate from developing countries to the West. This should check any hasty assumption that Gallup is exaggerating.
Against trusting the polls here is the consideration that people aren't always good judges of what they would do in counterfactual scenarios. But that cuts both ways. Probably, many people who tell Gallup pollsters today they want to emigrate to the United States wouldn't actually do so. But many people who say they don't want to emigrate to the United States might change their minds if it were a real option. Gallup polls are probably the best available estimate of how many people would come in the short run if US borders were completely opened.
How can Gallup’s poll estimates, then, be reconciled with the economic models that predict much more migration? Who is right: Gallup, or the economists? Probably both, Gallup in the short run, and the economists in the long run.
There is a well-known phenomenon, sometimes called “diaspora dynamics,” by which a particular migration pathway, from one source country to one destination country, tends to see accelerating flows over time, as pioneering immigrants ease the way for more of their countrymen. For most people, moving to a country where there is practically nobody at all like you, where nobody speaks your language or shares your customs, is daunting. By contrast, if there is a large diaspora from your homeland already living in a host country, you can immigrate, participate in the wealthier economy, with its better jobs and greater variety of consumer goods, and yet still speak your native language among friends, eat the cuisine to which you are accustomed, worship according to your own faith alongside others like you, hear the music you've learned to love, and so forth. Your countrymen can serve as a valuable information network, alerting you to the peculiar perils and opportunities of the new country, telling you about jobs and vouching for you to employers. Perhaps they serve as a private social safety net, too. You emigrate, not so much to a foreign country, as to a familiar diaspora in the midst of a foreign country. Then, quickly or gradually as you prefer, you learn a new language and new customs, assimilate to the new society, and leave the diaspora mostly behind, though some 3rd- and 4th- and 5th-generation immigrants still maintain some pride in, and some customs of, their ancestral homelands.
So if 150 million people immigrated to the United States, they would initially create many large diasporas full of people from particular countries all over the world. Then others, who aren't willing to say they’d immigrate to the United States now, would face a much more appealing prospect of migrating to America and then living in an established diaspora where they could feel at home. That could be expected to accelerate immigration flows further. In the long run, for example over a few decades, immigration under open borders might well be the billions that economic models predict.
Most American readers will probably regard the prospect of 160 million immigrants in the short run, then maybe a billion or more in the long run, mostly from developing countries, with horror, if only because it's such a drastic contrast with what we're accustomed to. Moreover, it is reasonable to worry that such a flood of immigrants, even if most of them would come with peaceful and wholesome intentions, might fatally disrupt the fairly benign institutional and cultural equilibrium in the United States that makes it so peaceful and prosperous in the first place. To that issue, we will return.
For present purposes, though, the point is that it's precisely the cruel intransigence of the immigration regime, which is trapping millions of innocent people, starting with well over a million Dreamers, in legal limbo for decades, that prevent the flood. Any softening, any leniency, any generosity towards the undocumented immigrants will be noticed abroad, and will induce a small fraction of the aspiring immigrants to try the undocumented route in the hope of benefiting from that softening or leniency. In particular, if some form of the Dream Act passes, it would alter and strengthen the intergenerational incentive to immigrate, encouraging parents of young children to immigrate so that their children can benefit from the next Dream Act. Even a tiny fraction of the world's aspiring immigrants is a lot of people. And those people will pave the way for more.
Advocates of the Dream Act usually present it as a one-time act. Politicians will probably insist, even as they vote for the Dream Act, that it will never happen again. But fast-forward fifteen years, let them be faced with another generation of undocumented immigrants brought here as children, and what will they say? The same arguments that have made it desirable to pass the DREAM Act for the past twenty years– mercy, fairness, the need to regularize and integrate immigrants who are already American in their language, culture, education, social networks, etc.-- will apply as much to the next generation of Dreamers as to this one. Politicians are notorious flip-floppers. Even if the politicians who sign DREAM Act I never do it again, by the time the pressure for DREAM Act II builds, most of them will be out of office. And foreigners need not conclude that it will happen again for it to incentivize another wave of immigration. It's enough for them to conclude that it's likelier.
This, then, is the Dreamer problem. We must legalize the Dreamers. Every day that we fail to do so, we attenuate our links to our founding ideals. You can't preach equality of opportunity and nondiscrimination and liberty and justice for all while legally marginalizing two million people who were raised in America and have no other home, without losing all credibility. And come to think of it, that kind of idealistic patriotic rhetoric seems less common than it used to be, and polls show that patriotism has declined sharply. It’s hard to be proud of a country that has, in effect, instituted a new kind of segregation, and sixty years after the famous “I Have a Dream” speech has created a new excluded underclass with no rights. And yet we can't legalize the Dreamers without effectively inviting a new wave of undocumented immigration by people hoping it will happen again. Nor would it be easy to justify confining amnesty to the Dreamers. There are millions of others who have lived here many years, productive lives in America, and who are embedded in American communities, holding jobs, running businesses, worshiping in churches, and having families here, many fearing violence or destitution if they go home. Justice and mercy demand that they, too, be allowed to stay. But of course, every extension of justice and mercy to more deserving people only increases the incentive for others still living abroad to follow suit.
In this blog post series, I advocate a policy that can make it incentive compatible to comply with immigration laws, while at the same time institutionalizing a decent respect for human rights. It would allow the Dreamers and many others to stay, without making suckers out of the many people still living abroad who would like to have come and gotten the same deal. It surely would lead to a surge in immigration, but it would mitigate it somewhat, and it would ensure that the population of native-born Americans benefit from the immigration surge, doing well by doing good. The key is to stop restricting immigration and to tax it instead.
But before I can get a proper hearing for any human rights-compatible, incentive-compatible immigration policy, there's a dragon to be slain. Most readers will vaguely think there’s no need to entertain such a radical solution, because a much more commonsensical solution is available and even enacted as law. It's everybody's favorite panacea: the chimera of enforcement.