The Opportunity Costs of Immigration Enforcement

I enjoy my job.  And I'm able to provide some value to some people, to help them obtain, through the laws on the books, the ability to work in this country and contribute to its economy. But my job is also maddening.  Every day presents a new struggle against a bureaucracy that seems to have fallen down the rabbit hole sometime during the Reagan era.

It's a world where immigration enforcement agencies are part of the same branch of government as the administrative judges ruling on the cases, and where ICE attorneys and judges sometimes work together to lock up immigrants and move them out of the country as fast as possible.

In an important sense, the work I do, and the work done by immigration judges, clerks, attorneys, ICE police, border patrol, and USCIS adjudicators is work that doesn't need to be done.  Or, at least, not nearly so much of it.

Matt Yglesias sees a few problems with the pre-recession economy, and two of them are relevant to my argument here.  First:

the misallocation of resources. We imported tons and tons of capital over the course of the last expansion. But an awful lot of that capital didn't wind up going to stuff that enhances our ability to produce goods and services in the future. Instead, at best it went to making it the case that people live in somewhat larger homes than they used to, and at worst it went to building homes that nobody wants to live in. This is a bigger deal than lost notional wealth-it's a lost opportunity. Instead of an overhang of factories or broadband cables or railroad tracks that we could try to put to use, we have a supply overhang of square footage.

DHS's budget in 2008 was $47 billion (pdf).  $20 billion of that went to TSA, CBP, and ICE.  The number of Border Patrol agents has gone from 9,000 in 2001 to 20,000 this year.

But that's not just $20 billion that could have been spent elsewhere.  It's $20 billion that went towards dampening or extinguishing the productive capacity of millions of workers.

I'm not saying we should have no immigration laws, or that we don't need government agencies to implement and enforce them.  But the amount of waste, inefficiency, and misdirection of resources I see every day is truly astounding.

Yglesias continues:

Last-the skills mismatch. To get back to fully employing our resources we need to shift to a situation in which fewer people are building houses, fewer people are selling financial services, and fewer people are building cars and, instead, more people are doing other stuff. But all the people working in those industries have developed skills ("human capital") that's to some extent sector-specific and the tools and equipment involved also have some level of sector specificity. Switching from building strip malls to building bridges involve some loss of usefulness in terms of people's skills. And switching from financial services into elsewhere in the economy may involve leaving a lot of experience behind.

Likewise, that $20 billion was money spent keeping me and thousands of immigration attorneys across the country, and tens of thousands of associated support staff, busy trying to get the government to acknowledge the productive capacity of our clients.  It doesn't count the dollars spent on attorneys' fees-much of it wasted if spent on notarios or incompetent or scheming attorneys.

Some people probably think the $20 billion, and the billions in attorney fees and opportunity costs, is money well spent.  I think we might as well have flushed a big chunk of that money down the toilet for all the good it's done our economy.

For those readers who think of attorneys as useless parasites* not all that, I'm more sympathetic to that viewpoint than you might think from my choice of profession.  So why ensure we have a steady stream of income-in fact, for many, more work than we can reasonably take on?

In dollars spent per person, the death penalty probably results in bigger opportunity costs than the immigration enforcement bureaucracy.  But there are lots more immigrants than death row inmates, so the cumulative negative economic effect is far greater.  And for what?  To stave off the reconquista?  Streamlining the immigration system and increasing legal immigration levels so that we weren't spending billions on enforcement efforts just to suppress labor supply would free up resources (currently poorly-spent tax dollars) and human capital to go towards more productive enterprises.  And that would be good for this struggling economy.

* This was ill-considered and obscured more than it clarified.  There are many fine immigration attorneys who work hard for their clients under difficult circumstances.  Some, unfortunately, are not much interested in serving the best interests of their uniquely vulnerable non-citizen clients, instead exploiting them for profit.  They are the ones who give the immigration bar a bad name.