What policies, if any, can reduce the flow of illegal immigration?
The libertarian answer is expanded legal immigration. Libertarians believe this would benefit the United States, the sending countries, and the immigrants.
The more popular answer is roughly the opposite: stricter bans on immigration via guards or border walls.
Numerous examples, however, suggest that banning something (drugs, guns, prostitution, abortion) has only a modest impact on its prevalence.
Thus without expanding legal immigration, the U.S. can only curtail illegal immigration by reducing the demand to migrate here.
Fortunately, the U.S. has two options that fit the bill. The first is repealing the War on Drugs, which is responsible for much of the violence in Latin America. Absent this chaos, fewer people would attempt to migrate.
The second is elimination of trade restrictions against Latin America (and other countries). This would raise wages and improve economic conditions south of the border, again reducing the flow of migrants.
Happily, both policies make sense independent of immigration policy. Two “win-win” options, if we only have the sense to adopt them.
Agree. At the same time, my hunch is that the incentives in current safety net policies are only a mild part of the incentive to migrate. Another thought is that those programs could include significant waiting periods of residence before immigrants become eligible.
A hugely disproportionate number of illegal immigrants come from Central America's Northern Triangle--Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador--which have had among the highest murder rates in the world. El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele recently took drastic action, locking up many gang members. El Salvador overtook the US as the world's No. 1 incarcerating nation, but their murder plummeted. So we have a little experiment running: It will be interesting to see Bukele's effect on the El Salvadoran component of illegal immigration.