Some 400 Wichita North and East High School students left class yesterday and marched downtown to demonstrate opposition to the anti-immigrant bill passed by the House recently. School officials are livid, threatening to suspend all the students, or at least any who didn't have written permission from their parents. A poll (no scientific claims here) by the Eagle is running 60-40 in favor of suspension. A typical comment is:

Students who skip school are suspended. That's the law. Breaking the law, by thinking that students are standing up for themselves in a political event should not be an exception to this law. . . . There are many aliens in the US, it's the illegal ones who are questioned. Illegal means illegal. . . . If aliens want to come to the US, then do it legally and if they can't or won't then they have no reason to be here.

This is a pretty simple way of looking at the world -- that's no doubt a big part of its attraction. Don't like something? Pass a law against it. That doesn't stop it? Make the punishment harsher, and the enforcement more certain. Surely some level of penalty and some degree of willpower will do the trick. This is an idea that is very attractive to the right, where order means everything and bloodshed means little. But the world is more complicated and confused than the view allows. Even murder never vanishes completely, no matter how rigorously prosecuted. Some people are nuts, some think they can get away with it, some don't care, some just make the wrong decision at the wrong moment. But the curious thing here is that if you took the harsh penalties away, the murder rate might rise, but not by much. Most people don't commit murder not because they fear punishment but because they have their own personal rules against it. But even that isn't consistent across all times and places: a big part of one's personal rules comes from the social context one lives in.

Down at the other end of the law and order spectrum, there's truancy. It may be the law to publish truancy with suspension, but that strikes me as pretty wrong-headed, even from a sheer punishment-mad perspective. As I recall, I was truant for about 30% of 9th grade. I never got suspended for that, but frankly suspension would have made my life a lot simpler. My case may have been unusual in some respects, but the common denominator was the realization that school had little if anything to reward my attendance. So suspension has the perverse effect of punishing those who benefit from school while liberating those who don't. That may cause the first group to straighten up and the others to move on to more antisocial behaviors. But neither case helps the problem, and we as a society suffer both ways.

The political tantrum over immigration hinges on this same notion: that illegal immigrants are illegal, a violation of our law and order, and therefore should be prosecuted to whatever extent is necessary to get to a point where illegal immigrants are no more. That is, roughly speaking, the point of the House immigration bill. The punishment mandated there is very harsh: an estimated eleven million people would immediately be judged felons, and anyone who knowingly or otherwise aids any of those new felons would become accomplices to a felony. If we put the first group in jail, which is what we normally do with felons, that would increase the US prison population five times. (Merely dumping them in Mexico would be like inviting them back.) The second group is harder to estimate, but would at least decline as more and more illegals are locked up. There is also something about building some sort of wall the length of the US-Mexican border -- a structure comparable to the Great Wall of China, but presumably more effective.

It's tempting to say that such a law would be insane, but in fact we already have laws like that on the books: the laws that prohibit marijuana and other "recreational" drugs. Indeed, there have long been more illegal drug users in the US than there are illegal immigrants, so we can estimate some of the effects and much of the ineffectiveness of the House immigration bill from what we've seen with drug prohibition. I can't list them all -- that would be another long project -- but I do want to point out one key problem that is common to both: that many (perhaps most) people don't really consider the individual drug users or illegal immigrants they know to be real criminals. This provides networks of protection that law enforcement only occasionally penetrates, leading to an arbitrary pattern of enforcement that reinforces the sense that the law is applied unjustly. This both discredits the law and leaves the targets of the law -- in both cases they number in the millions -- outside of its protection, which makes them more likely to break other laws or to be victims of criminals. Criminalizing such common and relatively harmless activities not only increases crime -- it multiplies crime, as the history of prohibition shows.

But is illegal immigration all that harmless? Aside from the issues introduced by criminalization itself, there appear to be two real problems and one phantom problem. One problem is that immigrants compete for jobs which has the effect of reducing wages, especially for unskilled labor. The other is that immigrants who work at low wage jobs tend to use more public services than they pay for through taxes. Both of these problems are real enough, but they're unlikely to be very significant except in locales where illegal immigrants are concentrated. But it's worth noting that the perception of these problems is heightened because there are other political forces working both to depress worker wages and to eviscerate public support programs. Arguing for more liberal immigration policy by itself makes those problems worse. On the other hand, immigration adds to the aggregate economy, although that fact may not be appreciated if the benefits are concentrated among the rich, as is too often the case.

The phantom problem has to do with the imagined effect that skewing the American population toward more immigrants might have on politics, society and/or culture. This is a persistent fear among the Samuel Huntington set and less intellectual bigots, but in the US at least such fears have always proven wrong. In American history, wave after wave of immigrants have arrived and over the course of a generation or two integrated themselves into an American mainstream that has changed remarkably little, except to have been enriched by a slightly broader view of the world. (In Europe, where so many nations are narrowly defined by a single ethnic group, this might be less so; on the other hand, one might note that the French politician who took a leading role in suppressing, or agitating, the recent round of "immigrant" riots was himself only slightly removed from his Polish ancestry.)

The current immigration debate mostly seems to be divided along two distinct axes. One is economic, ranging from the rich who seek to profit from depressing labor costs to the native working class who find their jobs and wages threatened by immigrants. The other is cultural, ranging from nativists who for one reason or another seek to isolate the US from the world to liberals who instinctively react against the racism or chauvinism of the former group. These axes bisect both political parties, although the Republicans are most visible because their ends of these two axes are the most activist. The Democrats tend to be reactive -- not an uncommon situation, and all too often a confused and dangerous one.

Rich, wage-depressing Republicans have been promoting "guest worker" programs similar to those used in the Persian Gulf, which legitimizes imported workers while keeping them on a tight leash -- Bush is very much in this camp, as is Sam Brownback, although the latter has some peculiar ideology going on as well. Tom Tancredo has made himself the leader of the nativist wing, as represented by the House bill. A likely scenario is a compromise that combines the two -- an extreme crackdown on illegals combined with enough guest workers to suppress wages -- but the political weakness of the Bush camp offers the extremists little incentive to give ground. Indeed, their ability to paint undocumented immigrants as strictly illegal would melt in compromise, and they're likely to pick up Democrat votes on economic grounds. On the other hand, the Bush camp might be just as happy to leave the current non-system as is: they get the wage suppression effect they want from the illegals.

My own view isn't very well formed. The House bill is obviously a very dangerous, very wrong-headed proposition: the sweeping criminalization deprecates law, undermines justice, and promotes crime; the great wall is expensive, likely to be ineffective, and above all sends a terrible message to the world. I'm also opposed to any guest worker program that is more dead-ended than the current green card system for legal immigration. If we need immigrants, we should want them to become citizens, and make that possible. The main problem with the illegals here already is that by being illegal they don't have adequate legal protection -- they are easily victimized and have little if any recourse. We need to come up with some way to give those workers legal status, and we need to make it attractive enough that the immigrants identify themselves, because we can never be effective enough at enforcement to solve the problem that way. Effectively, I'm arguing for some form of "amnesty" -- a word nobody on any side of the issue wants to be tarred with. The grant shouldn't be citizenship, but it should allow the immigrants to continue working but with legal protections.

Once illegal immigrants have a path to become legal, it becomes much easier to crack down on those who continue to employ illegals. This takes away much of the "pull" that promote more immigration. The "push" side, however, is on the other side of the border. Here US policy has done much to contribute to the problem, especially in how subsidized US agricultural exports have undermined the wages of agricultural workers in countries like Mexico. There are many other aspects to this part of the problem, but the bottom line is that if Americans truly want to reduce immigration we need to help provide improvements to the livelihood of those currently tempted to migrate here. That's a tall order, and can't be fulfilled any time soon, but that's no reason not to work on it. In the long term the best solution is to permit free movement of labor, but for that to work equitably means that all economies must achieve some degree of equilibrium. Until that happens, national boundaries can act as baffles which prevent a sudden worldwide rush to the bottom -- provided we have the political smarts to recognize and act on the need.

But getting back to the original point here, we need to develop a more realistic sense of law and order. It's foolish to try to outlaw things that people are going to keep doing anyway -- to do so just creates more outlaws, which ultimately means more trouble for all of us. And we can't overcome the impossible by escalating the enforcement. Proof of this is all around us.