Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies
many people like that and these are not the kind of people that immigration advocates are talking about.
HSNW: I was wondering if you could clarify what you said in a recent piece where you concluded that we should “work tirelessly for comprehensive enforcement of immigration laws and reductions in future levels of legal immigration.” When you say “reductions in future levels of legal immigration” what does that refer to? Is that a sort of quota system that we had in the past?
MK: To give you a brief thumbnail version of my take on this, mass immigration is incompatible with the goals and characteristics of modern society. High levels of immigration as such are not compatible with modern society, not because the immigrants are that different, but because we are different. Modern society is something that has characteristics that never existed in any other society in history. We have a post-industrial knowledge based economy. Additionally modern communications and transportation, has made assimilation and security much more complicated than before.
HSNW: Given the current budget climate, many lawmakers are balking at the high costs of building border fences that have proven ineffective, with a recent video showing to young women climbing the fence in less than eighteen seconds as well as the cancellation of the $1 billion SBInet project. Do you believe these expensive and technologically sophisticated efforts are wise investments or are there better more cost-effective alternatives to securing border?
MK: The answer is sort of yes, because they are both true. The technological solutions do in fact work. The original portion of SBInet is functioning, it is the expansion that they pulled the plug on. There are towers with cameras and sensors that are extraordinarily effective. The real problem is that they did not have enough agents to monitor the cameras. They will have fifty cameras and three guys working, and the smugglers know that if the camera is not moving then nobody is looking at it so they speed by. It is not a technology problem, it is using the technology to its best effect.
But that having been said, it might well be true that there is greater marginal value for the next dollar spent on things other than border enforcement, because we have spent a lot of money on border enforcement and we do not have what we really need yet. There are still fewer border patrol agents than there are people in the NYPD. We have put a good deal amount of money in it and I think it is at least plausible to say that the next dollar ought to be going to real work-site enforcement.
In an ideal scenario, if this administration could be made to enforce the law, then I would rather the theoretical next marginal dollar be put into worksite enforcement because that is probably where you are going to get the biggest bang for the buck.
HSNW: Building off that, what are your top policy recommendations for law makers? Would you say it is worksite enforcement?
MK: Make E-Verify mandatory for all employers. There is no silver bullet, there are all kinds of things that need to be done, but making E-Verify mandatory is the first step. Everyone says they are for it, the president says E-Verify is great. This idea that everything has to be done in one big bill is ridiculous. Everybody is for it, let us do that first then see what happens.
