What If A Law Can't Be Enforced?

The discussions here about Arizona's new attempt at enforcing immigration law have set me thinking about a more general question: What should we do as a body politic in a situation in which a law we have passed seems impossible to enforce?

In a sense, no law is enforced perfectly. Cannibalism is against the law, yet it does still, on rare occasions, happen that someone kills and eats someone else. We don't generally describe this as the laws against cannibalism "not being enforced". Rather we describe it as someone breaking the law.

When we talk about a law not being enforced, we generally mean that a lot of people are breaking it, and yet few of them seem to be suffering the consequences. Thus, although murders take place on a daily basis in our country, we generally do not hear complaints that no one is enforcing the laws against murder, since we at least see the police and prosecutors going through the process of trying to arrest and prosecute people for those crimes.

According to the criteria I've listed above, two obvious candidates for laws "not being enforced" would be our laws against narcotics and our immigration laws. While staggering amounts of resources are devoted to enforcing both of these, most of us have known people who use drugs at least occasionally and seem to face no legal repercussions, and most of us have met a fair number of illegal immigrants who, by their presence, clearly have not been deported. When we turn to the news or to studies, we find our impressions supported with data showing that vast numbers of people use drugs and large numbers of illegal immigrants are in the country. This causes many people to conclude that these laws are not being enforced, or at least not enforced sufficiently.

But there are other laws which are flaunted at least as often (and have a far smaller percentage of infractions punished) than these laws which do not cause us similar levels of concern. For instance, speeding laws are routinely broken. Police often won't even pull someone over unless he is going 5-10 mph over the limit, even though technically any speed in excess of the limit is an infraction of the law. And numerous speeders are never seen by a policeman. Another example is the drinking age. Sure, plenty of people are punished for violating the drinking age, but the number of times someone under 21 drinks beer or wine is vastly more. And frankly, most people really couldn't care less if somewhere a 19-year-old is quietly having a single beer in the confines of his home or dorm room. In cases like the speed limit and the drinking age, people clearly aren't concerned if many infractions go unpunished so long as the general norms they seek to enforce seem to be basically in place. (With the drinking age, it's hard to see how even that is the case, but for whatever reason, it's not considered a national emergency.)

I would argue that immigration and the drug laws actually have something in common with the drinking age and the speed limit in that truly enforcing these laws to the extent that 90%+ of infractions were punished would require such incredible excesses of an intrusive police state that we would consider the side effects worse than the cure.

Now, I'll start with the less controversial examples: While I could support lowering the drinking age a few years, or raising the highway speed limits a little, I have no problem with those laws existing despite the fact they cannot be wholly enforced. Even with insufficient and at times inconsistent enforcement of these laws, there do serve a social function and value. Thus, in their regard, I think it's okay to have laws which it is impossible to fully enforce.

But what of drug laws and immigration laws -- laws which arguably deal with issues which can have graver impacts to society and to individuals?

While I understand the argument that the "war on drugs" has caused far more suffering than either legalization or lax enforcement would (since it creates a niche in which the drug cartels thrive) I must admit that I am also hesitant about the idea of legalizing drugs. Yet it's hard to see how "we should fight harder" is the answer here. While I don't feel bad about killing or jailing members of the drug cartels, our fighting them seems to enable them more than defeat them (perhaps because defeating one group just helps one of their competitors.)

With immigration, given that we have a 2000 mile land border with Mexico, plus access to both coasts by sea, it's hard to see how any amount of resources spent on enforcement could truly stop illegal immigration from Mexico. The US is simply too attractive, and too many American employers are happy to not ask questions when it comes to hiring cheap labor. I'm sure that we could have better enforcement than at present, but there really is a limit to how good it could ever be. And yet, even as an advocate of far looser immigration restrictions, it's hard to say, "We'll institute better laws, but we'll never be able to enforce them anyway." Though even imperfectly enforced immigration laws surely have some utility. While imperfect enforcement benefits law breakers while disadvantaging those who follow the law, no immigration laws at all could clearly result in a much greater influx than we currently see.

Immigration Thoughts

Unless you are a loyal reader with clear memories of the stuff I was putting out back in 2005, this piece up today at American Catholic on the immigration issue is probably new to you.

Finding Wealth Beyond Measure

One of the things that helps, I suppose, in coughing up a (hopefully) thoughtful post or two every day is having an imagination that tends to grasp a piece of information and immediately slip sideways with it. Thus, when reading a history piece about the pre-Great War US and an opinion piece about illegal immigration coincided, I found myself wondering: What would things have been like if, in 1905, there had been a vast country just to the north of the US which was operation at current US levels of technology and affluence?

In 1905 much of our economy was still agricultural, and "blue collar" work was grim and low paid by today's standards. We talk about the growing gap between rich and poor today, but in most ways that's got nothing on the gap that existed in 1905.

The US wasn't in famine in 1905, it wasn't poverty stricken, but if you lived on a poor family farm it wouldn't necessarily be unusual for your diet to be highly monotonous. Porridge for breakfast, lunch and dinner dominated by bread. Vegetable and fruit were actually seasonal, unless they were jarred or canned. Here in the modern US people go on protein only diets because carbs do too good a job of providing a lot of energy in a small package -- for most of human history people have lived on carbs most of the time for the very same reason.

My grandfather, who grew up in rural New Mexico and joined the navy in 1945, talks about how the thing that amazed him when he joined up was the amount of food they were given. There was as much food as you wanted, and there were a couple different kinds at each meal. You didn't get that in a small mining town in NM in the 30s and 40s.

Before the Great Depression, the early part of this century was in some ways a pretty wide-open, optimistic place to be, for all of what in these days would seem like deprivation. But what if, just across the border, was untold wealth? Wealth that you just couldn't imagine. So much wealth that by laboring in the fields illegally you could make ten times what you could make working back at home.

That kind of temptation would be hard to resist. The dreamers, the ambitious, those looking for a quick buck, the adventurers -- a whole mix of different people, good and bad, hard working and not would have headed up to see what it was all about and try to get a piece of it. The rich would have gone there on vacation and for medical care.

Clearly, there are differences. The countries from which streams of immigrants want to come into our country are not in fact 100 years behind us in technology, though in some economic and political senses they may be nearly a century behind. But it seems an interesting thought experiment.

In order to pioneer, I think you need in some sense to feel like you are being the first. Pioneering something that was already pioneered by others provides no rush and sense of accomplishment. Indeed, when you have yet to pioneer something which for others is common place, I think there's a strong feeling that you should just be able to go get it, or be given it. Why should a whole country have to struggle and strain to attain something which has become so ordinary as to be unappreciated elsewhere? Why shouldn't it just happen without any work at that point?

Well, of course, things don't just happen without any work. Old roads still need work to travel down. That's just how the world works.

But I think we can count ourselves very, very fortunate that we were able to go into new territory first. It certainly wasn't easy, but it avoids a whole set of neurosis and loss of valuable talent that countries must face when they still need to boldly go where most other people went 50+ years before.

Work Americans Won't Do

As the fight over the latest attempt at coming up with new immigration legislation continues, we continue to hear every so often in the press that it's important to bring immigrants in to do "work Americans won't do".

Without question, immigrants (legal and illegal) do backbreaking and poorly paid work throughout this country. (Though the book has its flaws, Mexifornia by Victor Davis Hanson talks about the work and life of illegal immigrant agricultural workers in California from the point of view of someone who's worked beside them in 110 degree vineyards wafting with dust and pesticides.)

However, the phrase "work Americans won't do" has always bothered me. Perhaps the more accurate phrase would be "work Americans won't do if they can afford to palm it off on someone else without paying too much, and thus avoid any incentive to make the work more efficient and less manual."

Partly because of my annoyance with the phrase, and partly because of some lingering "a man's land is his own responsibility" idealism, I've never been able to stomach the idea of hiring a "yard guy". So every other weekend or so finds me and/or MrsDarwin out sweating in the yard.

A year or so ago, this meant I spent a hot May afternoon digging persistent holly roots out of our front yard (in what had been an area of shrubbery and was about to become the rose bed). If you haven't dug out holly before, you must understand that it really does belong in the company of ivy (as in the old carol), because like ivy is it nearly impossible to dig out or exterminate. The roots go down deep and they criss-cross all over with no seeming pattern -- and even the slightest bit that remains in the ground will send up sprouts for years.

I was pounding away with a short-handled mattock when one of a group of teenagers slouching by shouts in my general direction, "Stupid wetback! What ya doin?"

Now, I'm half-Mexican in ancestry, but no one ever guesses it. My hair isn't that dark, and although I take a tan if I get around to going outside enough, I'm not really olive at all. But apparently if I'm wearing workboots, jeans and a white t-shirt and covered in sweat and dirt while working in the yard -- it is actually possible for people to recognize my Mexican background. Perhaps I was even doing some of that famous work that Americans won't do.

So I'm sticking with doing my own yard work.