An Addictive Policy

     In a recent post I mentioned a game system I designed. I've actually got a fair bit of mileage out of that experience, and ended up writing my MA thesis on something I call the detection principle. Simply put, it's the idea that if you want to enforce a rule, you need to have some way of detecting when people break it, and it's most efficient to have the voluntary assistance of the people most immediately harmed by the violation of the rule.
     A simple example: Suppose we noticed a problem with unsightly and unsanitary bloody noses. So we pass a law that says anyone sporting a bloody nose will be fined $100, thinking that maybe that deterrent will encourage people to avoid getting bloody noses.
     At first, maybe it has a slightly salutary effect in some cases. We find that people invest in carrying  tissues or otherwise take steps to stop their nosebleeds quicker, or at least slip away to address them in private where they're less likely to be liable to the fine. But soon we find that a particular type of nosebleed becomes more common: people are getting punched in the nose.
     Well, we can't have that. Our law has been effective at reducing the reports of most other kinds of nosebleeds, but these miscreants are ruining everything by getting themselves punched. So maybe we need to raise the fine, because clearly the $100 deterrent isn't enough to keep these people from bleeding all over the place.
      That doesn't seem to work though. If anything, it causes more people to get punched. After all, someone who's inclined to hurt you in the first place by punching you now has a force multiplier: they can punch you and force you to pay a fine for being punched!
     Okay, that's no good. Obviously punching people should be deterred, too. So we'll make them liable as well. Except that doesn't really help much. The punching goes underground. We're still catching people for being punched, but mostly on anonymous tips, often (we suspect but cannot prove) from the people who punched them in the first place.

     The policy is obviously stupid in this thought experiment. We recognize that the victim of a punching is not culpable for bleeding, and that punishing them just deters them from cooperating in our efforts to catch the puncher. And that makes the overall problem of punching worse, which is why I titled this essay "An Addictive Policy"; a mild dose of the perceived remedy to the problem makes the problem worse, so it "needs" a stronger and stronger and stronger dose, none of which actually helps but just convinces us that we absolutely cannot afford to reduce the dose. We're already doing all we can, and look how bad the problem is! Just imagine how much worse it would be if we stopped!

     We don't do this with nose-punching, but we apply almost as stupid and every bit as damaging an approach to illegal immigration. It's perhaps not quite so obvious, because one can argue that an immigrant chooses to cross the border and take work illegally, but the power dynamic is almost identical. Employers may feign being shocked -- shocked! -- to learn that some of their employees are here illegally, but they choose to hire them, and for very good reason: they're cheaper. And they're cheaper because they can't tell anyone if you pay them less than the legal minimum wage, or if you opt not to spend money on expensive legally required workplace safety regulations.
     I am convinced that this is deliberate. Employers want to be able to evade labour laws; they want to be able to pay people less than minimum wage, and they want to be exempt from workplace safety laws. And it's very much worth their while to scream and yell in the public square about how those horrible, horrible immigrants are coming here and stealing jobs and spreading disease and violating our sovereignty and breaking our laws, and we need to really really crack down and build a wall and get rid of them all. They know perfectly well that a wall won't keep anyone out, and that there will always be desperate and disadvantaged people in the country illegally that they can exploit for cheap labour, especially if those desperate and disadvantaged people are deterred from letting anyone see their noses bleed.

    I argue that if you really want to stop illegal immigrants from taking jobs, you need to enlist their help in detecting and punishing the people who hire them. That means you need to stop treating the immigrant as the criminal. Sure, they crossed the border without permission. This is what lawyers call a malum prohibitum (wrong simply because it has been prohibited by the legislature), as distinct from a malum in se (inherently evil). If the legislature decided to allow crossing the border without permission, there'd be no reason whatsoever to be angry at someone who did so, and nothing to deter said person from reporting anyone who paid them less than minimum wage, or who failed to ensure proper workplace safety. Ensure that everyone who works here enjoys the same protections, and there will be no incentive for employers to prefer hiring non-citizens who don't.