Commentary April 29, 2010, 5:00PM EST

The Wailing Wall

Illegal immigration—Arizona's agony—is a national failure. The business case for fixing the problem

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It's easy to scoff at Arizona for using police-state tactics against people who sneak across the border to wash America's dishes, pick its apples, mow its lawns, and care for its children. The state law signed by Governor Jan Brewer on Apr. 23 allows local police to detain anyone they reasonably suspect is in the country unlawfully, and to arrest that person if he doesn't have legitimate identity papers. Although the law prohibits racial profiling, critics think it will inevitably lead to targeting on the basis of appearance. To prod the police into staying tough, the law lets citizens sue bodies that don't enforce it. Even within Arizona the law is controversial. Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard, who is running for governor, calls it a "tragic mistake."

Another mistake would be to dismiss the frustration that led Arizona to pass such a measure. Abandoned by Washington, left to deal on their own with illegal immigration from a nation on their southern border that is consumed by drug violence, Arizonans took matters into their own hands. If the federal government doesn't move quickly to secure porous stretches of the border and pass comprehensive immigration reform, other states may feel compelled to improvise, too.

It was a previous crackdown—a federal effort in California—that helped create Arizona's current nightmare. In 1994 the Clinton Administration launched Operation Gatekeeper, which used fences and patrols to stem illegal border crossings in California. By 2000 the human traffic had shifted eastward, and Arizona was the site of 45% of illegal crossings, up from 8% in 1992, says Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. That fueled a nativist Minutemen militia movement. Arizona got its own fences, of variable effectiveness, on nearly half of its southern flank—and 4,000 Border Patrol agents.

Since Mexicans couldn't make it across by themselves, they turned to vicious Mexican smuggling rings. Suddenly, Alden says, organized crime emerged as a problem. Perhaps the last straw for Arizonans came in late March with the murder of Robert Krentz on his Cochise County cattle ranch, which had been in his family for a century. Krentz was patrolling the 35,950-acre ranch when he was shot by an unknown assailant. It seemed to Arizonans that matters were spinning out of control.

For years, the U.S. has behaved hypocritically on immigration. Legal immigration of low-skilled workers is far below the amount demanded by American businesses, from farms to day-care centers to restaurants. Just 5,000 green cards a year are issued to low-skilled workers seeking permanent residence. In boom times employers would want as many as 400,000 immigrants on permanent or temporary visas, says Tamar Jacoby, president of ImmigrationWorks USA, an employers group. With such a disparity between demand and the legal supply, it's no surprise that smuggling and other forms of criminality are common. The same thing happened the last time the government tried to ban something desired by a big portion of the public. That would be the Prohibition era, from 1920 to 1933, when sales of alcohol were forbidden.

One obvious but imperfect way to relieve the pressure is to increase the number of low-skilled immigrants who are admitted legally. The need for them will only grow in the years ahead. The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicted last year that between 2008 and 2018 the U.S. economy will generate 8.1 million jobs requiring no more than on-the-job training or experience in a related occupation. That's far more than the 4.8 million new jobs that will require a bachelor's degree or more. What makes this solution imperfect is that flooding the job market with immigrants, who don't dare complain about pay or working conditions for fear of being fired and sent home, will harm less educated, native-born Americans and earlier- arriving immigrants who compete with them for work. "When employers say they need 400,000 visas a year, they're saying 'we need indentured servants,' " says Eileen Appelbaum, a Rutgers University economist.