In contemporary American politics a select few contentious issues dominate the news coverage of every major election. The economy, foreign policy, abortion, and a plethora of other issues continuously impact elections. In the 2024 election cycle, one salient issue dominated news coverage: immigration policy. After several decades of lenient immigration policy, America became harshly divided over the estimated 14 million illegal immigrants living within the country. Eventually, the American people elected President Donald Trump, in large part because of his harsh stance against illegal immigration. In his first year in office, President Trump devoted significant resources to bolstering border security and deportation protocols. While a share of advocates on the right tout Trump’s policy as a significant success, many Republicans believe Trump has gone too far in limiting legal immigration.
As Harvard economist George Borjas highlights in his book We Wanted Workers, immigration proves an immensely complex issue and will always produce both winners and losers. Within his discussion of the broader issues at play, he focuses on the argument of renowned Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, stating that illegal immigration is preferable to its legal alternative. In concise terms, he argues that illegal immigrants provide the same benefits that legal migrants contribute, while exerting less strain on the social safety net. Granting the substantial merit of Friedman’s argument in the context of its 1978 publication, the issue of immigration has evolved significantly over the past five decades. Under contemporary conditions, unregulated immigration involves a wide variety of factors that undermine Friedman’s thesis. Even assuming that illegal immigrants provide an increased labor supply that does not burden the social safety net, the secondhand impacts of illegal immigration present a host of problems.
The state of American immigration today has drastically changed since Friedman’s time. In 1980, three years after Friedman delivered his famous “What is America?” lecture, the census estimated there were just over two million undocumented immigrants in the United States. Today, 14 million undocumented immigrants reside in the country. Adjusting for an increased population, the share of illegal immigrants has risen exorbitantly. The larger population of illegal immigrants, alongside various policy reforms, has impacted society in ways that extend beyond their inherent labor contributions.
Back in Friedman’s era undocumented immigrants–aside from their legal status and lack of access to welfare–lived near identical lives to legal migrants: working and living freely without fear of deportation. However, legislation–most notably the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA)–arose largely from a crucial oversight Friedman made. While he asserted that illegal immigrants only occupied jobs undesirable to the native population, illegal migrants slowly started to break into the traditional American workforce. Because of their lower bargaining power and wage demands, migrant workers started to take over conventional blue-collar industries, such as meat packaging. When industry leaders realized they could adopt assembly-line techniques that rely on lower-skill labor, they replaced their union workforces with undocumented immigrants who performed the tasks at a much lower cost. Time has shown that illegal immigration’s consequences diverge from what Friedman initially outlined.
Indeed, Friedman in his lecture outlined that illegal immigration provides value when it blends into the background of society. If immigrants take jobs that the native population does not want and perform them at a level similar to natives, the strength of the domestic economy and the stability of immigrants’ lives improve without worsening outcomes for the native lower class. However, the burgeoning low-skill, low-wage labor supply provided by undocumented immigrants has undermined staple blue-collar jobs. The jobs illegal immigrants occupy are perhaps undesirable because employers have streamlined the production process to minimize costs and the need for skilled labor. With unions commonly demanding wages higher than the local minimum wage, employers’ decision calculus naturally leads them toward hiring illegal immigrants instead of union workers.
Legislation like the IRCA expressly prohibits employers from hiring workers without proper identification, yet these laws have only led to under-the-counter hiring practices that exacerbate the problem. Businesses not only continue to employ undocumented workers–meaning many union laborers cannot get their former jobs back–but now illegal immigrants also lack the bargaining power to advocate for better working conditions. Before the passage of strict legislation, they could approach law enforcement when their rights were violated. Now, employers hold the power to report illegal immigrants if they do not yield to unjust demands, often trapping them in low-paying, high-risk occupations. Both native and undocumented laborers lose under the status quo, due to the reduced ability of illegal immigrants to work jobs with sustainable wages and acceptable working conditions. Friedman argued for illegal immigration from a largely economic standpoint, suggesting that the influx of workers would boost labor supply without diminishing wages. In the wake of immigration reform, his hypothesis partly fails.
An important point of contention here might be that Friedman’s thesis actually still holds. After all, the native population has greater access to the job market than undocumented immigrants, and they choose not to take the jobs that illegal immigrants occupy. His thesis seems compelling: low-skill immigrants take undesirable jobs, employers produce goods more cheaply, and the overall economy benefits as a result. The important qualification, however, is that the jobs immigrants currently hold are different from the ones that existed before their arrival. Before obtaining access to cheap unregulated labor, employers upheld suitable, fair labor conditions that complied with labor laws and union demands. Following the influx of illegal immigrants, the desirability of such jobs drastically diminished.
With rampant industrial innovation, manufacturing companies sought to streamline their production and reduce expenses through the assembly line. Problematically, labor unions and minimum wage laws prevented employers from slashing wages and laying off substantial portions of their labor force. The illegal worker population, however, served as a catalyst for the transition to less-skilled industrial work, due to their willingness to work for low wages. In turn, many skilled blue-collar occupations became obsolete as employers converted to assembly-line style manufacturing, achieving similar productivity at lower costs. Although the quality of these jobs surpassed the quality of jobs available to illegal immigrants in their countries of origin, they did not attract American workers. In fact they effectively forced native workers to search for new occupations. Friedman is correct to argue that illegal immigration benefits the broader economy; however, it adversely impacts skilled workers.
In addition, Milton Friedman famously stood in favor of illegal immigration because he firmly believed it maximized the benefits of immigration without imposing costs on the social safety net. In the modern context, however, illegal immigrants’ relation to government programs has become more entangled. Friedman famously said, “As long as it’s illegal, the people who come in do not qualify for welfare.” This was true in his era, but not anymore. Today, illegal immigrants dip into a variety of public programs without providing commensurate tax revenue. Although the vast majority of undocumented immigrants largely abide by the law, many avoid taxation because they fear it might alert authorities of their illegal status. A 2013 Heritage Foundation study estimates that roughly 45% of undocumented immigrants work off the books, not paying a substantial share of the taxes they owe. Illegal immigrants do not contribute their expected share in taxes, disproportionately burdening the native population.
In the education system, specifically, the undocumented population places a substantial burden on public K-12 schools. Our country pledges to provide public schooling for every child, regardless of citizenship status, on the basis of Plyler v. Doe (1982). The Federation for American Immigration Reform estimated in 2022 that as many as 4.8 million undocumented children utilize the public education system. With the average public school spending per pupil at $15,633, this would mean that local governments spend upwards of $75 billion on the education of unauthorized immigrants. In addition to this hefty economic cost, the addition of millions of students into classrooms worsens overcrowding in schools. Teachers pay less individual attention to each student, extracurricular activities become more competitive, and students have reduced access to limited resources. Undocumented migration greatly strains public schooling without contributing proportional tax revenue, directly harming the native population.
Undocumented immigrants’ use of healthcare also burdens the social safety net. Due to their ineligibility for healthcare benefits, illegal immigrants often neglect to seek necessary medical care until health issues become pressing. Under the Emergency Medical Treatment & Labor Act (EMTALA), hospitals must treat emergency patients regardless of their ability to pay. In these cases, undocumented patients arrive at the hospital and drain scarce resources. Although the government should prioritize the preservation of life, regardless of one’s citizenship status, this situation involves imposing an additional burden on the social safety net not present during Friedman’s era.
The legal troubles of illegal migrants incur costs for the nation as well. Given the classification of undocumented migrants as illegal residents, federal and state governments devote sizable resources to handling the legal status of unauthorized residents. Recently, illegal immigration cases have accounted for around 38% of all federal prosecutions in district courts. This inundation of new cases risks overburdening an already overburdened judicial system. The aggregate administrative costs of managing illegal immigration can impose substantial tolls on social spending and welfare.
Furthermore, even assuming that undocumented immigration provides substantial economic benefits, unregulated migration produces several social issues that impede the nation’s well-being. Because law enforcement asks for formal identification, illegal immigrants often feel compelled to allow crimes to go unreported. In many predominantly Hispanic communities, women underreport crimes like domestic violence and sexual assault. When perpetrators realize they will not face punitive consequences, crime increases.
It is another major flaw of Friedman’s argument that it only examines the consequences of undocumented immigration through a citizen’s point of view. The harsh reality is that the majority of undocumented migrants get to their final destination through extremely dangerous paths. In the United States, migrants predominantly enter through sneaking across the southern border. In permitting illegal immigration, the government implicitly encourages migrants to embark on this dangerous journey. Many would-be immigrants tragically perish attempting to cross the border through perilous means. The government can only prevent this through adopting a harsh domestic stance against illegal immigration.
Lastly, Friedman fails to account for the political impacts of overlooking illicit behavior. Allowing immigrants to live freely in the country directly undermines federal law. When citizens see countless businesses and millions of immigrants violating immigration law, it severely undermines their trust in the legal system. Economic theory finds that economic growth strongly correlates to the rule of law’s robustness. Interruptions of either cause sharp drops in GDP and long-term growth prospects. Even though tolerance of illegal immigration may appear economically beneficial, it can easily cascade into public mistrust of legal statutes and lead to widespread disarray.
Ultimately, immigration poses a difficult problem because there exists no obviously correct approach to crafting specific policy reform. The United States’ population primarily consists of immigrants and their descendants, and immigration has proven instrumental for economic growth and innovation. However many winners America’s immigration policy has produced, it has also produced many critical losers. Although undocumented immigrants improve their lives through moving to the United States and contribute to the American economy, they simultaneously introduce a host of problems for the country and its existing population. In light of these issues, illegal immigration differs significantly from how Milton Friedman described it in the 1970’s. Although illegal immigrants do present benefits, the net impact of illegal immigration today involves far more complex effects than it did several decades ago.
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