Why Is There So Little Interior Immigration Enforcement?

Why is there so little enforcement of the immigration laws, except right at the southern border?

The basic reason, of course, is that except for intercepting those entering without inspection (EWIs), the administration is not very interested in the subject.

It does not want to do much in the interior, beyond deporting the most obvious of the criminals among the illegal aliens, and is not even very enthusiastic about that activity.

Within this context, however, there are other barriers to enforcement, problems that persist no matter what the mood of the party in power. With that in mind, I have devised a taxonomy of immigration fraud showing the numerous ways that the immigration law can be broken, and some of the built-in difficulties in responding.

The first thing to notice is the incredibly long list of ways that people try to beat the immigration law, considerably condensed in the table below. Aliens, employers, and middlemen of various kinds have devised a plethora of ways to try to violate the law, and some of them are harder to handle than others.

In some cases, the crime is hard to identify; in others, the violators have large lobbies rooting for them; and some violations have no political support. Further, some of these techniques are much more common than others.

We have identified three major sets of enforcement challenges. There are those in which the violator is operating pretty much alone, such as the case of the individual EWI, and the single employer of EWIs and other illegal aliens.

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