Keep migrants, and sanction reasonable flow

WASHINGTON — I've written several columns arguing that our society should welcome the current influx of immigrants, not brand them as felons or build a fortress wall along the Mexican border. Quite a few readers have written to ask, often not quite this politely, "OK, so what's your solution?" That's a fair question, so I'll try to answer it.

The easy part, for me, is how to deal with the 11 million undocumented immigrants already in the country. I think the thing to do is put them on track to citizenship — all those who want to become citizens, at least, and whose only crime is being here without the required documents. The word "amnesty" is politically radioactive so we can call it something else, but at the end of the day that's what it's going to be.

After all, we invited these people to come here and pick our strawberries, clean our offices, pluck our chickens, bus our tables, wash our cars and perform a host of other jobs for which our society no longer wants to shell out working-class wages and reasonable benefits such as health insurance. By "invited" I mean that we left the Mexican border essentially open, gave employers the luxury of no-questions-asked hiring without any credible threat of sanctions, and failed to make clear who was supposed to enforce the immigration laws and how. That adds up to an invitation.

The economic counterargument that gets made is that undocumented immigrants depress wages for all low-skilled labor. But I don't hear the claim that there's an actual glut of unskilled workers — just that the undocumented, because of their precarious position, will work for cheap. Shouldn't it follow, then, that wages would rise when these workers were legitimized, enfranchised and unionized?

Some readers have written to argue that the amnesty, whatever it's euphemistically called, would "reward illegal behavior." Let's be real: We're talking about behavior that our society has encouraged and exploited. It would be like a policeman who flags you down, says it's an emergency, asks you to drive him across town as fast as possible and then writes you a ticket for speeding.

Now for the hard part: What to do about the border?