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SEIFFE:  How To Solve Illegal Immigration In One Day

Monday, March 6, 2006

By Ralf Seiffe

We could solve the illegal immigration problem in one day by a simple Treasury Regulation.  On the day we decide to end the invasion, the Treasury Secretary should issue a regulation that henceforth, money transfers to countries with which we have an immigration problem are forbidden without an FEIN number.  

For those of you who are not familiar, the Federal Employers Identification Number is a business' equivalent of a Social Security Number.  It serves as the account number for all transactions between a business and the federal government and many states use it for the same purpose.   

The objective of this regulation would be to stop the illegal immigrant's ability to send money home through our banking system or through the other private companies that provide international wire transfer services. Violation of the regulation needn't be a criminal offense; simply confiscating the money civilly would be enough to stop the money flow, especially if the government allowed the bank or the transfer company to keep a portion.

Eliminating the ability to send U.S. dollars back to the family in Mexico , for example, substantially reduces the incentive to come here in the first place.  The value of a money-based plan is that it obviates the one major impediment to immigration reform--employers.  And history tells us employers are right; when President Reagan made his attempt to staunch the problem he wound up giving amnesty in exchange for employer sanctions.  Since then, the sanctions have withered but we still have a crowd at the borders.  

In this proposal, the employers would be free to hire anyone they want, pay their wages and be done with the problem of illegal workers.  This would leave the illegal to his own devices.  Imagine what would happen to a worker in Pilsen trying to send cash to Mexico.  

A trip home with a load of cash in a money belt invites theft by bandidtos and would require the drama of another illegal re-entry to return. If he tried to send the cash through the mail, the most likely outcome is that someone in the Mexican Post Office would steal it. If he tried to counterfeit a FEIN, he'd risk loss and exposure.  

Of course, the immigrant's employer could arrange the transfer under the authority of his own FEIN.  There's a big downside to that, however, because it would tend to spotlight the business, bringing it to the attention of government and bank systems that troll for money laundering operations.  

There are, of course, legitimate reasons to transfer money to countries with which we have an immigration problem.  For example, Ford might need to fund a payroll for its extensive operations in Mexico .  Using the same system they would normally employ to wire money to a disbursing bank in Michigan , they would send it to Banco National in Mexico to pay the workers who now assemble Lincolns there.  To make that transfer, Ford would simply have to reveal its FEIN.  That wouldn't be a problem because we all agree that outsourcing the assembly plant and sending the payroll to Mexico is in the public interest. 

Objections to this concept aren't hard to imagine; counterfeit FEIN numbers, the indirect approach to border control problems that cry out for direct action and  conservatives' usual objection to any proposal that's not a "perfect solution".  The idea that erecting a money fence will force the illegal immigrants to bring their families here is another reasonable concern.  Nevertheless, providing for one's family is one of the most important human motivators; by making it harder, some potential illegals will try something other than border-breaking.  

America 's real immigration problem is not that illegal immigrants want to come here.  After all, every one of us came from someplace else and that includes Native Americans, too.  Individual businessmen who hire the new immigrants are not the problem, either.  They simply react to a situation that's not of their making. The real problem is that the government has failed to control our borders.  But, as we are learning in the war on terror, the concept of borders and territoriality is only one of the fronts.  Perhaps it's time to rethink how we defend ourselves and enlist our all our assets to maintain our culture and wealth.  Adding dollar control to border control might be a FEIN idea.

© 2006 Ralf Seiffe

Ralf Seiffe advises business start-ups and product launches from Chicago, Illinois and is a political analyst and columnist for the Illinois Leader and Illinois Review.