U.S. immigration policy is based on denial. Most lawmakers in the United States have largely embraced the process of economic “globalization,” yet stubbornly refuse to acknowledge that increased migration, especially from developing nations to developed nations, is an integral and inevitable part of this process. Instead, they continue an impossible quest that began shortly after World War II: the creation of a transnational market in goods and services without a corresponding transnational market for the workers who make those goods and provide those services. In defiance of economic logic, U.S. lawmakers formulate immigration policies to regulate the entry of foreign workers into the country that are largely unrelated to the economic policies they formulate to regulate international commerce. Even in the case of Mexico—with which the United States shares a two-thousand-mile border, a hundred-year history of labor migration, and two decades of purposeful economic integration—the U.S. government tries to impose the same arbitrary limits on immigration as it does on a country as remote as Mongolia. Moreover, while the global trade of goods, services, and capital is regulated through multilateral institutions and agreements, U.S. policymakers persist in viewing immigration as primarily a matter of domestic law enforcement.

This quixotic attempt to promote the expansion of trade across national borders while simultaneously imposing arbitrary numerical limits on the movement of foreign-born workers across U.S. borders has failed. Fruitless efforts by the U.S. government to stem the migratory flows produced by its own economic policies and demanded by the U.S. labor market have simply driven a large share of immigration to the United States underground and swelled the ranks of the undocumented. In the process, U.S. border-enforcement efforts are accomplishing precisely the opposite of their intended effect. Immigrants who might have returned home after a few years of work are now settling permanently. High profits for people smuggling have attracted large-scale criminal organizations from around the world, which pose a far greater risk to national security than undocumented immigrants themselves. The expansion of an underground labor market has driven down wages and working conditions for all workers in industries that employ large numbers of immigrants. There is an unsustainable contradiction between U.S. economic policy and U.S. immigration policy, and economics is winning.

Lawmakers must devise a realistic solution to this dilemma. Perpetuating the status quo by pouring ever larger amounts of money into the enforcement of immigration policies that are in conflict with economic reality will do nothing to address the underlying problem. Nor is it feasible to wall off the United States from the rest of the world. While observers may debate how the process of globalization should be managed and what rules should govern international trade, globalization itself is now a fact of life. The dependence of the United States upon transnational commerce and immigrant labor cannot simply be undone, at least not without devastating the entire economy in the process. It is too late to try forcing the genie of globalization back into the nativist bottle.

The most practical option is to bring U.S. immigration policy in line with the realities of the U.S. labor market and an increasingly global economy. Lawmakers should craft immigration policies that are as responsive to market forces as their economic policies, while implementing and enforcing tough labor laws to guarantee fair wages and good working conditions for all workers, whether native or immigrant. They should establish a process by which undocumented immigrants already living and working in the United States can apply for legal status. And they should treat immigration as the transnational issue it truly is and negotiate migration agreements with other countries, particularly Mexico. By taking these steps, the U.S. government would be able to more effectively control, regulate, and monitor immigration, rather than consigning a large portion to a shadowy and insecure black market.