Illegal Immigration: the Crime that Pays

National Data, By Edwin S. Rubenstein

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Illegal aliens break the law when they enter the country. Ditto the employers who knowingly hire them. Both groups are guilty of crimes. Yet both are merely doing what rational individual (if immoral) would do—because the U.S. government has chosen not to punish these crimes.

About 35 years ago economists began developing a new model of criminal activity. The major breakthrough was the work of Gary Becker, a University of Chicago economist and, later, a Nobel laureate.

In Becker’s model, criminals are rational individuals acting in their own self interest. The “cost” of crime to criminals consists of two parts. One is the income foregone by devoting time to criminal activity—the so-called “opportunity cost”. For illegal aliens, like most criminals, this cost is very small. They are largely unskilled and uneducated; jobs in Mexico, if available at all, do not pay as well.

The second, and far larger, cost of crime to criminals is the time they expect to be incarcerated because of this activity. “Expected punishment” is not the same as the length of time a convicted criminal actually spends in prison. Most crimes never result in an arrest. Many of those arrested aren’t prosecuted. Many convicts are paroled.