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OVER THE LAST DECADE we have seen a sharp increase in the estimated numbers of would-be immigrants who have died trying to get into the United States and into Europe. Who is it we are determined to keep out to the point that they risk their lives to get in? An equally determined but tiny minority of men, women and children from mostly poor countries, who will come no matter what in search of work or refuge. They are not criminals. But the result of our determination is that we are feeding a criminal trade. There has been a sharp growth in illegal trafficking of people as receiving countries have clamped down on entries and semi-militarized more and more borders.
These developments raise two issues. One concerns the old trade-off between policies that criminalize what may not intrinsically be a criminal act and to do so in the name of controlling a somewhat untenable situation; this in turn raises the incentives for genuinely criminal actors to promote the forbidden activity. A familiar instance of this trade-off concerns marijuana control policy. Does the criminalizing of marijuana in the U.S. - and the UK - really work better as a policy to control its use than the controlled legality of marijuana in the Netherlands, which leaves very little room for profit making by drug dealers and hence no incentive to expand its use?
The second policy issue raised by these developments is that the deaths of these thousands of people attempting to enter affect us all, not only those directly concerned. The fact that these people lack the proper documents for entry is easily represented in policy and media circles as exempting us from any responsibility as societies for these deaths. The lack of proper documents somehow seems to make these deaths less human and reduce whatever might be our responsibility contributing to these deaths.
The trend toward greater police and military control and growing disregard for international human rights codes as well as our civil liberties laws is promoting illegal trafficking and weakening our rule of law and thereby our democracies. These policies are adding to an already growing mix of what I would describe as negative incentives, or incentives with negative outcomes for significant sectors...