10 thoughts on “Immigration laws and others not enforced”

1. Weak analogy. I get it, the upper-class wants cheap labor and illegal is better as it has even less rights.

   That hardly makes enforcement of immigration laws the same thing as an ineffective enforcement of speeding laws.

2. The Obamacare individual mandate violation penalty (oh, excuse me, “tax”, repeal scheduled to take effect in 2019) seems like it could have been another addition. The IRS used to return (some) returns as “incomplete” in which one left the answer blank to the question of whether one had been insured during the previous year, but then by Executive Order they processed anyway, and the IRS only recently tightened up that policy, for one year, before the issue becomes moot. The law itself doesn’t allow for liens or prosecution. Even deductions of unpaid penalty/tax from refunds was not apparently very consistent or vigorous, to put it mildly. There was no Lois Lerner for the Obamacare mandate, quite the contrary.

   Cowen just made a similar point, in his way, about the enforcement of (Constitutional) post-viability abortion prohibitions in the wake of Goldberg’s firing of Williamson from The Atlantic.

   I’d point out that these things seem to split in at least two distinguishable categories depending on the degree of political polarization on the particular issue involved. Or perhaps one might better distinguish them by encountering problems with either general public opinion, on the one hand, and elite opinion, on the other.

   For things like media sharing, speeding, and sports betting, the issue is not politicized and hits a wide, general audience. Politicians, police chiefs, and prosecutors – and with little regard for their own party membership or ideology – are mostly worried about upsetting the general public, in a kind of broad public opinion-based “democratic” version of jury nullification by means of preemptive prosecutorial discretion to avoid provocative aggravation.

   Consider the speeding / red-light camera issue. The enthusiasm of municipal jurisdictions for installing such platforms seems uncorrelated with party, as do any local advocacy movements that spring up in opposition to such installations. However, it’s worth pointing out that the impersonal nature and fair implementation of these devices seems to make 100% enforcement more feasible and politically acceptable, while actually having the intended effect (e.g., the near total reversal of the speeding situation on part of my morning commute, achieved in a short time.)

   Emissions controls and mechanical safety inspection regimes are also very widespread, and also quite annoying (infamously so in California), but notice here too that 100% enforcement that bites has become feasible and doesn’t seem to generate a sufficient amount of the kind of opposition any government agent cares about.

   At the other extreme are extremely politically polarized laws like the Obamacare mandate. Here, Democrat administrations are reluctant to harshly enforce the penalty/tax for fear of their ideological opponents making political hay out of some predictably spinnable sob-stories, and Republican administrations had no intention whatsoever of taking “care that the laws be faithfully executed” in the case of enforcing these provisions in good faith anyway, up to the moment they were able to repeal them.

   The case of immigration and abortion is mostly reversed, though most GOP establishment politicians share general elite opinion and are only cynically signalling to their own voters that they care about enforcement of the law. Still, one sees Democrat administrations trying to ignore and effectively neutralize the law for ideological reasons, and any attempts of Republican administrations to try and enforce the law stymied in a much more partisan manner.

   But that’s just for laws that are enforced by the state itself and on its own initiative. However, laws that give ordinary citizens private rights of action (and sometimes able to rely upon the assistance of government agencies for actual prosecution of the claims) are just as important in terms of imposing serious penalties and much harder to limit via discretion.

   Consider the gay-marriage-based commercial discrimination cases. If these matters were strictly in the hands of agents more sensitive to political pressures and averse to jurisprudential gambling with the risk of establishing long-standing precedents going the other way before public opinion was prepared to accept the new policies, I’m guessing the laws would have be legamoronic in most parts of the country in which the issue might ever arise, and it would have been less likely that we’d already be getting SCOTUS decisions on them this year.

3. There are different kinds of laws that don’t get ‘enforced.’
   Some are laws against things that don’t happen any more. With all the free music on Youtube, you don’t need to have your own MP3s. With most of the software you need coming bundled on the device, or available at a low cost/ad supported, you don’t pirate anymore.
   Then there are the blue laws and such that nobody cares about, but weren’t taken off the books.
   Then there are social issues which are still contentious where enforcement depends on locality
   There are laws which are so harsh to be used as proxies for other informal regulations… tax evasion was used against organized crime, not against people who fudged their deductions.

   • There are laws which are so harsh to be used as proxies for other informal regulations… tax evasion was used against organized crime, not against people who fudged their deductions.

     Vague and flexible “Obstruction of Justice” rules, untethered from having to be associated by any underlying crime, provide a good example.

     Another interesting, though different case is the antideficiency act, which compels agencies to only spend as much as they’ve been appropriated, and only for the purposes allowed by law. Technically, is has a criminal application, but it’s never been pursued in that way. From La Wik

     Although the ADA and its predecessors are over 120 years old, no one has ever been convicted or indicted for its violation. However … punitive administrative actions are routinely taken against government employees.

     In my experience, while I’ve seen reports of ADA violations, I’ve never even seen a genuinely “punitive” admin action result thereof, or even any action that had any perceptible negative impact on the culpable party’s expected career path except in truly rare and extraordinary cases. Even very weak enforcement of rules like this provides sufficient incentive to keep everyone in line, since even a relatively unlikely prospect of an incident which could thwart one’s professional and career ambitions by making one slightly less impressive than one’s competitors for scarce promotion opportunities is enough to keep the target class of people steadfastly in compliance.

     • Another example – the “lying to a government agent” laws which are used as a prosecutorial shortcut when government agents manage to entrap the target. The recent example is Michael Flynn – if he were actually brought up on any kind of germane charge his court case would have made a media circus, with an uncomfortable focus on the decision-making of particular government employees.

4. I can’t find the common theme on the unenforceables, except maybe anonymous exchange. With simple two party exchanges, trade would build up too many arbitrage points. Guv taxes inventory best, the natural congestion point.

5. What we really want is for people to drive in a way that does not cause undue risk to other drivers. This is much harder to codify than a speed limit,

   Right … we want responsible police & prosecutors to exercise discretion.

   Yet there are many cases of abuse, and less discretion is the usual reaction to publicity about abuse of discretion.

   On speed limit laws, it’s pretty easy for the police and the public to agree that 20 miles too fast is too much; 15 miles too fast is too much; and 10 miles too fast might be ok, but might be too much. So the de facto is mostly discretion between 10-20 mph too fast. Occasionally, only 5 mph too much will lead to a citation; and perhaps more often 20+ doesn’t — in both cases when the cops are nearby.

   Tech says, with cameras, the cops can almost always be nearby.

   If cameras can be nearby, the Speed Limit signs can also become variable — so that they show good weather, mostly, and a slower speed limit with worse weather. This complicates enforcement and habits, but might lead to more reasonable speed limits.

   Finally, speed limits are clearly anti-Libertarian, since “nobody is hurt”. They are an excellent example of a precautionary law where the probability of harm and of higher damage increases with speed, so there is some limit chosen that is enforced to punish those whose actions show an increased probability of harm. Libertarians are philosophically against this — but that’s why the Lib philosophy, in practice, seems so unworkable in the real world.

6. 1) I still say Sexual Harassment is 90% legal here and the cultural phenomenon is ensuring it is treated as legal survives.
   2) And iTunes, Pandora, and Spotify have created legal substitutes for Napster.- Very True but I also assume with software as well. They have made it cheap and easy enough to do legal sales and most people know they are risking hacking and identity theft for illegal ones.
   3) Legalization of marijuana seems to gaining speed and now even in red states it is becoming like speeding. (Although not heavy enforced, it does impact people driving.)
   4) In the SW immigration laws are still lax by local authorities.

7. The best way to overturn an unpopular law is to enforce it vigorously. See: Prohibition.

   – If rich white college kids routinely went to jail for smoking a joint, marijuana laws would be repealed, and in fact repealed with expunged records for previous offenders.

   – Speeding is not really about repealing laws, it is about nuisance fines for local revenue. Anyway, we tend to slow down as we get older, so you are more likely to care less as you vote more. But notice how red light cameras tend to get removed as enforcement “tailoring” (e.g. moving the white line around, changing the orange time, rear-enders near red lights etc) starts to punish good drivers.

   For immigration, I do not think rich people think of Mexicans as cheap labor for clipping their hedges. And not cheap labor for big business, which in theory should be checking documentation (mine have always been checked by employers). Therefore, it appears to be a political strategy aimed at importing voters. It would be interesting to see if a massive campaign to deport all illegals would cause the laws to be changed.

8. I think “legamoron” is a useful word. We need another word for laws we want enforced by and for corporations but not against individuals.

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