It is why some countries are racist: Poland/Hungary are unfriendly to illegal immigrant because they don't need them. It is also why Italy has recently become strict with illegals: They don't need that many workers now, so they are not welcome and they are ramping up the extraditions.
Illegal immigration is very easy to solve: You have all workers register with the government, you then put big fines (and jail) for those who hire non-registered people. But the current fines for hiring an illegal are a joke. You can simply pay the fine and hire another the same day and still be more profitable than going by the law.
That doesn’t solve illegal immigration, it just promotes illegal documentation forgery and illegal under-the-table employment on top of illegal immigration.
OTOH, illegal immigration is easy to solve, you first align the numerical limits of your immigration system with demand by retaining only in-total and not per-country caps, and then, if you want a more complete solution, you make those caps soft caps instead of hard caps by allowing supernumerary immigrants that would be qualified but for numerical limits to temporarily reside while waiting in line for a regular slot (or just bypass the line entirely) by paying an annual (or, for the bypass mechanism, larger one-time) impact fee to address expected social costs.
Now, the problem is that many people who say they want to “solve” illegal immigration don’t want to solve illegal immigration, they want to limit total immigration and, particularly, limit immigration of certain nationalities for which there is high immigration demand, and are using “illegality” as a cover.
Anything that increases the costs of illegal immigration will reduce the incidence of it. It will probably never go all the way to zero, but the harder you make it the less it will happen.
Many people, both outside and inside the system, are openly obstructing enforcement of even existing laws and policies. That's the biggest reason illegal immigration continues - a lot of people want it to.
> OTOH, illegal immigration is easy to solve, you first align the numerical limits of your immigration system with demand by retaining only in-total and not per-country caps, and then, if you want a more complete solution, you make those caps soft caps instead of hard caps by allowing supernumerary immigrants that would be qualified but for numerical limits to temporarily reside while waiting in line for a regular slot (or just bypass the line entirely) by paying an annual (or, for the bypass mechanism, larger one-time) impact fee to address expected social costs.
That's like telling people who want to "solve" a high murder rate that they should just legalise murder, problem solved. The limits that we have are the product of our democratic process, even if you disagree with them. Even many pro-immigration people are against the idea of selling extra spaces, and many anti-immigration people would be (rightly!) dubious that the people who the social costs actually fall on would see any of the money.
Well, no, it's not, because people who want to solve a high murder rate will admit that their concern is people getting killed in the conditions that are currently illegal not the illegality. And murder laws reflect the view that those conditions are inherently wrong (mala in se); they don't permit a fixed number of what-would-otherwise-be-murders per year with a specific allocation of who gets to commit them and a waiting list if you would qualify to commit them but your application would exceed the allowed number.
People who conplain about “illegal immigration” pretend that their problem is illegality, not immigration, and the structure of immigration laws reflect that immigration of vast groups of people who are denied legal immigration each year is not inherently wrong but only “wrong” due to aggregate impact, which can be addressed by other means.
> Even many pro-immigration people are against the idea of selling extra spaces,
The only difference between trying to prohibit supernumerary immigration of immigrants who aren't personally barred and selling extra spaces is that the money those people are willing and able to spend to immigrate goes to criminals, and the public foots additional costs of enforcement as well as dealing with the social costs of immigration and the additional social costs of illegality, instead of avoiding the last cost, mitigating the penultimate cost, and avoiding driving money to criminal organizations. And part of the additional social costs of the particular illegality it engenders helping those who are personally barred for good cause avoid detection because the prohibition of immigrants who aren't undesirable breeds widespread contempt for immigration laws and there enforcement.
Maybe. Maybe not. If there was a good answer that everyone was happy with then I'm sure the democratic process would adopt it.
> The only difference between trying to prohibit supernumerary immigration of immigrants who aren't personally barred and selling extra spaces is that the money those people are willing and able to spend to immigrate goes to criminals, and the public foots additional costs of enforcement as well as dealing with the social costs of immigration and the additional social costs of illegality, instead of avoiding the last cost, mitigating the penultimate cost, and avoiding driving money to criminal organizations.
Again, just as with murder; the point of making it illegal is to stop it, and I'm sure the illegality cuts the rate at which it happens.