An out-of-control situation fostering criminality, coupled with heated division on enforcement and a sense that the federal government has lost its grip on the situation? If you were thinking about America’s current migrant crisis, that may be true. But these descriptions also refer to an era from 100 years ago: Prohibition.
While obviously immigration is not the same as illegal alcohol production, our attempt at prohibition against both produces the same effects. America does have a legal immigration system, but that is a facade. That system, which has not been updated since 1990, has limited allowances for legal immigrants, long paper-intensive processes and a backlog of 9 million cases that render it hollow.
From 1920 until 1933, America embarked on what President Herbert Hoover described as “a great social and economic experiment” to ban the distribution, sale and consumption of alcoholic drinks. Prohibition’s purpose was to protect families from the scourge of drunkenness, but it had unintended consequences including an explosion of smuggling, organized crime, an increase in the murder rate and, yes, and an out-of-control northern border.
With the passage of the 18th Amendment banning alcohol in 1919, former President William Howard Taft, who later became a Supreme Court justice, said: “The business of manufacturing alcohol will go out of the hands of law-abiding members of the community and will be transferred to the quasi-criminal class.”
Prior to Prohibition, the term “organized crime” did not exist, but with the ban, the demand for illegal alcohol was so powerful that mob kingpins such as Al Capone and Lucky Luciano quickly began filling the void, running illegal importation operations from Canada and pulling in as much $3.6 million per year in untaxed income, which would be about $62 million in today’s dollars.
All these things are now true for immigration. In place of the Bowery Boys and the Five Points Gang of the Prohibition era, the Sinaloa, Jalisco New Generation and Gulf cartels are the new Al Capones. Criminal syndicates charge fees ranging from $4,000 to $20,000 for human smuggling. Similar to the Prohibition era, these enterprises have teams that specialize in logistics, transportation, surveillance, stash houses and accounting — all supporting an industry whose revenues have soared to an estimated $13 billion today from $500 million in 2018, according to Homeland Security Investigations.
Like the Prohibition era, the illogical nature of our immigration laws has broken the federal government. There are more than 2 million asylum cases pending in U.S. immigration courts, more than 1 million work permits in need of processing and only 140,000 permanent legal immigrant visas allowed for individuals who want to work while America has millions of job openings. The federal government spends more on its immigration enforcement agencies than all other federal enforcement agencies combined, and what do we have to show for it?
Prohibition did permit exceptions in the same way America’s current legal immigration does provide avenues, but in both cases, the public then, as the public now, bent those rules well beyond their intention to meet the demands of that time. During Prohibition, for example, the law allowed for medicinal use of alcohol. This exception quickly overwhelmed the medical profession as doctors pocketed an estimated $40 million for writing medicinal whiskey prescriptions. No less than Charles Walgreen, founder of Walgreens, intimated that his wealth was built on the medicinal alcohol exception. Philadelphians primarily got their alcohol from the chemical industry, where denatured alcohol produced under government permit for industrial uses could be diverted and made available for consumption within days.
Similarly, asylum laws were only meant for a small portion of individuals who are seeking asylum. Of the 1.3 million pending asylum cases, chances are only about 31% of them will get asylum, based on historical trends. Asylum is an exceptional remedy, just as medicinal alcohol was then, but in both situations, the exceptional quickly became the rule because they are essentially the only game in town.
What lessons can we learn from our failures then and now? First, repealing Prohibition did not suddenly make drinking entirely available no more than reforming our immigration laws would lead to open borders. A series of regulations after the repeal of Prohibition in the 1930s led to closing hours, age limits, Sunday blue laws and a collection of geography-related prescriptions that kept bars and package stores away from schools, churches and hospitals. State licensing requirements forced legal sellers to live by codes that met the demands of the public while keeping them safe.
The same is true for immigration. Updating our immigration system with a much larger number of legal immigrants, a greater number of immigration pathways, faster temporary work visa processing, technological case management improvements and far more flexibility in increasing immigration numbers during good times and decreasing in bad would help as well. While expanding legal immigrant pathways, closing other pathways is critical, as are enforcing stringent asylum rules and increasing the likelihood of having an asylum claim heard.
In the end, American satirist Mark Twain’s adage was correct: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” The rhymes of our failure on Prohibition can be useful for our current immigration crisis.
Christopher Richardson is an immigration attorney, a historian and a former U.S. diplomat. He is also chief operating officer of BDV Solutions, a labor solutions consulting firm.
Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email letters@chicagotribune.com.
Christopher Richardson: Prohibition has lessons for us as we grapple with an overwhelming immigration problem
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01.12.2023
An out-of-control situation fostering criminality, coupled with heated division on enforcement and a sense that the federal government has lost its grip on the situation? If you were thinking about America’s current migrant crisis, that may be true. But these descriptions also refer to an era from 100 years ago: Prohibition.
While obviously immigration is not the same as illegal alcohol production, our attempt at prohibition against both produces the same effects. America does have a legal immigration system, but that is a facade. That system, which has not been updated since 1990, has limited allowances for legal immigrants, long paper-intensive processes and a backlog of 9 million cases that render it hollow.
From 1920 until 1933, America embarked on what President Herbert Hoover described as “a great social and economic experiment” to ban the distribution, sale and consumption of alcoholic drinks. Prohibition’s purpose was to protect families from the scourge of drunkenness, but it had unintended consequences including an explosion of smuggling, organized crime, an increase in the murder rate and, yes, and an out-of-control northern border.
With the passage of the 18th Amendment banning alcohol in 1919, former President William Howard Taft, who later became a Supreme Court justice, said: “The business of manufacturing alcohol will go out of the hands of law-abiding members of the community and will........
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