The latest catch phrase in the immigration debate is that we must “get control of our borders” before we consider actually changing the current immigration law that has made enforcement so difficult in the first place.

In his Washington Post column yesterday, George Will wrote that “the government’s refusal to control [the U.S.-Mexican] border is why there are an estimated 460,000 illegal immigrants in Arizona and why the nation, sensibly insisting on first things first, resists ‘comprehensive’ immigration reform.”

On the other side of the political spectrum, Democrats in Congress this week unveiled the outlines of an immigration bill that would postpone any broader reforms, such as a new worker visa program or legalization of workers already here, until a series of border security “benchmarks” have been met.

Requiring successful enforcement of the current immigration laws before they can be changed is a non sequitur. It’s like saying, in 1932, that we can’t repeal the nationwide prohibition on alcohol consumption until we’ve drastically reduced the number of moonshine stills and bootleggers. But Prohibition itself created the conditions for the rise of those underground enterprises, and the repeal of Prohibition was necessary before the government could “get control” of its unintended consequences.

Illegal immigration is the Prohibition debate of our day. By essentially barring the legal entry of low-skilled immigrant workers, our own government has created the conditions for an underground labor market, complete with smuggling and day-labor operations. As long as the government maintains this prohibition, illegal immigration will be widespread, and the cost of reducing it, in tax dollars and compromised civil liberties, will be enormous.

We know from experience that expanding opportunities for legal immigration can dramatically reduce incentives for illegal immigration. In the 1950s, the federal government faced widespread illegal immigration across the Mexican border. In response, the government simultaneously beefed up enforcement while greatly expanding the number of workers allowed in the country through the Bracero guest-worker program. The result: Apprehensions at the border dropped by 95 percent. (For documentation, see this excellent 2003 paper by Stuart Anderson, a Cato adjunct scholar and executive director of the National Foundation for American Policy.)

If we want to “get control” of our border with Mexico, the smartest thing we could do would be to allow more workers to enter the United States legally under the umbrella of comprehensive immigration reform. Then we could focus our enforcement resources on a much smaller number of people who for whatever reason are still operating outside the law.

Arizona’s harsh new law against illegal immigration is being justified in part as a measure to combat crime. The murder of an Arizona rancher in March, allegedly by somebody in the country without documentation, galvanized support for the bill.

The death of the rancher was a tragedy, and drug-related violence along the border is a real problem, but it is a smear to blame low-skilled immigrant workers from Latin America for creating a crime problem in Arizona.

The crime rate in Arizona in 2008 was the lowest it has been in four decades. In the past decade, as the number of illegal immigrants in the state grew rapidly, the violent crime rate dropped by 23 percent, the property crime rate by 28 percent. (You can check out the DoJ figures here.)

Census data show that immigrants are actually less likely to commit crimes than their native-born counterparts, as I unpacked a few months ago in an article for Commentary magazine titled, “Higher Immigration, Lower Crime.”

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published an article by John Yoo that criticized the Obama administration’s decision to prosecute Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM) and several of his fellow Guantanamo prisoners in civilian court.  Yoo makes too many claims for me to respond to in a blog post, but let me address a few.

According to Yoo, “The treatment of the 9/11 attacks as a criminal matter rather than an act of war will cripple American efforts to fight terrorism.  It is in effect a declaration that this nation is no longer at war.”  That is an odd thing to say for several reasons.  First, it is all over the news: We are still very much at war.  Second, even if Obama pulled U.S. troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq, would the United States really be “crippled” in the fight against bin Laden?  ”Crippled”  suggests the U.S. is on the verge of joining Costa Rica or Belize in terms of our military strength.  Farfetched.  Third, the Bush administration also treated the 9/11 attacks as a criminal matter when it indicted and prosecuted Zacarias Moussaoui in civilian court.  Yoo seems to think that that call was mistaken, but did it ”cripple” the U.S.?  Did the Bush administration, in effect, declare that the U.S. was “no longer at war”?  Of course not.  So why does Yoo make that claim now?  Odd.

Next, Yoo complains that by bringing KSM to New York for a civilian trial, the prisoner will get to “enjoy the benefits and rights that the Constitution accords to citizens and resident aliens.”  This is another odd statement because the benefits of a civilian trial (public trial, jury trial, calling witnesses, confronting adverse witnesses, etc) are not limited to citizens and resident aliens.  After all, Asian tourists and illegal immigrants from Mexico, to take two examples, are not “citizens” or “resident aliens.”  If a federal prosecutor were to accuse them of a crime, they would get a trial in civilian court.  A claim that the government could deny, say, a nonresident alien from China a civilian trial would be totally at odds with American constitutional law.  Yoo may disagree with that law, but if he does, he should have made that clear because he left a misleading impression.

Third, Yoo calls the Moussaoui trial a “circus” because it provided Moussaoui with a “platform to air his anti-American tirades.”  Well, to start, just because Yoo calls a trial a “circus” does not make it so.  The federal judge in the Moussaoui case did what we would expect a good American judge to do–that is, give the person who is accused of the crime a fair opportunity to speak and to offer a defense.   At the same time, the  judge must maintain order in the courtroom and anyone who becomes disruptive (including the accused) can be removed.  The potential problem of  a “tirade” is nothing new and is not, of course, limited to persons who share bin Laden’s twisted worldview.  Some recent examples include the Unabomber and the shooter at the Holocaust museum.  In short, it is a weak argument to critique our system of civilian trials because the defendant may want to insist on saying something that is unpopular, unpleasant, or incoherent.  And, at the time of sentencing, a trial judge can respond, as Judge William Young did when he sentenced Richard Reid to life behind bars.

For more on the subject of military commissions, go here and here.  For more on John Yoo, go here and here.