State immigration laws usually offer more enforcement, rules, and regulations that exacerbate the effects of our already-restrictive immigration laws.
This time, California is making an exception. A new California law, AB 1544, proposed by Assemblyman Manuel Perez, D-Coachella, and originally coauthored by Assemblywoman Linda Halderman, R-Fresno, who has since removed her support, sets up a state work permit (subject to federal approval) to legalize many unauthorized immigrants in California.
Unauthorized immigrants make up the majority of farmworkers in California, as they do in many other states. Many unauthorized immigrants also labor in the service, light manufacturing, and food-preparation sectors. Native-born Americans would have to take a big pay cut to work in these industries, something most are not willing to do.
Bringing these workers into the legal market will help California’s economy and, consequently, expand the tax base. California’s proposed immigration law will expand the size of the market rather than shrinking it, as immigration laws in Alabama, Arizona, and Georgia have done.
Intractable deficits are forcing Californians to rethink how they deal with unauthorized immigration, just as the desire for taxing alcohol—not a sobering realization that banning alcohol was a failure—was the straw that broke the back of Prohibition in 1934.
During the Great Depression in the 1930s, the federal government faced problems similar to the ones California is confronting today. Plummeting tax revenues, massive government spending sprees under President Hoover and President Roosevelt, and already-high tax rates put the government in a bind. How to raise revenue? Like so many answers, this one lay in the bottom of a bottle.
Prohibition of alcohol became law in 1920 largely because of the offsetting revenue from the income tax. In 1913, the last year before the federal income tax became law, about a third of federal revenue came from taxes on alcohol. When the income tax provided an unexpectedly huge boost to government revenues, the government could ban alcohol and deny itself the tax revenue. Deficits during the Great Depression changed that thinking.
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