As someone who pays taxes to support our federal government, I was curious about this statement from the IRS: “We’ll not provide you specific details regarding the identity of the individual who used your SSN for employment purposes.” Why not? Assuming that my stolen identity is being used by a worker, the Social Security administration knows the location and name and all the financial details of the employer where the suspected fraud is taking place.

I looked into the matter, and it turns out that I am one of millions of U.S. citizens whose identity is apparently being used by illegal immigrant workers. For decades it has been the policy of the Social Security Administration, under liberal and conservative presidents alike (including Trump), not to share this information with the IRS or Immigration and Customs Enforcement, much less with the victim of identity theft. Doing so would be inconvenient for employers who violate the law against hiring illegal immigrants, to say nothing of the dishonest, cheating foreign nationals themselves.

In the case of suspected identity theft, the Social Security Administration has long had a policy of sending a “no-match” letter to the employer. In the spring of 2021, however, Biden’s Social Security Administration announced that it would no longer send no-match letters. According to the National Law Review, “Immigration advocates and many employers welcomed the announcement.” Of course they did. Employers of illegal immigrants and “immigration advocates”—meaning nonprofit bureaucrats and PR professionals funded by libertarian and leftist foundations, donors, and cheap-labor businesses—treat every method of enforcement of U.S. immigration laws, from policing the border to raiding worksites to deporting violators, as tyranny reminiscent of the Gestapo.

Only in 2020 did the Supreme Court rule that victims of identity theft can sue illegal immigrants and their employers in state court. The four liberal justices on the Supreme Court disagreed with the conservative majority, arguing that prosecutions of immigration-related identity theft on behalf of victims is the monopoly of the federal government—which, as we have seen, under presidents of both parties has chosen not to prosecute immigration-related identity fraud except in rare circumstances.

The connivance of our federal government with cheating employers and law-breaking foreign nationals gets even better—or worse, depending on your perspective. Assuming that my doppelgänger is not paid in cash, and has Social Security taxes deducted from his check by his law-breaking employer every two weeks, what happens to the (probably modest) Social Security taxes paid by the other “Michael Lind” with my Social Security number?

It turns out that for decades the Social Security Administration has been dumping Social Security taxes into a special account for suspected fraudulent payments, to be used to boost the dwindling Social Security trust fund. This is what it means when you read happy-talk articles in the mainstream media declaring that “undocumented immigrants”—by which they mean law-breaking foreign nationals with forged or stolen documentation—are “paying into Social Security.” The Social Security Administration actually profits from illegal immigrant identity theft, while the unauthorized and exploited foreign workers get nothing. Meanwhile, millions of victims of federally abetted identity theft like yours truly are told by our government YOYO (you’re on your own).

The claim that illegal immigrants benefit the economy by paying Social Security taxes under false names and numbers, sales taxes, and other incidental taxes was eloquently rejected by Barbara Jordan, the former civil rights leader and U.S. representative from Texas who chaired President Bill Clinton’s commission on immigration reform: “There are people who argue that some illegal aliens contribute to our community because they may work, pay taxes, send their children to our schools, and in all respects except one, obey the law. Let me be clear: that is not enough.” Jordan also told Congress: “Simply put, if we cannot demagnetize our economy for illegal aliens who come here to seek jobs, we cannot control illegal immigration. If we cannot control illegal immigration, we cannot sustain our national interest in legal immigration. Those who come here illegally, and those who hire them, will destroy the credibility of our immigration policies and their implementation.”

Was Sanders wrong? Consider the massive corruption and refusal to enforce numerous laws involved with worker smuggling at every level of American society, including the mayors and city councils of “sanctuary cities,” the IRS and Social Security Administration, and, under Biden, the Transportation Security Administration and ICE itself. Also consider the increasing violence and armed capability of the Mexican cartels that smuggle in roughly half of America’s illegal immigrants and claimed refugees, many of whom are no longer originating in Mexico or El Salvador but from locations much farther from America’s borders. Is it then natural to ask if prohibition is working? Should limits on immigration be removed? Should the United States adopt an open-borders labor policy?

Smuggling human beings—mostly low-wage conventional workers, but also trafficked prostitutes—into the United States is a massive and lucrative criminal enterprise, just as smuggling alcohol across the Mexican and Canadian borders was in the 1920s. A century ago, Mexican tequileros smuggled bootleg liquor by mule across the Southwest border. Today, so-called “coyotes” working for the major Mexican criminal cartels like the Zetas and the Gulf Cartel are engaged in the industrial-scale smuggling of people—increasingly from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and even Europe, not just from the Americas—into Texas and other border states. In the 1920s, many Americans who wanted a drink could find one at a speakeasy or elsewhere. Similarly, in the 2020s, practically any employer who wants to hire illegal immigrants can do so—confident that the chances of an arrest or an ICE raid of the workplace are near zero under the Biden administration.

The civilian accomplices of the transnational labor-smuggling mafias are much more brazen than the official enablers of alcohol smuggling were during Prohibition. Many progressive cities have declared themselves “sanctuary cities,” forbidding their own police departments from collaborating with immigration authorities. Some cities and states issue drivers licenses and provide welfare payments to illegal immigrants and their stateless children. New York City will now allow foreign nationals who have been in the city for at least 30 days (formerly known as “tourists”) to vote in its elections, though it claims that no illegal immigrants with forged IDs will be allowed to vote. Sure they won’t.

Moreover, outright legal prohibition of this or that vice is not a failure if the law is sometimes violated, as long as enforcement raises the costs of consumption. It may be unfair, but society suffers less from the vices of the affluent few, whose money cushions the impact of their behavior, than from the same vices in the working-class majority. A Hollywood studio executive or politician’s son who snorts cocaine and spends a fortune on escorts is a high-end nuisance compiling material for a future autobiography; a working-class neighborhood transformed by crack houses and bordellos is a social disaster. In the same way, an au pair who overstays her visa and is paid well by a rich family is not a threat to the low-wage American workforce comparable to a never-ending stream of poorly paid foreign workers—legal, illegal, or guest workers (formerly known as indentured servants)—whose availability allows amoral employers to worsen working conditions in construction, gardening, meat-packing, janitorial services, hotel cleaning, and other fields for citizen-workers.

But do low-wage immigrants—regardless of whether they are legal or illegal—actually suppress wages and/or take away jobs? This brings us to what I think of as the borscht belt theory of immigration. The best-known joke identified with the borscht belt—the region of hotels and resorts in the Catskill Mountains that once served a heavily Jewish immigrant clientele—involves a typical patron who complains that “The food in this place is really terrible, and the portions are so small!”

The borscht belt theory of immigration goes like this: “Immigrants do not suppress wages—and without more immigrants, wages will go up and everything will be more expensive!” A related version on the political left is this: “High levels of poverty in the United States are a national disgrace—and also, the United States is not importing enough poor people!” Both statements cannot be true. It cannot be the case that immigrant competition does not suppress wages in a particular occupation, and at the same time also true that employers in the absence of immigration would be forced to raise wages to attract workers and pass the costs along to consumers.

When the intellectual apologists for cheap-labor immigration policies in journalism, the academy, and libertarian and progressive think tanks claim that there are entire categories of jobs that American citizens and legal immigrants already here refuse to do, they really mean that workers refuse to do those jobs in bad conditions for low wages. Scholars have documented many industries and occupations in which employers have used low-wage legal or illegal immigrants or guest workers to break unions and keep wages low, from janitorial services to meat-packing. In tight labor markets, like the one caused by the tech bubble in the late 1990s, the recovery just before the COVID-19 pandemic, and the present period of supply disruptions, employers find that they have to raise wages and lower requirements to attract employees. That’s good for workers, even if it’s painful for employers and some consumers.

Now and then, business lobbyists say the quiet part out loud. “Welcoming immigrants would cool off inflation, U.S. Chamber of Commerce CEO says,” read a Jan. 11 headline in CNN Business. The story quoted Suzanne Clark, the Chamber CEO, calling for the federal government to double the number of legal immigrants: “If we can alleviate the worker shortage, it might be the fastest thing to do to impact inflation.”

And how exactly would doubling legal immigration reduce inflation? The leader of the Chamber of Commerce did not explain, so I will: By enabling American businesses to hire workers for unattractive jobs without having to raise wages. More immigrants means a looser labor market; a looser labor market means a reduction in the ability of workers to demand wage increases, whose cost employers might pass along to consumers in the form of higher prices. (Some employers are able to raise wages without increasing prices by sharing more of their profits with their workers, something which they prefer not to do; others may compensate for higher labor costs with mechanization or automation.)

Not only the Chamber of Commerce but particular lobbies for industries from agribusiness to low-end service sectors to Silicon Valley are constantly demanding increased numerical levels of immigration—not because they are deeply devoted to humanitarian causes, but because lower wages mean more money in their pockets. In boom times and slumps alike, organized American business always wants to import more legal immigrants and more indentured-servant nonimmigrant guest workers, even as it lobbies against enforcement of federal laws against employing illegal immigrants, tax fraud, and identity theft.

Seldom do employer lobbies admit that so-called “immigration reform” is all about profits. In a recent memo summarizing a poll carried out by Fwd.US and America’s Voice, two organizations that lobby for higher immigration levels, three Democratic polling firms—Global Strategy Group, Garin-Hart-Young, and LD Insights—recommended leading with heart-warming tales about reunited families and other happy talk, rather than with economic arguments: “In general, it is better to focus on all of the aforementioned sympathetic details of those affected than to make economic arguments, including arguments about wages and demand for labor. As we have seen in the past, talking about jobs Americans won’t do is not a helpful frame, and other economic arguments are less effective than what is recommended above.”

This, then, is why the parallel between the prohibition of alcohol and the prohibition of smuggled workers breaks down. Unlike the desire of consumers for alcohol, the desire of American employers in many low-wage sectors of the economy to pay workers as little as possible and to keep wages from rising by importing foreign labor is insatiable. Low-wage employers therefore must not be given the opportunity to hire, except under strict limits, from the global labor pool—in spite of the high cost in transnational criminality and widespread disregard for the law that immigration restrictions and enforcement can engender. As Barbara Jordan observed a generation ago: “The commission finds no national interest in continuing to import lesser-skilled and unskilled workers to compete in the most vulnerable parts of our labor force.”

Prohibiting labor smuggling has plenty of bad side effects, from enriching transnational crime syndicates to encouraging a culture of ignoring laws among employers, nonprofits, and even government agencies. But replacing prohibition with an open borders labor policy would be far worse for low-wage American workers of all races, native and foreign-born alike.