KING CANUTE AT THE BORDER

George Bush is the King Canute of the immigration debate, and I mean
that in a nice way.

Canute has an image problem today because so many people think of him
as that batty old English king who thought he could command the tide
to recede. But that's the wrong spin on his legend.

In the original tale, he was a sensible ruler who was tired of
hearing flattery from his courtiers about his great powers. When they
told him that even the tides would obey his command, he went down to
the sea to teach them a lesson in limits.

Today's courtiers are the Republicans in Congress and the others
demanding that America "secure the border." They're furious at Bush
for suggesting that a crackdown at the border will not stop the tide
of illegal immigrants.

"When you make something illegal that people want, there's a way
around it," he said, pointing out an inconvenient reality that would
remain even if a 2,000-mile fence were built on the southern border.
People would keep going under it, through it or around it to other borders.

The Border Patrol has tried building fences and adding thousands of
agents, and in some places it has made smuggling harder. Yet the
overall flow of immigrants hasn't slowed. No matter how hard they
work, the agents can't outlaw basic economics.

In San Diego, for instance, agents took pride that their concentrated
efforts had caused local smugglers to raise their fee to $1,500. But
that's still a small price next to what immigrants stand to gain.
Chinese immigrants are already paying $20,000 apiece to be smuggled
into America.

It's the same kind of economic quandary that has stymied the war on
drugs. For more than a quarter-century, federal and local authorities
have tried to solve America's drug problem by making smuggling and
dealing prohibitively expensive.

They've stepped up enforcement at the borders, promising that more
agents and new technology would make a difference. They've taken the
fight to countries supplying drugs. They filled prisons with dealers
and addicts. But even though they raised the cost of smuggling and
dealing, the increase was never enough to make a difference.

"Seizing drugs has not had any perceptible impact on the availability
of drugs," says Peter Reuter, an economist at the University of
Maryland who's an expert on drugs and other black markets. "Even
though enforcement has gotten tougher by any measure, the prices of
drugs have been falling steadily."

I'm not suggesting that stopping drugs is the same as stopping the
flow of illegal immigrants. In many ways the drug war is easier
because it enjoys more popular support. Most people would like to see
less drug use. No one wants a drug market on the corner, and people
will urge the police to round up dealers and addicts there.

They're not about to turn in the illegal immigrants working in their
stores, their neighborhoods and their homes. They know how hard
immigrants work and how much they contribute. They may tell pollsters
there's too much immigration, but they like the immigrants they know.

Americans are understandably angry to see immigrants' breaking the
law, but they're not going to be assuaged when a crackdown simply
creates more illegality. The only practical way to reduce lawbreaking
is to change the law so more immigrants can enter legally and the
ones here can stop hiding, the approach favored by Bush and Senators
John McCain and Edward Kennedy.

Some skeptics doubt that illegal immigrants want to come forward and
start paying taxes. But most immigrants claim to be willing, at least
according to a new survey of more than 200 undocumented workers in
Los Angeles, Chicago and Miami conducted for the Manhattan Institute
and the National Immigration Forum.

About 4 in 10 of them said they're already getting taxes deducted
from their paychecks, and 70 percent said they'd be willing to pay
back taxes to get legal status. More than 90 percent said they'd
comply with other requirements, like paying a fine of $1,000, getting
fingerprinted and submitting to a criminal background check.

Railing at them for breaking the law is not going to make them go
home or stop others from following them here. Immigrants will cross
the border one way or another. The more of them we let in legally,
the better off everyone will be. Whether you welcome more immigrants,
as I do, or whether you'd rather see fewer, there's no point in
commanding the tide to ebb.