Why bootleggers and Baptists are resisting change on the southern border

As the 2024 presidential cycle accelerates towards November, immigration policy and rhetoric took center stage this past week. With a potential bipartisan deal in the works, Republicans are sparring and President Biden supports presidential authority to shut down the border “when it becomes overwhelmed.”

Let’s hope that this time, at long last, a workable solution to the untenable situation on our southern border emerges. However, if negotiators are to succeed where so many have failed, they’ll need to overcome the “bootlegger/Baptist” dynamic.

Forty years ago, economist Bruce Yandle — who works at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, where I am an affiliated scholar — used regulatory economics and U.S. alcohol regulation to illustrate why seemingly polar opposites join forces and benefit from the status quo, only in very different ways. 

As they win, broader public interests lose. When you can’t figure out why Washington fails to get anything done, here’s a good place to start.

In American towns, both those opposed to drinking — the Baptists of Yandle’s southern upbringing — and local bootleggers have historically favored “Blue laws” that shut down Sunday liquor sales. These Baptists could feel better knowing there would be at least one day a week when evil booze was banned. But under the same laws, bootleggers gained a day of monopoly power and laughed all the way to the bank.

The theory sheds light on the lasting immigration crisis, another situation where seemingly unaligned actors have plenty to gain from policy inertia.

Some of immigration’s “bootleggers” are easy to identify. While bootlegging is inherently illegal, Yandle’s theory applies whether or not laws are broken. It only requires that someone profit from regulations shielding them from competitors, particularly new entrants to markets, or from technological change and exogenous shocks.

Certainly, there is an illegal labor market for immigrants, primarily in low-skill jobs with small firms, in aspects of the gig economy, or with informal employment. Also important are the nearly 800,000 visa overstayers who legally enter the country but remain after their visa expires. Employers who hire illegal workers take advantage of limits in immigration policy and enforcement and are bootleggers in this sense. Individual unauthorized immigrants are party to this operation but are also unorganized and open to exploitation.

Other “bootleggers” operate within immigration laws and even lobby to maintain them. For example, large firms have the resources to flood the H-1B program with petitions for the limited number of temporary, non-immigrant visas for highly educated foreign professionals. Sports and entertainment interests can petition similar visas to bring in individuals with “extraordinary ability.” Each enjoys a system that provides legal access to affordable talent without the obligation to sponsor any particular immigrant forever.

While this type of bootlegger may or may not have a stake in the poorer laborers at the heart of today’s crisis, it constitutes a powerful group with little overall interest in reforms that may be better policy but would upset their apple cart.

And who are immigration’s “Baptists” — those who take the moral high ground amid the controversy? Once again, from Yandle’s perspective, the religious identity of the Baptist example need not be the case. They may be politicians, well-organized groups or members of the public who seek to achieve an objective — or who simply gain influence or political capital — by advocating for regulations that seemingly address an overarching public concern.

While calls for mass deportation, building a wall, haphazardly housing migrants on the border, busing migrants to cities in the north and denying benefits without due process have done little or nothing to solve the crisis, they galvanize people and solidify a political base. Thus, these ideas hold the focus of politicians, distracting them from reasoned policies targeting specific economic and humanitarian aims.

It’s been this way for a long time. A decade ago, the Senate provided superficial hope with a comprehensive immigration bill, which quickly bogged down in the House as the bootlegger/Baptist coalition allowed for only marginal change. No sustained or substantial progress has been made since. Today’s situation is even worse thanks partly to an unholy alliance with more interest in either maintaining a highly dysfunctional U.S. immigration system or unhelpful talking points than reform.

What is to be done? Turning back to regulatory economics, it is usually changes in the demand or supply for a regulation, or some big shock from outside the system, that breaks the cycle. This could happen through the emergence of a new alliance — one that recognizes the bootlegger/Baptist challenge for what it is and can respond with the right mix of political pressure and influence.

This coalition should be founded on the economic advantages of bringing young, talented workers into an aging workforce, and on the social, political and diplomatic value of remembering that the integration of immigrants is a part of America’s heritage. 

Yandle might call this an alliance of bartenders and patriots.

James Witte is an affiliated scholar with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and director for the Institute for Immigration Research.