Policy Resistance – Immigration & Prohibition

Complex systems find many ways of resisting or evading pressures, resulting in policy failure, backlashes, whack-a-mole games and other unintended consequences. Some great examples just wandered by my desk:

Via Economist’s View:

Immigration reform has a long history of unintended consequences: More than two decades of increased enforcement since the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 has done little to reduce the number of illegal immigrants. In fact, it seems to have increased their numbers. …

Princeton University sociologist Douglas Massey pointed out … that measures to secure the border seemed to produce almost the opposite of what was intended. … With increasing border enforcement, workers who used to shuttle between jobs in California or Texas and home in Zacatecas or Michoacán simply began to stay put and sent for their families, becoming permanent, if sometimes reluctant, residents. According to Massey, post-IRCA border enforcement may have increased the size of the permanent Mexican population in the United States by a factor of nearly four.

From a great article on Wayne Wheeler, The Man Who Turned Off the Taps, in Smithsonian:





The prohibition article also poses an interesting puzzle. If prohibition was more or less quickly and broadly unpopular, how did it get passed by such landslide margins in the first place? I can’t believe that ignorance of the possible outcome was universal, so there must have been some powerful positive feedback behind the initial passage of the policy. Perhaps it was a tipping point effect: once a vote becomes sufficiently lopsided, fewer and fewer politicians want to be on the losing side of a landslide vote, so they join the herd. A modern analogy might be the post-9/11 authorization of the Iraq war.