Enforcing the law works. Imagine that.

Since the Federal government is consistently shirking one of its few explicitly stated Constitutional responsibilities, that of maintaining the U.S.'s border security (while simultaneously sticking its ever-intrusive nose into just about all other aspects of the peasantry's lives), some states such as Arizona and Oklahoma have given up waiting for it to ever take action, and have implemented strict laws on their own that deal with illegal immigration.

In Arizona, as of January 1 it is now illegal to knowingly hire illegal immigrants, something that is truly not that hard to avoid. A business faces a ten-day suspension of its business license for a first offense, and risks losing it for good for subsequent violations. Oklahoma has gone much further than that, making it a felony to transport or shelter illegal immigrants, and makes it a crime for them to attempt to obtain driver's licenses or sign up for social services.

The states have enacted these laws for numerous reasons, such as saving the states millions of dollars in social services paid to people who do not pay taxes, reducing the large amount of petty and serious crimes that are committed by a very small but highly visible portion of the illegal population, and preserving the wage rates for legal residents, as proved by a report issued just this week:

"Illegal immigrants cost Arizonans at least $1.4 billion in lower wages in 2005, a prominent Harvard labor economist estimates in a report released this week."

Are some of these laws too harsh? It's admittedly debatable, especially the Oklahoma law. What's not debatable, however, are the immediate results that the new laws are getting right after they have gone into effect. Both states are reporting that illegal residents are leaving in droves, both to neighboring states with more lenient policies and back to their home countries. This is proof that reducing the demand for cheap, exploitable immigrant labor is reducing the supply, just as economic theory predicts.

Companies that are located in those states are just going to have to pay their employees American-standard wages, not Third-World starvation pay, and the consumers are just going to have to shell out a little more for their yardwork or Big Mac, and maybe forgo that second big-screen TV for Junior's room. A fair trade, if you ask me. I tend to agree with Oklahoma State Representative Randy Terrill, the sponsor of his state's law, who is quoted in the USA Today article as stating that "There is no job that an American citizen is unwilling to do," he says. "They're just not willing to do it at the wage rates that are being paid to illegal aliens."

One of the wonderful parts of our representative republic is the fact that different states can experiment with different policies, the "legislative experiments" that the Founders envisioned. If one state's law fails to work, the other states can ignore it and continue on as they always do. If it does work, however, the other states will receive added pressure to adopt similar legislation from their own citizens eager to obtain the same results. This process has already begun, as Arkansas State Representative Rick Green admits:

"We're getting a lot of pressure at home because they see what Oklahoma's done".

Who knows? A tidal wave of successes at the state level may even force the U.S. Congress and the President to get off their duffs and start doing their jobs correctly.