Root causes on the back of an envelope

Two weeks ago, I posted an article in this space about the "Root causes of illegal immigration." I started from a Congressional Research Service report entitled "Central American Migration: Root Causes and U.S. Policy"; and I argued that the Administration's root cause analysis went astray by failing to distinguish between bounded cases (where the number of causes is strictly limited) and unbounded cases (where solving some causes just makes room for others). Then I asked readers whether they would like to see me work out my own root cause analysis of the same problem.

At this writing, seven readers have said "Yes." So I'm going to give it a shot—partly to respond to their interest. 

But the exercise drove home for me another important fact about problem-solving. Finding the root cause is only half the battle! After your analysis has generated a list of potential causes (and for many complex problems there are more than one), you then have to decide which causes you can address. And from that smaller list, you may have to filter again to find which causes you are willing to address! Admittedly if your widget-stamping machine is out of alignment, this last part is easy. Of course you're willing to re-align the widget stamping machine. But in other kinds of complex problems—especially in system problems, of which political problems are prime examples—every action taken over here will have some unintended side effect over there. So before you charge in to fix stuff, you have to weigh what it is worth fixing.

This is important, and I ran smack-dab into it while working through this example.

With that said, let me make a couple of apologies and disclaimers.

Nothing here is brilliant. My earlier post sparked a discussion in the myASQ community, and Jason Wesolowski of TX-RX Systems made all the same points I'm going to make here, with breathtaking elegance, in a couple of paragraphs. My version is longer so I can show my work; but my hat is off to Jason for seeing the issues right away, and for expressing them with admirable concision. 

I am no expert on illegal immigration. There will be points that I miss. This article is a back-of-the-envelope calculation, nothing more. All I really know is the logic of root cause analysis. So if you understand illegal immigration as a subject-matter expert, please take the systematic method that I show you here and flesh it out with better real-life information.

I said this before, but it bears repeating: This is not a post about immigration, nor about the election! In the first place, as noted, I am no expert on these topics. I have no idea what the best immigration policy should be. In the second place, there is lots to discuss here at the level of data and logic, without letting political opinions slow us down. I will keep my opinions out of the conversation.

The discussion unfolds in three steps. First, is there a problem? Second, what are the potential causes? Third, let's evaluate those causes to see which we want to address.  

Is there a problem?

First we have to check whether we have a problem at all? Don't go to a lot of effort to find the root cause for something that's not a problem. So, ... Is illegal immigration a problem?

I think the answer has to be Yes, for at least two reasons.*

From a procedural point of view, it is always bad when an organization's written procedures say one thing, and people in their daily work do something else. (And in civil society, the laws are our "procedures.") When the written procedures and the daily work disagree, it's at best confusing. Nobody knows what the real rules are. Also there is a risk that you'll get punished today for doing what got you praised yesterday. It's maddening.

The solution, when there is a gap between the written procedures and the daily work, is always—always!—to bring them back together. Maybe you enforce the procedures as written. Maybe you rewrite them to match the familiar habits. Maybe you meet in the middle. But tolerating a situation where the organization is chronically out of compliance with its own procedures degrades performance, degrades trust, and degrades morale. It is poisonous. (I talk more about the role of procedures in this post, among other places.)  

From a humanitarian point of view, when someone enters the country without the protection of the law, unscrupulous people can abuse or exploit him. His landlord or his employer can mistreat him, and he has no recourse. If he complains, the authorities discover that he is here illegally, and deport him. So the landlord and the employer are free to do a lot of bad things.

Temporary foreign workers clear
a field west of Montreal. (CBC)

Abuses can turn up even when a migrant enters the country legally. Just a few days ago, the United Nations issued a special report on Canada's Temporary Foreign Worker (TFW) program, comparing it in some instances to a "contemporary form of slavery."** However the case may turn out with Canada's TFW program once the dust settles, it is at any rate a legal public program. How much greater are the opportunities for abuse when the migrant worker has entered the country illegally and can claim no public protection!    

What are the root causes?

This post is already too long, so I have pushed the details of the analysis to another page. YOU CAN SEE THE ANALYSIS BY CLICKING HERE!

Also, when I started work on this I began trying to arrange the root causes on an Ishikawa diagram. I didn't get very far, but you can see the results at the bottom of this page.

But here is the list of potential root causes coming out of that analysis:

• Things are bad in a migrant's home country.
• The US is a big country with a large population.
• The US has very long land borders.
• The US has very long coastlines.
• The US is a good place to live.
• Lots of people find jobs in the US.
• Sometimes the filters at the border might fail to detect an illegal entrant.
• Sometimes the procedures at the border might fail to detain an illegal entrant.
• There is no reliable way to track someone once he is out of official sight.
• The legal entry procedure is very difficult and takes a long time.

If anything here doesn't make sense, the analysis goes through the reasoning in detail.

Now we get to the hard part.

Evaluating root causes, deciding where to act

Some of these points are not actionable. Of the rest, most are facts we probably don't want to change. There is one point that holds promise, but even it is tricky. Let's look at them.

Facts we can't change

The first four points on the list are simple facts that are out of our power.

Things are bad in a migrant's home country.

My last post explained that this fact is the one the Administration tried to change in their "Root Cause" initiative. And they succeeded in improving conditions in three countries. But bad conditions in other countries meant that the next year saw more migrants anyway. Pragmatically, the world is too large and there are too many countries where people are suffering for this to be a useful line of approach. 

That doesn't mean we should never help other countries! I take no position in this article either for or against foreign aid. But we can't expect foreign aid to reduce the immigration pressure.

The US is a big country with a large population.

Yes it is.

The US has very long land borders.

If you want barriers along our borders, that might have a deterrent effect in some places. But there are a lot of miles to cover.

The US has very long coastlines. 

You can't build walls in the water, and there's a lot of coastline.

Facts we (probably) don't want to change

Now we get to points that are more actionable. But we might want to think twice before acting.

The US is a good place to live. 

If we deliberately made the US a post-apocalyptic wasteland, no one would want to come here. But that's crazy. Let's not do that, OK?

Lots of people find jobs in the US.

Norway is a nice place to live, but there are very few illegal immigrants because it is almost impossible to find a job if you don't have legal status. An article from 2017 explains that "'Norway must be one of the most transparent societies in Europe.' It’s also highly regulated, where residents’ addresses are registered with local authorities and banks can’t open accounts for people lacking official identification numbers." Or consider New Zealand: an online discussion thread on exactly this topic explains that New Zealand prosecutes employers who hire illegal immigrants, and the fines are devastating. 

In principle we could do the same in the US, but do we want to? That depends. Most of my professional work has been in high-tech, and whenever I have taken a new job I have been required to show proof that I can legally work in the US.*** But I'm pretty sure there are industries or professions where the rules are not so strict, and I think there is a limit beyond which more rules would feel burdensome. If you ask the teenager down the street to babysit for a couple of hours, do you really have to check that her papers are in order first? (And then keep records to prove that you checked!) Or where is the line? There may be a little room on this front, but I expect not a lot.

Sometimes the filters at the border might fail to detect an illegal entrant.

I don't know if this ever happens, but logically it has to be evaluated. The problem is that every detection system has a failure rate. If we increase the sensitivity of the detection system used at the border, there will be more false positives. In other words, a more sensitive system is more likely to deny entry to normal citizens returning from vacation! Such an "improvement" won't be popular for long.

Sometimes the procedures at the border might fail to detain an illegal entrant.

Again, I don't know if this ever happens, but logically it has to be evaluated. But supposing it were true, what then? Are we asking for sturdier holding facilities at each port of entry? Are we asking for officials to deploy tougher methods? I don't know, but none of that is likely to look good on the evening news. So again, such an "improvement" won't be popular for long.

There is no reliable way to track someone once he is out of official sight.

Here's another point that is in principle easy to fix. Just make the US a police state, where no one can go anywhere without official papers and permission. Every time you arrive in a new town, check in with the Secret Police before you even find a room for the night. Then if anyone does slip past the border illegally, it will be child's play to track him down.

But who wants to live in a country like that?? I don't. You don't. Nobody does. So again, let's not do that! 

This leaves one last cause to consider.

The last root cause

The legal entry procedure is very difficult and takes a long time.

Honestly I think this one looks the most promising, if only because the others look so bad. In principle, "all it takes" to fix this is for Congress and the President to agree on something simpler than what we have now. (Quit snickering! 😀) And it's a common­place of process management that you get people to follow your processes by arranging things so that compliance is easy and noncompliance is hard. Make following the procedure the easiest way to do something, and everyone will follow the procedure. It's the same here. If it is easier to obey the law than to break it, everyone will obey the law. That's what we want.

Or maybe not. Maybe getting that agreement is hard. Maybe we as a country haven't come to a consensus on what we want here. That's not a problem that root-cause analysis can solve. The best I can do is to expose the problem, so that at least we know what we have to answer. But actually to answer it requires political work, and not Quality work.

Don't forget that a complete solution might involve several initiatives at once. Notwithstanding everything I said about the other root causes, they might be involved in partial measures that overlap each other to keep the problem from getting worse while a full solution is implemented.

But, speaking purely from the perspective of this Quality analysis, I think that tackling the last root cause—i.e., reforming immigration law—comes the closest to a winning play.

That doesn't mean it will be easy.

__________

* If you think there are more reasons than these two, that's always possible. I don't claim this is a complete list. 

** You can find the UN report here. For news reports, see here and here. The Canadian government responded on August 16 with a blistering news release accusing that the UN "special rapporteur" "spoke to no employers, did not visit a single farm, and spoke only with 100 workers." Up till now I have been able to find this news release only on LinkedIn, here.  

*** Since I am a citizen, that has not been hard to do.