June 26, 2008
America’s immigration idiocy
An excellent column by George Will, on a subject close to my heart:
Two-thirds of doctoral candidates in science and engineering in U.S. universities are foreign-born. But only 140,000 employment-based green cards are available annually, and 1 million educated professionals are waiting — often five or more years — for cards. Congress could quickly add a zero to the number available, thereby boosting the U.S. economy and complicating matters for America’s competitors.
Suppose a foreign government had a policy of sending workers to America to be trained in a sophisticated and highly remunerative skill at American taxpayers’ expense, and then forced these workers to go home and compete against American companies. That is what we are doing because we are too generic in defining the immigrant pool.
Barack Obama and other Democrats are theatrically indignant about U.S. companies that locate operations outside the country. But one reason Microsoft opened a software development center in Vancouver is that Canadian immigration laws allow Microsoft to recruit skilled persons it could not retain under U.S. immigration restrictions. Mr. Change We Can Believe In is not advocating the simple change — that added zero — and neither is Mr. Straight Talk.
John McCain’s campaign Web site has a spare statement on “immigration reform” that says nothing about increasing America’s intake of highly qualified immigrants. Obama’s site says only: “Where we can bring in more foreign-born workers with the skills our economy needs, we should.” “Where we can”? We can now.
As an immigration lawyer who has been representing foreign professional workers in the US for some 25 years, I have had many opportunites to see how America’s irrational hostility to skilled as well as unskilled immigrants not only harms this country’s interests in being able to compete in the global econony, but harms individual businesses, including thousands of small companies, which are forced to make hiring decisions dependent on what has become, in effect, a game of immigration roulette due to the shortage of professional visas.
More than this, it also distorts the lives and career plans of tens of thousands of qualified foreign professionals, with not only badly needed science, computer or engineering skills, but also foreign language and/or international business skills that are simply not available in the general population of US citizen workers.
What must these people, who may have invested important years of their lives (as well as money) in acquiring a US education, think of a country that forces H-1B workers, for example, to plan their entire futures on a roll of the dice? And this is only one of many examples of how short-sighted US government policies constantly find new ways to turn away the best and the brightest.
But rather than my dwelling on the details, the main point I would like to make is that American attitudes toward all immigration, skilled and unskilled, legal and illegal, are governed by a deep seated antagonism, whipped up by anti-immigrant TV figures, politicians and newspaper pundits, that blames immigrants for almost every problem in America. This is not a new phenomenon, and has little to do with the after effects of the attacks of September 11, 2001 (in which an estimated 500 immigrants from 90 different countries died - the terrorists, evidently did not check to see which passports their victims were holding before crashing the planes).
Instead, it is based on a backlash that has been building up ever since 1965, when the immigration laws were reformed to eliminate racial restrictions (thinly disguised as “national origin” quotas) that heavily favored immigrants from Northern and Western Europe over all others. Today, some immigration opponents are openly expressing nostalgia for the pre-1965 laws. It is hard to believe that today’s shortages of professional visas would be so acute, and the resentment against skilled foreign workers so strong, if it were not for the fact that so many are from places like India and China, rather than Europe.
At the same time, the paranoia over illegal immigration, which is caused entirely by the fact that our immigration laws irrationally exlude almost all unskilled workers, would quickly subside if most of the “illegals” were white, instead of brown-skinned.
Roger Algase
Posted by: algasema | June 27th, 2008 at 6:45 pm | Report this commentalgasema,
Interesting analysis. But surely it is understandable that any group would want to uphold their cultural identity, which in the case of America was (mostly) European. That is, I am referring to pre-1965 America; now it is possibly too late for such an argument. Now that the demographics have changed, maybe European Americans have lost the moral right to secure culture homogeneity: that would be one minority imposing its will on the rest.
Posted by: RCS | June 27th, 2008 at 7:48 pm | Report this commentRCS, “cultural identity” may be a valid concept in certain contexts, but in the current US immigration debate, it is a loaded term, widely used as a substitute for race. Probably the most graphic example of this is in Samuel Huntington’s recent book “Who Are We”, where he tries, without much success, to argue that the US is European in terms of its “culture” and “values”, without being “white” racially.
This might make some sense were it not for the fact that the book is also filled with virtually every negative anti-Hispanic stereotype that that ever been used in the US. Morever, it expressly shows sympathy with the “white” majority’s efforts to hold onto power and privilege in the face of massive non-white immigration.
75 or 100 years ago, US immigration policy was openly racial, based on pseudo-biological concepts that the Nazis brought to full fruition. Now, it is rather passe, to put it mildly, to talk in these terms, Instead, we have a lot of demagogic talk about how immigrants from Latin America, Asia and the Middle East are “invading” America, destroying its “values” and “sovereignity”, overthowing the English language (which many of them speak more correctly than most Americans), and will lead to the breakup of this country.
Europe is not alone in having its far right anti-immigrant nationalists. We have plenty of our own over here.
Posted by: algasema | June 27th, 2008 at 8:43 pm | Report this commentSorry for overlooking my typo in the spelling of “overthrowing”.
Posted by: algasema | June 28th, 2008 at 1:23 pm | Report this comment