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Instead of Cutting Legal Immigration in Half Over a Decade, Let’s Increase It
I want to make sure I understand this. President Trump is supporting an immigration bill from GOP Senators Tom Cotton and David Perdue that would replace, as The New York Times explains, “a system that favors family ties in deciding who can legally move to the United States with one based on skills and employability.”
So more a merit-based system that gives an edge to those who have advanced skill and restricts those who don’t.
I campaigned on creating a merit-based immigration system that protects U.S. workers & taxpayers. Watch: https://t.co/lv3ScSKnF6 #RAISEAct pic.twitter.com/zCFK5OfYnB
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 2, 2017
The end result here, according to The Wall Street Journal paraphrasing a Cotton aide, is that “the legislation would decrease overall immigration to about 638,000 in its first year—a 41% drop—and to about 540,000 by its 10th year—a 50% reduction. The number of employment-based green cards issued each year would remain at 140,000.”
A few things:
First, the US is hardly an immigration outlier here, whether it’s the average annual inflow of immigrants as a percent of population or the stock of immigrants as a percent of the population.
Second, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that “the impact of immigration on average native-born workers remains small and inconsistent, with no evidence to show a large detrimental impact on less-educated workers.”
Third, economists strongly agree that the average US citizen would be better off if a larger number of highly educated foreign workers were legally allowed to immigrate to the US each year.
Fourth, a demographic-driven slowdown in US labor force growth means real GDP growth is likely to be slower in the future than in the past.
Fifth, slower labor force growth means we need faster productivity. And “evidence also shows that immigrant scientists and entrepreneurs play a disproportionate role in driving the technological advances that power productivity growth in the United States.”
So given all that, isn’t this bill off point? How about a bill to sharply boost overall immigration with an emphasis on attracting many, many more immigrant scientists and entrepreneurs? This from McKinsey: “The nation could generate tremendous impact on productivity in the near term and beyond 2020 by increasing the annual flow of high-skilled immigrants.”
And as I have also noted:
Roughly half of U.S.-based unicorns — technology startups worth at least $1 billion — were founded by immigrants, with India the top nation of origin. As venture capitalist Paul Graham tweets, “This is a good time to remember that without immigration the U.S. will only have 5 percent of the top people in each field.” And more to the point regarding the Trump ban, as The Atlantic notes, “Iranian-Americans founded or hold leadership positions at Twitter, Dropbox, Oracle, Expedia, eBay, and Tinder.”
If a smart person with a good idea wants to do great things, shouldn’t America be the place that helps make that ambition happen?
Published in Economics, Immigration
He feels the same way about immigrants that the Palestinians felt about the Jewish pioneers.
Yes you’re right, education reform has to start much much earlier–but my point was, people from all over the world want to come here to study. What we have to do is get Americans to the level, by age 18, where they can handle the material.
This idea that we’ll fall behind if we don’t import brainpower just makes no sense to me at all.
I agree that education reform has to start earlier. From the conversations I’ve had with graduate coordinators (so I’m talking about grad school here), they would like to take more Americans but just too many are unqualified. Indeed, US citizens actually get some preferential treatment compared to their foreign counterparts.
In the absence of reform, the best that we can do is cause a brain drain in other countries and hope that the best and brightest from other places will settle here in the US.
Just flush the Americans down the toilet. Nice strategy.
Oh, how hard can Indigenous Transwomen’s Literature of Kuala Lumpur really be?
Its the dumb student’s fault, not the teachers and professors. Don’t you know that?
My understanding is most universities prefer foreign students because they get to charge higher tuition.
Exactly! Add the fact that most universities are cesspools of Liberalism it makes perfect sense that they would prefer foreigners over Americans as they do minorities over whites through affirmative action.
I’m not talking about undergraduate education.
There are plenty of majors that are rigorous.
Neither was I, although a quick check of the University of Wisconsin Website does show that foreign graduate Students are charged the same non-resident rate as any other non-Wisconsin resident, while for undergrad they even get a surcharge on top of that.
So I guess it depends on how broad your definition of “foreign” is – International Grad students are only preferred in the same way that Illinoisan grad students are.
Edit: And that’s just what we need, is more of them coming here, with their weird accents, strange ways and stinky foods. (I am referring here, of course, to Illinoisans)
Maybe when the labor shortage becomes severe enough, getting a job and going to work will look like a better deal than welfare. Allowing in more low-skilled people who lack the English skills to even order from a drive-thru window, much less work at one, is not the answer.
Deep dish pizza is an abomination.
It often is.
Nope it is the crap educational system run by leftists that fails to prepare kids. Also this idea that you must go to college needs to stop. It used to be acceptable to work right after high school, but now you are not worth anything unless you go to college and when you are done, you will be replaced by foreigners who work for cheap. H1B visas are immoral and shows the utter disdain even Republicans have for the working class.
The market has spoken.
In education, do not confuse the nominal tuition with what the students actually pay. In many, if not most, cases they are getting financial aid. I went to school with someone from India whose father was a high government official. My claasmate grew up in a mansion with many servants. Yet he was on a full need-based scholarship. It helps when your parents do not have to file 1040s.
You’re the only one talking about Nazis here. By the way, the anti-immigration position is the Leftist position.
I always like how non-scientists and engineers always complain about the lack of skilled employees in science and engineering and say we need to allow the best and brightest immigrants into our country, because there are just not enough scientists and engineers. Ask any engineer or scientist and you will find that none of them complain about the lack of skilled American scientists and engineers.
Another note:
I am glad that the open borders pro-immigration types on this thread are a tiny minority of Americans.
And I am glad that despite “winning” the White House and having a Republican House and Senate, the big-government Trumpocrats appear completely unable to pass any major anti-immigration bill.
@viruscop – Really? That is debatable. Half of the comp-sci grads in the US aren’t working in that field, while US corps bring in cheap labor from India. Although, to be realistic, the internet allows corps to employ foreigners via the internet, so it would be hard to stop them using cheaper foreign labor.
@viruscop– “The market has spoken.”
Again, only a half-truth. Afaik, companies used to us aptitude tests to promote and train high school grads, but activist courts banned them, calling the tests racist, due to their disparate impact. As a result, companies now let the universities discriminate for them.
James and others, one would have to be tone deaf at this time to believe the case for more immigration.
A. As Bigfoot and others have noted, wages in IT have fallen dramatically due to massive issuance of H-1B visas. Falling wages is not a sign of an economy that needs more skilled workers.
B. Net employment of American born workers since around the year 2000 is zero. Zero! All jobs created since then have net, net gone to immigrants with no new jobs net going to American born workers. This is a deplorable stat. It is a sign of an economy and a political system that is seriously failing it’s population. This situation could and should be considered a “taking” by our government that has heavily tilted the playing field in the direction of large corporations and banks and has worked tirelessly to destroy small business without any regard to consequences of American born workers.
New flows of immigrants are fine in an economy that is creating jobs for American citizens of all skills, and needs new foreign workers, but this socialist, heavily managed ‘Corporatist” economy our “Uniparty” of McConnell, Ryan, Pelosi, Obama, and Bernacke has concocted is not creating any new jobs net, net for American workers. This situation is an unbelievable disaster. Employment of men and blacks is at an all time low. Whole communities have lost hope and have turned to destructive lifestyles. The young are not getting good new jobs, while at the same time the cost of living keeps going way up, with untenable increases in housing, food, utility bills and insurance due to an omni-present government sticking it’s nose where it doesn’t belong far, far too often.
To even consider more immigration at this time shows an extreme nearly deranged lack of empathy for your fellow Americans.
Growth is a by product not the goal, it’s a net of changes, some good some not so good. It’s an abstraction and an average with most useful information removed. Get policies right and we get growth but the policies should be aimed at removing barriers to investment, entrepreneurial activity, getting a job, a good education and training. We can have more growth by a robust immigration policy but it’s just a number, more workers from abroad more factors of production. What does that do for people here who don’t have jobs, others who can’t justify a minimum wage and need a job? Or we can have growth by getting people off welfare, off the streets, out of the drug business but in the short term there may well be lower growth. We get higher GDP by mothers going to work, hiring a baby sitter but there has been no net production increase, indeed a decrease because the mother is more apt to do a good job. The notion that the federal government creates jobs or growth is of course nonsense. It can crush or allow human flourishing. The latter is the goal not some abstract accounting aggregate.
Jaime,
You are right tighter immigration is a non tariff barrier (not a price control) on workers with higher restrictions on some skills. Unless we have totally open borders that will always be the case, so the question is where to draw the line and on what skills. When we draw the line we need to pay attention to what is going on domestically. What is going on domestically is falling wages for unskilled, increased drug overdoses, increased crime and violence, single mothers and able bodied people dropping out of the work force and dependence increasing. All of these things are products of bad policies, weak adjustment but none of them are caused by lack of immigration of competing workers. The alternative to open borders for people is open borders for goods and services. Both have impacts. The adjustment to competition to goods and services is easier, the impact is spread widely and thinly and, if we get the barriers to adjustment right, short lived and gives rise to the by product of growth and flourishing. Or at least so far that is the experience we and every other open economy have enjoyed. Not so mass migration anywhere.
I just read the whole thread and missed anyone arguing for open borders. I saw several arguments for sustaining current immigration numbers or growing them, many for higher levels that are suggested in this program, but none that advocate “open borders.”
Say what?
Exactly. Talk about waving a white flag! We should be saying we wil not tolerate “the absence of reform”.
What the adherents to the new “cartoon” conservatism (that is the “conservatism” that is defined as, let’s keep all of the dirty foreigners out and let’s erect trade barriers so that we can bring all of those jobs gluing flip-flops together back to MAGA) need to understand is that, a critical factor in economic growth is population growth. The current US fertility rate of 1.85 births per woman is an all-time low. The fact is, immigration is necessary and critical to sustained growth. Immigration should be controlled and increased, not decreased.