A Little Sanity, Please
The colliding slogans of the immigration debate-"stop illegal aliens" versus "remember, we are a nation of immigrants"--fail to explain some complicated truths. The first is that America is a different place from 50 years ago. Then, half of American men didn't finish high school and entered the workforce as unskilled laborers. Today, over 90 percent finish high school and shun unskilled, low-wage jobs. Yet our increasingly automated service economy is driven by low-skilled workers. The Department of Labor estimates that we will need 7.7 million more in the next decade alone. At the same time, we are desperately short of skilled professionals in science, medicine, and technology. In fact, the U.S. labor force is skewed. It is predominantly composed of people who possess skills that overqualify them for the lowest-skilled jobs and underqualify them for the highest.
So there are two imperatives for America to maintain the forward thrust that has produced a booming economy with an unemployment rate of only 4.7 percent: more unskilled hands and more top professionals. Of course, the demand for unskilled labor here has been met by millions of illegal immigrants, who can earn five times the rate in Mexico--the greatest economic differential of any border in the world. No man-made barrier can do more than moderate the tide of immigration under this kind of pressure. That must be remedied, and so must the inequities that border states bear in providing public services beyond the tax revenues they can hope to reap. Our current policies force illegal immigrants underground so that we do not know who they are, what they're doing, and whether they're paying their fair shares of taxes. At the same time, our political leadership must help the American public understand that we are simply not going to take on the moral, political, and financial burden of expelling these millions, disrupting the lives of otherwise law-abiding, hard-working people--not to speak of their children born here.
Keep the talent. The paradox of immigration is that while we have been unable to control the illegal, we have been very good at controlling legal immigration, and controlling it in a manner contrary to our economic interest. For nearly 40 years, until 1990, there was no cap on H-1B visas, which permit foreign-born scientists and engineers to work here. In 2003, the cap was reduced by two thirds, from 195,000 to 65,000 annually, after the dot-com bust, when groups representing domestic electrical engineers and computer technicians successfully pressured Congress by arguing that foreigners were taking their jobs. Today, there is an acute shortage of such professional talent--and virtually anybody with these skills can get a job.
Foreigners play a critical role in the high-tech world, making up nearly half of our Ph.D.'s in computer science. We need these gifted professionals to come, to stay, and even to bring their foreign counterparts here, rather than let them go home and work for our competition. In a competitive global economy we could not pick a worse time to turn away highly qualified, value-creating workers with excellent math, engineering, technology, and science skills that America's educational system is failing to produce in adequate numbers. We rank only sixth worldwide for graduates with bachelor's degrees in engineering.
And what is the point of our training the brightest foreign-born talent and then not letting that talent stay? It makes no sense to send these skilled professionals back to India or China to start businesses and develop new technologies for companies that will compete with the United States. Nor does it help us when American companies, denied their skill, create foreign subsidiaries and thus compound the problem of outsourced American jobs. One measure would be to stop counting family dependents against the cap.
Pervasive in all the debate is the deep fear that America is being divided into two cultures, with two languages, because of what many see as the unwillingness of Latinos, especially Mexican immigrants, to assimilate into American culture. Whereas European immigrants crossed an ocean with no thought of returning, Mexican and other Latino immigrants, with cellphones and no dividing ocean, retain ties to the homelands where their language and customs are rooted. Yet the fact is Hispanics are doing what American immigrants have always done: learning English, finishing school, opening their own businesses, and intermarrying with Americans--if anything, at a faster rate than previous ethnics.
The legislation advanced by Sen. John McCain would give them the traditional American second chance to play by the rules and become legal--a chance traditionally given to previous immigrants. This bill deserves support, for America has always come out ahead when it responds to the better angels of our being.
This story appears in the April 17, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.