A Good Immigration Bill
The notion that unskilled immigrants tend to complement rather than replace native Americans is supported by the unusually low unemployment rates of the six states that have the largest influx of illegal immigrants-New York, California, Illinois, Texas, Florida, and Arizona.
Millions and millions of new jobs requiring no more than a high school education will have to be filled over the next decade. Who will take them? Not those born in America. Our fertility rates are falling, our education levels rising. The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that we will have many vacancies for unskilled labor-exactly where the vast majority of immigrants expect to be working.
In the California workforce of 2004, among undocumented men ages 18 to 64, more than 90 percent were working, compared with just over 80 percent of native-born men. Illegal immigrants receive virtually no welfare transfers that could sustain them without work. They know that if they're going to be unemployed, they're better off at home in Mexico instead of New York or Chicago. They're here because they want to work.
That is one side of the immigration coin. We hear less about the other side—the high-tech immigrants and the value they provide our economy. By some estimates, about a third of Silicon Valley start-ups in the past decade have been founded by Indians or Chinese, who also power the science departments of America's great universities. Yet, we continue to lock out of the U.S. economy some of the world's best and brightest in such fields as medicine, computers, and engineering, forcing them to work abroad where they can develop businesses or work in businesses that compete with us. It doesn't make sense.
So looking forward, we will need more rather than less migration at both the low end and the high end of the skill sets. Bear in mind that we are getting older. As the 80 million baby boomers retire, we will have 250 seniors to 1,000 working people in 2010; by 2030, 411 seniors per 1,000. Who will pick up the financial burden in the Social Security system for the aging baby-boomer generation?
Our door has to be open—but not wide open. We cannot let in all of the world's many millions who wish to come. And we are entitled to be selective. The key question is how effectively our policies have been designed to address our interests. Another short answer: Not at all. That is why we have to take this opportunity to change them.
The bipartisan bill by a group of 10 U.S. senators is a good and bold attempt to sort out this issue after decades of confusion. The senators are right to call for a change of emphasis to put more stress on special skills and limit the numbers claiming entry on the fact of a relationship to someone here. Today, once an individual has become an American citizen, he or she can petition on behalf of relatives, not only spouses and children but also parents and siblings, who in turn can bring other relatives over, creating so-called chain immigration. This allows an immigrant to bring in a brother who brings in a sister, who brings in a brother-in-law, who brings in a daughter, ad infinitum.
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