Immigration Opening

[question everything]

The Wall Street Journal

Immigration Opening
May 19, 2007; Page A8

(snip)

On the plus side, the bill addresses the 12 million undocumented aliens living in the U.S. by providing a way for most to obtain legal status with minimal disruption to their lives or employers. In return for reporting to authorities, paying a $5,000 fine, passing a criminal-background check and making a "touch back" visit to their home country, illegal aliens would be eligible for a "Z" visa allowing them to keep working here. Restrictionists are calling this "amnesty," but they were going to slap that label on anything this side of mass deportation. The public is understandably upset about the presence of so many illegal aliens in the U.S. But there is no evidence that voters want millions of foreign families -- many of whom have been here for decades and have American children -- uprooted and forcibly removed from the country. The restrictionist wing of the GOP simply wants no new immigration, and "amnesty" is merely a political slogan to kill any reform.

Another major part of the legislation is more problematic: This would shift immigration away from family ties and toward a merit-based model that favors better-educated immigrants with higher skills. The stated justification for this change is that the U.S. currently admits too few skilled workers due to unchecked "chain migration," which facilitates the entry of unschooled and unskilled kin. That's hard to credit, however, considering data that show the typical legal immigrant already has a higher skill level than the typical American.

We're all for admitting the world's best and brightest, but the economic benefits of immigration also derive from the way immigrant skills complement the U.S. work force. Foreign workers make the U.S. more productive because they complement us at both the high and low ends of the skills spectrum. Remove the low-end leg of the stool, and you make the economy less productive and natives worse off. Why? Because we'll be using our human capital less efficiently. Natives may end up doing jobs they're overqualified to do, or those jobs will disappear altogether and diminish our quality of life.

(snip)

Which brings us to the Senate bill's biggest flaw: the guest-worker program. The U.S. has so many illegal immigrants in part because there aren't enough legal ways to enter the country. A guest-worker program is the best way to allow that legal entry, but the Senate's version isn't up to the task. It would make available some 400,000 "Y" visas per year, and the cap would be adjusted annually based on market fluctuations. So far, so good. The problem is that these Y visas, which are good for two years and renewable up to three times, would require the worker to return home for a year in between each renewal. There's no economic reason for creating such turnover red tape and denying employers the benefit of experienced employees. The complexity would discourage compliance, especially among workers who might decide to enter the black market (or never leave it) rather than jump through these hoops.

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URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117953975978008412.html (subscripton)

[hansberrym]

1. Yeah, yeah, yeah... The nation-state is dead

WSJ and like minded global corporatists can go fuck themselves.