Your mission: Equip your country, the USA, with an effective “gas mask” (immigration policy). You have three choices, shown below: Brand X, Brand Y, and Brand Z. Your choice will affect your nation’s well-being for generations to come. (No pressure, of course.)
Which is your choice, and why? (The Face Hugger, maybe?)
For many years, the law we’ve had in place is not even close to Brand Z. Instead, it’s almost the worst possible combination of Brands X and Y.
Our current immigration law is a “Keep Out” sign that's reluctantly obeyed by high-potential foreign innovators, job-creators, future nobel-prizewinners, and many hard-working, would-be job-fillers. That's unfortunate for us.
For others, though, it’s merely a “Detour” sign. Many hard-working job-fillers arrive legally via airplanes, cars, and ships, then circumvent the law by staying after their visas expire; for some reason, we don't see much about this on the news. Other job-fillers, however, circumvent the law (and the incompetently-managed legal immigration process) in the first place by arriving on foot across porous borders—a scene we see repeated ad nauseam on the news—and the ease with which they do it makes one wonder how many undesirables are also arriving in the same manner. (“Undesirables”: criminals and terrorists bent on doing us harm, who care not about the law, but only about the miniscule likelihood that the law will be enforced on them.)
Don’t get me wrong; I remain an Optimist. But finger-in-the-wind politicians on both sides of the aisle, including fringe-group Republicans, have a penchant for periodically “challenging my optimism” – to put it mildly. Ten years ago it was the debt-phobes who almost destroyed the creditworthiness of my country in a knuckleheaded political game they were playing. This year it’s the xenophobes who are (unknowingly?) threatening our economic future. Their ill-considered philosophy—close the border and throw the bums out—is threatening to destroy one of the elements that could save the social security system from the demographic ravages of baby-boomer retirement.
Rather than talk, talk, talk, I decided to put together a little graphic to show why we need a lot more immigrants—economically productive and promising ones—than the shamefully inadequate number our current stupid law allows in today. The image below should make sense to anyone who remembers fourth grade arithmetic, so pass it along if you think it will do someone else some good:
In short: Our economy will thrive if GDP grows, grows, grows. But that will require a lot more workers, inventors, and job-creators than our current, stupid immigration policy will generate. We need to change the policy, we need effective enforcement of that new policy, and we especially need effective execution of a new, better process. It should be as quick and easy for good, productive people to get in as it should be difficult or impossible for undesirables to get in. Results like that require forward-looking, growth-friendly laws and effective management of the process; not finger-in-the-wind politics or ratings-induced bloviating on the cable channel.
Most immediate and pressing is the need to defeat the xenophobes who would try to saddle our country with Brand Y, the Face Hugger from the movie Alien. (Bill O’Reilly, are you listening?)
Lastly: A reading assignment. Geniuses From Abroad is an article written ten years ago by George Gilder. It could have been written yesterday. Below is a snippet, but you really need to read the whole thing word-for-word if you are interested in understanding what it will take to bequeath to our grandchildren a secure, robust economy. The excerpt below is the ending; read this, then go read the whole article.
Excerpt from George Gilder’s 1996 article, Geniuses From Abroad:
With U.S. high school students increasingly shunning mathematics and the hard sciences, America is the global technology and economic leader in spite of, not because of, any properties of the American gene pool or dominant culture. America prevails only because it offers the freedom of enterprise and innovation to people from around the world.
A decision to cut back legal immigration today, as Congress is contemplating, is a decision to wreck the key element of the American technological miracle. After botching the issues of telecom deregulation and tax rate reduction, and wasting a year on Hooverian myths about the magic of a balanced budget, the Republican Congress now proposes to issue a deadly body blow to the intellectual heart of U.S. growth. Congress must not cripple the new Manhattan Projects of the U.S. economy in order to pursue some xenophobic and archaic dream of ethnic purity and autarky.
Now go read the whole article, and tell your friends about it.
And, just for grins: Next time you're watching Bill O'Reilly, wondering if he'll ever say a word about the need for more immigrants of the productive type... picture him wearing a Face Hugger. I've done it. It's fun.
--------------------
And here's some further reading, for anyone interested in more details about our current, stupid immigration policy:
• ...by Steve Forbes
• ...by Nobel laureate economist Gary Becker
• ...by my favorite economist/columnist, Alan Reynolds
• ...and another one by Alan Reynolds
