AN IMMIGRANT'S LAMENT

November 22, 2014

At the risk of sounding self-serving (because I am a first generation immigrant) I have to add my voice to the immigration debate that surfaces every now and then and jumped to the top of the headlines this week with the executive action taken by President Obama. Clearly, regardless of the constitutionality and political savvy of the President’s action, Congress is remiss by not addressing the immigration challenges in a comprehensive and statutory way. Not having a growth-oriented, comprehensive, immigration policy hurts the American economy, its social cohesion, and its image and reputation abroad. So, why is Congress not acting? Only because this was an election year? I hope not, because in this democracy every other year is a (national) election year.

The way I see it, immigration is good for America—even indispensable for its long term prosperity—and not overly complicated to channel properly:

·        Immigration has served this nation well and there is nothing to suggest that, going forward, that will be no longer the case;

·        Population growth is essential to economic prosperity and current birth rates are not sufficient to sustain the population of the USA in the long term;

·        American citizens are no longer prepared to do many menial jobs that still need to be done;

·        In a global economy we need to attract the best talent available to stay competitive as a nation;

·        Modern information technology makes it possible to control immigration and keep undesirables out.

A problem with the current immigration policy in the USA is that we have made illegal immigration too easy and legal immigration too hard!

The United States is often and rightly referred to as a “Nation of Immigrants”. There is not another country in the world where immigration has as much contributed to population growth and economic success as it has in the USA. According to the U.S. Census Bureau about sixty million Americans—or one in every five people—are immigrants or the children of immigrants. These are the people that have propelled the USA to its superpower status. What is there to suggest that continuing immigration would suddenly become a negative rather than the positive it has been ever since the arrival on our shores of the Halve Maen and the Mayflower?

A fertility rate of 2.1 (2.1 births/woman) is required to sustain a population. The fertility rate in the USA is well below that number, which means that without immigration the country would regress in population, and the fertility rate would be substantially lower if it was not for a relatively high fertility rate of recent immigrants. In his book, “The Next Hundred Million”, subtitled “America in 2050”, Joel Kotkin gives us a glimpse of the competitive advantage America is expected to have over other developed countries—including China and Japan—as a result of a much higher population growth. The next 100 Million Americans Joel Kotkin is writing about will not be there in 2050 without stepped up organized legal immigration.

Immigration by children and working age people will have to offset a graying indigenous population and provide a much needed improvement of the current growing imbalance between the working population and the army of retirees. Migrant labor has become (whether we like it or not) the backbone of the farm economy, which is in turn one of the most globally competitive sectors of business in the USA.

Unfortunately, America has no monopoly on the best and the brightest students in the world, but we are still blessed with a highly competitive elite university education system that is the envy of the world and attracts exceptional talent from other countries. We educate and stimulate these foreign students—in many instances at public expense—and then we practically force them to go back to where they came from because of our antiquated immigration laws and regulations. How smart is that? We train the best and the brightest in the world to compete with us!

It is a sign of hopeless dysfunction in Washington if, with all the good reasons to deal with the immigration issue in a constructive, forward looking way, we cannot get a comprehensive immigration bill through Congress. David Brooks wrote in a January 2013 column in the New York Times, titled “The Easy Problem” that, “If we can’t pass an (immigration) law this year (2013), given the overwhelming strength of evidence, then we really are a pathetic basket case of a nation.” As a result of the President’s unilateral action and the outcome of the mid-term elections, the realistic outlook for an immigration bill coming out of Congress looks now further away than ever. Unless the Republicans come to the realization that they will lose another Presidential Election and probably with it their domination of Congress if they don’t use their newly won majority in Congress to enact a constructive and comprehensive immigration reform.