Immigation Policy

Source: "LOOK BOTH WAYS: The Right Road to America?"
By Amy Chua, The Washington Post Sunday Outlook, December 16, 2007.

"Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Amy Chua, herself an immigrant who now teaches law at Yale, has a very sensible piece in the Washington Post. She is pro-immigration, but calls for a sensible immigration policy to assure that the new immigrants continue to buy into the fundamental values on which the nation has progressed, while bringing the nation needed and valued skills.

I quote some important data from her article:

In the 19th century, the United States would never have become an industrial and agricultural powerhouse without the millions of poor Irish, Polish, Italian and other newcomers who mined coal, laid rail and milled steel. European immigrants led to the United States' winning the race for the atomic bomb. Today, American leadership in the Digital Revolution -- so central to our military and economic preeminence -- owes an enormous debt to immigrant contributions. Andrew Grove (cofounder of Intel), Vinod Khosla (Sun Microsystems) and Sergey Brin (Google) are immigrants. Between 1995 and 2005, 52 percent of Silicon Valley start-ups had one key immigrant founder. And Vikram S. Pundit's appointment to the helm of CitiGroup last Tuesday means that 14 chief executives of Fortune 100 companies are foreign-born.

The United States is in a fierce global competition to attract the world's best high-tech scientists and engineers -- most of whom are not white Christians. Just this past summer, Microsoft opened a large new software development center in Canada, in part because of the difficulty of obtaining U.S. visas for foreign engineers.

Professor Chua has five suggestions:

1. Revise immigration priorities, giving less weight to family reunification and more to the economically important skills and aptitude that the immigrants bring.
2. Make English the official national language. Have serious English language requirements for citizenship.
3. Immigrants must embrace the nation's civic virtues. (Professor Chua does not make the point, but I suggest that we could as a nation, working through our civil society organizations, develop a program of integration of immigrants into our civic culture, not only teaching about government, but enrolling kids in the scouts, extending church membership to immigrants, tying them into neighborhood assiciations, etc.)
4. Enforce the law. A failure of the law that results in millions of illegal immigrants is not acceptable.
5. Make the United States an equal-opportunity immigration magnet. Give the people who will be the best Americans and make the most contribution to America the opportunity to immigrate here, whatever their national origin, gender or ethnicity.
   

I wonder what core values we most want to protect? Belief in democracy, adherance to rule of law, participation in civil society, willingness to serve the nation, willingness to work, egalitarianism? I suspect we need a national debate on the subject.

Were we to have a reasonably agreed to set of such core values, then I think we could do a better job of selecting people for immigration who adhere to them. Social and behavioral sciences have advanced a lot since the 19th century, and we could utilize them in the selection of people to whom to give visas and green cards. Economic concerns are important, but they are not the only criterion we should use in for entry into U.S. citizenship.