“There is always a well-known solution to every human problem -- neat, plausible, and wrong.”
H.L. Mencken
I quote at length:
Since the early days of the Republic, talented foreigners have streamed to our shores to till the soil, build industries, and turn the country into a scientific and technological powerhouse. They converted the U.S. into the first global nation, giving us adaptability, an intuitive feel for other cultures, and an innovative edge.
We see living proof of what they can accomplish in the lives of Sergey Brin (pictured left), Jerry Yang (right), and Pierre Omidyar (center). All three came here as the children of legal immigrants and grew up with the blessings of opportunity in their adopted land. And guess what: They went on to start Google, Yahoo!, and eBay. Nor are they alone in their contributions. From 1995 to 2005, legal immigrants were CEOs or lead technologists in one of every four U.S. tech and engineering start-ups and half of those in Silicon Valley. These companies employed some 450,000 people before the recession hit.
It’s now commonplace to see foreign-born students dominating U.S. graduate programs in science, math, and technology. Not long ago, it was joked that MIT stood for “Made in Taiwan.” Immigrants have accounted for 70 or so of 315 American Nobel Prize winners since 1901 and, according to one study, about half of all patents issued in the past decade.
But that flow of talent is starting to reverse course. The U.S. imposes so many limits on the numbers of legal immigrants and, since 9/11, has introduced such a thicket of red tape that many who would have come here are now staying home. Moreover, their native countries have become more alluring: By a 9 to 1 ratio, Chinese respondents to a recent survey said they had better opportunities to start businesses in China than in the U.S. By a 2 to 1 margin, Indians said their home country provided better education for their children.
Gergen states, and I agree strongly:
There are two main ways high-skilled foreigners can now gain entry to the U.S. -- and both are too restrictive. First, they can apply for permanent residency, a so-called green card. The trouble is that less than 20% of the 1.1 million legal permanent residents admitted each year are highly skilled. Second, foreigners can apply for a temporary six-year visa, the H-1B, but the cap for those is just 85,000 a year. Far more apply than can get in, and there are huge backlogs and long waits (as much as 20 years) for scientists and engineers.
Strikingly, leaders on both sides of the Congressional aisle agree that we should open the doors wider to skilled foreigners, but they have allowed this issue to become entangled with that of illegal immigration. This approach to talent is loony -- what The Economist calls a “policy of national self-sabotage.”
Comment: Gergen appears to suggest that it is legal immigration that provides the U.S. with imported talent, and indeed that the 80 percent of immigrants entering via green cards who are not "highly skilled" are not talented. So too, he seems to imply that none of the illegal immigrants are talented. I suspect that there might be a fair amount of talent, not to mention intestinal fortitude in those who brave the challenge of illegal status to obtain a better life for themselves and their families. Perhaps we need a process which differentiates among those illegal immigrants who we very much want to expel and those who would more than justify a more lenient policy if allowed to stay. JAD
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