Steven Malanga makes an interesting point in his City Journal post on the U. S.’s contradictory, confusing, and counter-productive immigration laws that I hadn’t thought of. More than 85% of legal immigrants are not skilled workers:
About 15 percent of legal immigrants to the United States receive work visas for people with special skills, advanced degrees, or money to invest in job-creating enterprises. The total, about 150,000 people, includes spouses and minor children of these individuals. Another 10 percent of legal immigrants in recent years have been refugees or asylum-seekers. The country also has a so-called diversity visa, which it uses to grant legal status to about 50,000 immigrants annually from countries that haven’t sent the U.S. many immigrants lately. What remains, about 65 percent of legal immigration, is based on family ties—spouses, children, parents, and siblings of adult American citizens, as well as spouses and minor children of legal permanent residents.
Combine that with the observation made by Scott Alexander in his post I linked to last week, something else that hadn’t occurred to me:
In one model, immigration is a right. You need a very strong reason to take it away from anybody, and such decisions should be carefully inspected to make sure no one is losing the right unfairly. It’s like a store: everyone should be allowed to come in and shop and if a manager refused someone entry then they better have a darned good reason.
In another, immigration is a privilege which members of a community extend at their pleasure to other people whom they think would be a good fit for their community. It’s like a home: you can invite your friends to come live with you, but if someone gives you a vague bad feeling or seems like a good person who’s just incompatible with your current lifestyle, you have the right not to invite them and it would be criminal for them to barge in anyway.
I hold more to the second view although I’d characterize it as “instrumental” rather than “privilege”. I think that immigration should serve the present citizenry rather than the other way around and serve the present citizenry much more broadly than just the immigrants’ kin.
The key point is that these two “models”, as he puts it, are not easily reconcilable. For one to prevail the other must be quashed. There’s little middle ground.
If you’re looking for a reason that comprehensive immigration reform has proven elusive, that’s as good as any. And, since the two conflicting models are difficult to reconcile, while it may remain so. That and that the sort of comprehensive immigration reform that appears to be acceptable to most elected officials is completely unacceptable to many of their constituents.
Yet another example of how their are two consensus of opinion on immigration—one among the elite and another among the rest of us. Some time we should make a list of issues of which that’s the case.
I think most comprehensive immigration reform is directly or indirectly about increasing the number of immigrants with more visas and some form of normalization for at least some illegals. Latest Gallup poll on immigration
38% Should be decreased
38% Should stay the same
21% Should be Increased
This could reflect some instrumentalist thinking in the last group (we need more immigration), but in general Americans think of it as a privilege.
Yeah, that was my point. The division is less Democrat vs. Republican than it is elite vs. the rest of us.
Can there be comprehensive immigration reform that doesn’t preserve family reunification? Is it really reform if it does?
So most people want to leave it as is or increase the numbers. Hmmm. Anyway, I think immigration should largely meet our needs and goals, acknowledging that we won’t always get it right. I think that we also have humanitarian obligations, especially when cause crises.
Steve