Conflicted

What can I say? I agree with William Galston’s column in favor of merit-based immigration at the Wall Street Journal but I have problems with the way he’s making his argument. For example,

But contrary to common belief, the pace of immigration to America is modest by international standards—just 0.3% a year as a share of the U.S. population. The comparable figure was higher in two-thirds of countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and between double and quadruple as high in countries ranging from Canada to Norway.

That has a number of problems. First, it’s a snapshot. Rather than just looking at the headline rate, compare the U. S. with the other OECD countries over, say, the last century and it paints a very different picture. Second, most if not all of the OECD countries are experiencing social unrest as a consequence of high immigration rates. Countries with high rates of immigration that are faring best are those experiencing robust economic growth, have high standards for the immigrants they’ll accept, and the will and ability to enforce those standards, e.g. Switzerland.

Here’s another example:

There is little evidence that immigrants are arriving too fast for the U.S. labor market to absorb. As a share of the American workforce, the annual inflow of workers with green cards was 0.04%, far below the OECD median. The equivalent figure was 12 times as high in Australia, 10 times in New Zealand, and seven times in Canada.

That’s sleight of hand. He begins with “immigrants” and transitions to “immigrants with green cards”. There is ample evidence that the U. S. labor market is unable to absorb the number of low-skilled illegal immigrants we have accepted in the form of declining wages for low-skilled workers. Also, bear in mind that the costs are proportional to total number of immigrants while the benefits are proportional to the total number of skilled immigrants.

Finally,

Moreover, Canada has accepted 35,000 Syrian refugees in recent years with a minimum of public controversy.

It might help if we weren’t making war against refugees’ countries of origin and refugees weren’t setting bombs along marathon routes and killing people.

The bottom line for me is that we should accept more legal immigrants under a points system, accept fewer under “family reunification”, eliminate the diversity lottery, allow fewer illegal immigrants, make war a lot less, and look at our policies and the ways in which they interact unflinchingly. Sugar-coating and cherry-picking aren’t helpful.