If you want to read another episode in Forbes’s propaganda campaign to convince its readers that all immigrants are Sergey Brin, this piece is a pretty good example of the genre.
It tells the story Noubar Areyan who’s started 38 companies in the U. S. I think the story has a moral but the moral has got to be that culture matters. Dr. Areyan is an ethnic Armenian born in Lebanon who emigrated to Canada with his family as a teenager and went to college there.
In all likelihood his family is Christian and the reality is that in Arabic-speaking countries Christians tend to better educated than their Muslim peers. But that’s not the only way that he’s atypical. The percentage of those with college educations and doctoral degrees is pretty low throughout the Arabic-speaking world. Of the immigrant population in the United States 29% have college degrees while 14% of those have doctorates or professional degrees. That’s 4% of the total immigrant population—hardly representative. If you torture the statistics long enough, as is usually done in these articles, you can make that look better.
If you set out to create an immigration policy specifically intended to undermine the economy and social fabric of the United States, it would look a lot like the one we have. Just to hit a few of the high points problems include the strong emphasis on family reunification, diversity visas, and the unfortunate reality that by far the largest number of U. S. immigrants are semi-skilled or unskilled with poor command of English.
The reality is that we need two distinct immigration policies: one for Latin America and the Caribbean (mostly Mexico) and one for the rest of the world. Because of the lack of that distinction the discussion of immigration policy inevitably cross-ruffs between defenses of policies specifically designed for the best qualified immigrants and those that suit the completely unqualified.
Dave, in any 30 second ad that policy translates to, “An open door for white Europeans, and a door slammed in any brown face.” Or some such slogan.
We need an immigration policy that prioritizes the needs of Americans. We need assess our needs as a country, and then fill those needs. I’m not saying that should be the only criterion, but it should be the organizing principle. We should ask cui bono, and if the answer is something other than ‘the American people’ then we should take another look.
I think the way to address the issue you’re pointing out is with a guest worker program with a lot of allowances for Mexican workers. The present system provides for 10,000. 10,000.
The United States is the only country in the world that shares a 1,500 mile land border with a country where the per capita income is 10% of what it is here. That means we have special needs.
Any change in policy that prioritizes the needs of Americans can be summarized in a 30 second spot as “An open door for white Europeans, and a door slammed in any brown face.†Despite the reality that by far the greater number of present legal immigrants are a) not white Europeans and b) have college educations.
Our present system has two major components: the legal immigration system and the illegal immigration system. By far the greatest number of illegal immigrants are Mexicans. To accomplish anything both will need to be changed and any effective change will necessarily disadvantage “brown faces”.
Additional point about Christians in the Middle East, particularly in Lebanon: many attended British, French, or American schools. I fear that this is something that has significantly changed about immigration from the region, the West once received a fairly Westernized elite. For all of the problems with what fashion described as colonialism, a number of elites actively embraced Western culture and values as a way to help transform and improve their societies. And when weak democracies slid into weak or corrupt dictatorships, those fleeing to the West did so as “Westerners.”
It also distinguishes between the immigrants from the Middle East received by the United States and those received by European countries. Until quite recently nearly all of the Middle Eastern immigrants we’d received were Christians. That’s quite different from the European experience.
Your comment raises another point. When dictators, e.g. Saddam Hussein, Moammar Qaddafi, got into trouble as they inevitably did, they quickly made transitions from Westernizers to Islamizers.