Steven Malanga — Real Clear Politics
And Now, On to Immigration Reform
“Even with everything else on its agenda, the Obama administration has declared itself ready to plunge forward on an issue likely to be as contentious and exhausting to the nation as health care reform, namely a new effort to restructure our immigration laws. Last Friday, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano laid the groundwork… “
…”Meanwhile, many other developed countries were moving in another direction. Countries like Australia, Ireland and Canada recognized that most immigrants in the modern world hadn’t been forcibly separated from their relatives but had migrated by choice, and so a visa policy based on the idea that countries should be allowing families to ‘reunite’ was misleading.
Instead, these countries tilted their policies toward focusing on those with skills and talents most likely to succeed in and contribute to a late 20th century developed economy. Some, like Australia, went so far as to create extensive lists of the jobs their economies needed filled and placed a premium on granting visas to people who could do those jobs. Others, like Canada, enacted broader criteria that rewarded visa applicants with points based on their education levels or their ability to speak and read the native language.
In less than 15 years Australia completely flipped the ratio of its immigrant visas: whereas in 1993, 70 percent of those arriving were granted family visas, by 2006, 70 of Australia’s immigrants had been admitted based on skills criteria. The newly arriving immigrants performed far better. A 2006 study concluded that the average immigrant to Australia gained income parity with native-born Australians just five years after arriving. By contrast similar studies in the United States suggest that many immigrants today start out far behind average native-born workers in pay and make little progress over their lifetime because they lack the education levels or skills to advance.
Several far-reaching examinations of American policy concluded that we should head in the same direction as other countries. The Jordan Commission, chaired by former Congresswoman Barbara Jordan in the early 1990s, employed some of the country’s leading economists to study U.S. immigration and produced a series of striking reports that can still be obtained through the National Academies. The Jordan Commission observed that the family preferences policy had inadvertently tipped much of U.S. immigration toward visas for unskilled migrants and that we should shift to a skills-based system. Politicians in both parties initially accepted the recommendations of the commission, then headed for the hills when a backlash against the report erupted among those who saw it as ‘anti-family…”
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