This article is more than 10 years old.
America needs more immigrants, both for economic and moral reasons. A lot of people in Washington agree with this--but their ideas are mostly terrible. ("Green cards for degrees!" Yay, a new boondoggle for bubbleific universities!)
Before I set out my preferred policies, here are my priorities:
- Improving the human capital stock of the United States. Countries compete for human capital, and the competition is only going to get more fierce. The source of America's greatness has been that it has been a haven for human capital, dating back to the Puritans.
- Diversity and motivation. I certainly don't mean ethnic or geographic diversity. I mean actual diversity. The hip idea for "high-skilled immigration" is a points system similar to that of Australia and Canada. It's a good idea, but here's the problem: the Steve Jobs test. Steve Jobs was a dropout hippy who only landed in the US by chance. He would never have been allowed in on a points system. America has plenty of guys who can game the interview process at McKinsey. What about the guy who's going to run a chain of drycleaners? Most of the East European Jews who came to the US fleeing pogroms wouldn't have made it under a points system, and yet they and their descendants enriched America in every way possible to an incredible amount. I'm not saying we should turn down all the people who did well in school and let in all the unemployed dropouts. By all means, let's be extra generous and welcome the people who spent their lives coloring inside the lines. But let's not kid ourselves that that exhausts the definition of "high-skilled" or (especially) "high potential." We want people who are truly motivated to come here, and we want people who are high potential not just in the ways that a Fortune 500 HR department thinks of as "high potential."
- Justice. "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses." America a beacon of freedom and opportunity. All that stuff. It matters. America needs to be itself--more precisely, it needs to make itself worthy of itself.
With that in mind, here are 6 good ideas:
- Recruitment, but actual recruitment. I love Jim Manzi's idea of shifting America's immigration policy from a mentality of keeping people out to a mentality of recruitment. But, as I said above, it needs to be actual recruitment. Let's have a points system, sure, but let's make it fuzzy. Dropping out of school to start a company should get you more points than finishing your degree. Doing nonprofit/community/etc work should get you points. Being religious should get you points (hey, statistically, it's a good predictor of a bunch of desirable qualities). Every embassy should have a recruitment staff whose goal is actual recruitment, not box-checking. A few years ago there was a minor media flap here in France when it was discovered that the US Embassy was putting on a big effort to reach out to minorities in the French suburbs. Plenty of these guys don't go to the French grandes écoles. Plenty of these guys want to make it in life and can't here (oh, trust me). Let's get them over here. Here's an idea: before being considered for recruitment officer, someone should have spent a number of years as a Big Brother or Big Sister; and/or have been an entrepreneur (you can't be a successful entrepreneur if you don't take calculated risks on people; you can't be a successful HR person at a big company if you do).
- Turn the USMC into the US Foreign Legion. The USMC is experiencing a bit of an identity crisis since JSOC has replaced it in its traditional role of "Drop in, kill something, drop out." Meanwhile, we have a model of a successful immigration policy with the French Foreign Legion. Training in the French Foreign Legion is an inspiring thrill to behold. They all learn French in-between drills. After a few years they all bleed the Tricolore. They're from everywhere in the world. There is pretty much a 100% chance that someone who's willing and able to spend a few years in the Marines to get a green card has the requisite motivation and skills to be a great addition to American society. And it's true diversity. No need for quotas. The only flaw with this idea is that we can't get 100% of the immigrants America needs through it.
- Setup US-run charter cities around the world as immigrant reserves. (One per continent should do. We could probably swing it with, say, Panama, Liberia, the Philippines and Ukraine.) Nevermind the fact that charter cities would do positive good to countless people. Just like the USMC, someone who moves to a US-run Hong Kong and works his ass off there for a green card is, again, pretty much guaranteed to have the requisite motivation and skills. Crucially, these charter cities should have (much) lower taxes than the US so that there's no obvious financial incentive to emigrate (on top of the fact that low taxes are good). Think of these charter cities as the US's strategic human capital reserve. Tens of millions of hard-working law-abiding America-loving people willing to move here and make America richer. Importing people from these cities could become part of an automatic macroeconomic stabilizer. Call it Qualitative Easing.
- Expand asylum. No one in the immigration debate talks about asylum, which is probably the policy where the greatest difference is made to actual lives, and where the imperative flowing from America's ideals is the strongest. No, we can't take in all of the world's wretched. But we sure as hell can try. Make America's promise of freedom a reality!
- Expand the green card lottery. It's such a great idea.
- Do opportunistic green card drops. It's both humanistic and in line with the recruitment idea. There come many times in the history of the world where groups of people are persecuted. We are surprisingly powerless at stopping persecution, because war creates more problems than it solves, and because other means kinda suck. But we can protect actual people from persecution. By giving them green cards. European anti-Semitism was the best thing that happened to the US because it sent tons of great people over here. Same thing with anti-Puritan persecution in the 17th and 18th centuries. Israel knows this, of course. Remember Operation Solomon. On top of being The Right Thing To Do and a timeless act of state badassery, it was really smart immigration policy. I'm not advocating for sending actual planes, but opportunistically letting people immigrate to the US when things get rough in their home. Opportunistic green card drops are both smart foreign policy and smart immigration policy. Are you, Government X, behaving like a total you-know-what to a subset of your citizens? We might or might not pursue sanctions and other means of retorsion, but in the meantime we'll bleed you of your human capital. Hey, look, your internal affairs are your internal affairs, but all these people are beating down our doors, so we're going to let them in. Sorry if that's embarrassing. That's your problem, not ours. Meanwhile, oh look!--our rate of entrepreneurship just ticked up again. And people around the world love America even more because that stuff about a land of freedom and opportunity is made tangible. Competition for people is perhaps the best long-run disciplinarian of states, and sharpening the incentives would be a public good for the world (especially if other countries start emulating us), on top of a great benefit to the United States directly.
Let's be imaginative. Let's do things that make sense.
"But, PEG, what do we do about all the undocumented immigrants who are already here??" For that, go to Morgan Warstler's guaranteed income plan and his Mexico manifest destiny plan.
EDIT: PS You should read Adam Ozimek's proposal for region-based visas.
