To the extent that this piece fails to mention the dominant role of bringing in very extended family members and fails to consider benefit to America, it is disingenuous.
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The Border Crisis Stymies Needed Immigration Reform
Too many migrants are entering illegally, but the system for legal admissions has broken down as well.
Jason L. Riley
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Jason L. Riley
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Dec. 5, 2023 6:34 pm ET
Illegal border crossings continue to dominate the migrant debate, which is understandable given that we are, as John Adams put it, a nation of laws. Illegal entries have reached record highs in recent years, and the Biden administration’s response is best summarized as somewhere between incompetence and indifference.
Republicans want Democrats to pay a political price in next year’s election, and perhaps they will. But the situation on the border isn’t simply another political headache for the administration, like high gasoline prices or upticks in violent crime. Rather, it’s a major issue that could reverberate for decades—no matter which party wins next year.
(MARC: I just saw that 15+% of people here are foreign born)
For starters, porous borders compromise homeland security. The world is a dangerous place, as recent events have reminded us, and the government needs to know who’s entering the country. Increasingly, the southern border has become a portal not only for Central Americans but also for tens of thousands of foreign nationals from as far away as Asia and Africa. A large majority are economic migrants in search of employment and better living conditions. (and, as such should not be admitted) Still, the possibility that some small percentage is coming here to do us harm deserves more attention than it’s getting from the White House. (Well, that sure is understated!)
Releasing millions of “asylum seekers” into the U.S. interior with little clue of who they are or where they are headed may seem like madness, but Democrats in Congress think it’s a pathway to comprehensive immigration reform. (No, they think to dilute American citizens with undocumented voters) Which brings us to a second pressing problem with the current migrant mess. So long as the border problem persists at crisis levels, the debate over how to repair our immigration system for admitting people legally is going nowhere.
Donald Trump believes that foreign nationals reduce job opportunities for U.S. natives, but the fact remains that despite heightened levels of undocumented immigration, the country still has far more job openings than job seekers. (the millions of unskilled non-English speaking illegals are not likely to mesh up with our needs) The real problem is a labor shortage that hasn’t gone away even as wages have risen. (Not after inflation!!!) According to Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former head of the Congressional Budget Office, demographic trends are to blame, and more legal immigration should be part of any solution.
“The retirement of the Baby Boom generation is swelling the ranks of retirees entering the large entitlement programs that rely on labor taxes for their funds, raising the specter of a future of smaller cohorts of workers paying higher taxes in a slower-growing economy,” Mr. Holtz-Eakin writes in a new paper. “The reform of employment-based immigration can address the near-term scarcity of labor, as well as the looming demographic crisis created by low fertility and the retiring Baby Boom generation.”
Among the changes that Mr. Holtz-Eakin calls for is a less-restrictive H-1B visa program for skilled workers. The number of visas, which often go to graduates of U.S. universities, has been capped at 85,000 since 2004, even though more than 480,000 people are currently seeking one. Visa holders aren’t permitted to switch jobs or start businesses. In addition to the low cap, no country may receive more than 7% of the annual allotment, a rule that stymies nationals from populous countries such as India. “The result is long wait times for skilled workers and an inflexible system for employers,” Mr. Holtz-Eakin writes.
Opponents of the visa program argue that employers use it to hire foreign nationals at lower salaries than they would have to pay an American worker. But that would be a clear violation of the law,(and such violations would be enforced in the real world exactly how?) and academic studies repeatedly have shown that H-1B visa holders receive the same or higher pay than comparable U.S. professionals.
Mr. Holtz-Eakin stresses that our inefficient migrant policies are noticed by other countries and have put us at a competitive disadvantage in the international competition for human capital. Earlier this year Canada announced that it was offering 10,000 work permits to foreigners residing in the U.S. on H-1B visas. Within 48 hours of the program’s launch, all the slots were taken. “At present,” Mr. Holtz-Eakin writes, “the near-term outlook for labor is scarcity, the long-term trend is slowing population growth, and the United States’ global competitors are more successful in attracting high-skill immigrants.”
You can support more legal immigration and better border security at the same time, and polling shows that most Americans do. They understand that allowing more people to come lawfully will help reduce unlawful entries. Moreover, there is agreement among Democratic and Republican lawmakers that the system is dysfunctional and outdated. There is no reason we can’t upgrade our policies in a way that accommodates the aspirations of migrants and satisfies the demands of a 21st-century economy. But don’t expect to see bipartisan appetite for constructive reform so long as illegal immigration rages unchecked.
