When reading this diary, all I ask is to keep an open mind. What I see in the current debate is that many people advocate specific measures (reduce the quota, open the border, abolish H-1B, build a fence, etc.) without understanding the big picture. Very often, the debate ends up being reduced to "you are a racist/you don't care about the American worker".
I can't claim to be right about everything, but will try to present more than just unsubstantiated views.
Another point: be sure to listen carefully to the other side. For instance, one of my "arch opponents" here on DKos, BobOak, came up with a great suggestion for addressing the H-1B program that I'm planning to "steal" and advocate.
To state up front where I stand:
- I believe that the middle class is seriously suffering, and has been since the 1970s. I'm middle class myself, and certainly feel that pinch.
- I believe that unions can and should be an important part of restoring the middle class.
- I am personally a beneficiary from US immigration, having become a US citizen in 2005.
- I have been hurt both by outsourcing and by the H-1B situation (and on both sides of the H-1B situation, too - had to deal with bad working conditions due to H-1B coworkers, and being taken advantage of as an H-1B myself).
- I do not believe in American exceptionalism; in my mind, all persons in the world deserve the same fundamental rights as Americans. In other words, the pain of a Mexican or Canadian counts the same as the pain of an American.
- I do believe that America is first and foremost for US citizens, and Americans should have first dibs on benefits.
Beyond that, I think of myself as somebody who pretty much ignores citizenship, skin color etc. - or at least, I try.
I believe in a diary such as this, it is important to address these basic points first. Not everybody will agree with them - and very often, this is the basis for disagreeing with specific proposals.
Do I believe that immigration is good or bad for the United States? Actually, I consider this a moot question. Migrations are fundamentally as unstoppable as the weather, and so far all of our attempts to stop it have been as unsuccessful as the War on Drugs. I see no reason why this would change in the future. Therefore, we need a completely new approach - controlling and channelling migration, and mitigating its effects, rather than trying to outright block it.
There are many problems, some perceived, most very real, with the current immigration system. There is one type of problem I deliberately do not address, one bias if you will: issues of the nature of "will destroy our culture" or "we will have to start speaking Spanish". While I can understand wanting to preserve the familiar, I do not consider any one culture inherently superior to another, and I consider cultures changing, merging etc. a natural process that happens routinely all over the world, and has happened throughout history. Even changing languages in a country is surprisingly common. Remember that English evolved from the languages of the Angels and the Saxons - immigrants from what today is Denmark and Germany - imposed upon a celtic population!
Among the problems I will address are:
- A decline in wages by the middle class
- A disruption in the housing market
- Communication difficulties due to different languages
- Crime (actually, no need to address that - the crime rate of immigrants is consistently lower than of native-born citizens).
OK, so let's start with some proposed solutions that won't work, and one that I believe will.
Open the border completely Won't work.
OK, nobody actually proposed that - but some people claim that it is a proposal.
Of course we do need control over immigration. There was a time in the 18th century when we truly had open borders. All it took was finding a ship to take you to the "New World" and getting off the boat - and you were a legal immigrant. Not surprisingly, that attracted many fugitives and other criminals.
Build a Border Fence Won't work.
In some areas, such as between San Diego and Tijuana, the fence is a very good idea - more for traffic control reasons than for immigration reasons, though.
Other than that, it is a feel-good measure that would only address superficial symptoms rather than the root cause - if it even worked. As a matter of fact, the fence has already backfired. One reason for the huge number of permanent illegal immigrants is that going back and forth has become too difficult. It used to be common to come to the USA for a few months, maybe harvest season, and then return.
A border fence also helps smugglers, as the Arizona Daily Star reports:
Though rough terrain hinders agents' ability to patrol, reinforcing security with walls in rugged areas actually could help smugglers by providing an infrastructure — walls require roads to patrol them.
The majority of illegal immigrants - 2/3, by most estimates - comes to the USA legally through a regular immigration checkpoint.
On top of that, the fence works like a Berlin Wall, actually dividing communities such as Jacumba, CA and Jacume, Mexico.
In rural areas, such as Jacumba, CA, a fence sounds good, but in the end it is futile. Trying to extend it along the whole US/Mexico border is out of reach even just financially. Even East Germany wasn't able to make their wall work - and that was only 300 miles long.
Tighten the quota or implement a moratorium, no immigration at all for a certain number of years. Won't work.
That's going to aggravate illegal immigration. One of the prime reason for illegal immigration is the near-impossibility to immigrate legally. So how would making it more difficult to immigrate help solve the problem?
My own proposal: abolish the quota, and revamp the categories.
First off, it may be counterintuitive, but abolishing the quota will not actually lead to more immigrants! The quota system has simply utterly failed. This is because under the quota system, everybody who applies eventually does get into the USA - we just make them wait for many years (there are a few people who either die waiting, or give up, so this statement is not entirely accurate, but close enough for practical purposes). At the same time, the decades-long quota wait has another side effect: most immigrants are quite old. In some cases, we may only allow somebody to immigrate after retirement age. Obviously, it is much better for the USA to allow somebody to immigrate in his 30s than making the same person wait until his 50s!
For an example, let's look at the Family 2A category - most other categories work similarly. This category is for spouses and children of Green Card holders - people who are looking to be with their loved ones, and will move to the US no matter how long it takes.
The annual quota in this category is approximately 88,000. By some estimates (the actual number is not published, and probabably not precisely known) there are currently about 1 million such family members waiting.
All the quota does is make these people wait many years, but they'll end up coming to the USA anyway - and many of them decide to come illegally because they do not want to wait that long.
So abolishing the quota would not actually change how many people come to the USA!
Of course it would lead to a temporary surge in numbers; the first year or two without a quota would see legal immigrant numbers go up to two or three million people until all those currently waiting have immigrated (we could mitigate this sudden influx by raising the quotas slowly until we abolish it altogether).
Once this surge has run its course, we will see immigration levels return to roughly the same levels we have today.
In order for this scheme to work, we would need to implement more changes:
- Increased funding for USCIS. Applications need to be processed in a more timely manner.
- Rework the categories. Currently, the vast majority of people doesn't have to wait 25 years - they will never be eligible to immigrate. This is one of the driving forces behind illegal immigration. We need to rework the system so that hardworking people have a realistic shot at the American Dream, even if they have to start out as dish washers or garbage collectors. History shows that, given the chance, immigrants will move up the economic ladder very quickly and benefit the USA as a whole.
Would this scheme allow "chain migration?" No, it wouldn't. Chain migration means that first one family member immigrates, then sponsors other family members, who in turn sponsor yet more family members. Under the current system, chain migration does not actually exist, simply because each step of sponsorship takes decades - and nearly all sponsorship requires US citizenship (except for spouses and minor children), which takes another five years or so to get.
Abolishing the quotas would still require US citizenship before somebody could sponsor an immigrant, so there still would be a sufficient delay built into the system to prevent chain migration.
The categories should also be updated. One of the ideas from the Kennedy/Kyl reform proposal was a merit-based immigration system. This is fundamentally a very good idea, although Kennedy/Kyl got it quite wrong in various ways.
We should be quite generous with immigrant visas. Allowing people to immigrate legally is our single best tool to fight illegal immigration!
So I propose to create a merit-based system (similar to the Kennedy/Kyl) system that allows all those who currently qualify to continue immigrating, plus also allows "hard workers" to come to the USA permanently.
Won't these "hard workers" compete with US workers? First of all, the actual numbers would still be miniscule compared with previous immigration waves.
Jobs are not a zero sum game. During every past immigration wave, Americans expressed similar fears: "The Irish are taking away my job" "The Polish are driving down wages" and so on. Reality is, the USA has continued to prosper. This is actually an odd complaint, coming from a country obsessed with growing the GDP.
One economic fact most people overlook is that every new person not only takes a job, he also creates many new jobs. This is the main reason we as a country are so obsessed with growth!
What does matter is that the new immigrants are able to take jobs freely, and they can actually afford to fight for reasonable wages. What drives down wages is not competition, but currently the fact that immigrants can't afford to fight for their labor rights.
In other words, giving immigrants free access to the US labor market will actually empower employees and stabilize the middle class.
Many people are concerned about absorbing immigrants into the communities. For instance, a shortage of housing is often cited. History can help put this into perspective: the same problems existed on a much bigger scale during past immigration waves. For instance, 1907 saw slightly more immigrants than 2006 in absolute numbers. Since the US population in 1907 was approximately 90 million, that immigration wave was actually nearly four times the current wave in terms of its social and economic impact.
Stories abound about immigrants living in tenements and substandard housing at the time. Obviously, though, this resolved itself fairly quickly.
Anecdotal experiences of the beneficiaries of the 1986 amnesty, as well as from the integration of Vietnamese and Korean immigrants, also suggests that integration into society tends to be a non-issue within a short time frame.
H-1B
First of all, I would like to note that the H-1B has existed since 1952 (called H-1 at the time), and never been a problem until the 1990s - even though the original H-1 had nearly zero protections. It was available for any job, without a six-year limitation, without a quota, without a Labor Condition Attestation. It was also rarely used. The reason? Until the late 1980s, the process of getting a Green Card was very easy and fast.
Thus, if we implement the above proposal, H-1B will virtually disappear on its own.
That said, there are a number of things we can do to improve the H-1B even under current conditions.
Fellow Kosack BobOak actually came up with an excellent suggestion: instead of giving out H-1Bs on a first-come, first-served basis, giving them out to workers with the highest salaries first. One way I could see this implemented in practice is by dividing the quota into separate sub-quotas for each of the four experience levels, with the one for level IV being the most generous. The result would be that H-1Bs would be easy to get for those who don't drive down US salaries, while making it difficult to get for the lower-paid entry-level positions.
Another suggestion I have is to encourage unionization by exempting unionized jobs from the cap. One side benefit of this step would be an improvement in US schools; currently, H-1Bs are in practice unavailable for teachers.
