Im-Migration Headaches

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

Inscription on the Statue of Liberty

Not really… we don’t want ‘em. Go back where you came from. Do not darken our door. Oh, and our unemployment statistics makes us wonder why you picked us anyway? For a nation founded by immigration, one whose very greatness depended on the polyglot that resulted from immigrants coming here to work and grow a new life, our immigration policies are truly out of step with America’s best interests. We are desperately in need of functioning engineers, high level mathematicians and cutting-edge scientists, but we make their getting into this country so difficult that many no longer try. And if the barrier for their entry into the United States is lowered, restrictions on their immediate family joining them are often untenable.

Even for people who have traveled to the United States to attend college, remaining here after graduation can often be prohibitive. So many of these are from emerging countries that all they do is return to their native lands with the expertise to compete against us. Our colleges and universities need their tuition in an era of budget cuts, so we encourage them to come to learn but make it clear their new-found, U.S.-based expertise is not welcome to stay. The United States does not become a lesser economy because trained people are invited to build their lives here.

Almost one in five small businesses is owned by an immigrant, and small business is where most our future job growth is coming from… and where little software companies become Google. “Meanwhile, the United States only accepts 140,000 permanent immigrants a year based on Citizenship and Immigration Services' employment-based standards. A recent report by The Partnership for a New American Economy found that immigrants or their children founded more than 40 percent of the 2010 Fortune 500 companies. Further, these U.S. companies employ more than 10 million people worldwide and have combined revenues of $4.2 trillion. And these are the very people we are turning our backs to.” USNews.com, March 23^rd. They return to their emerging economies while like it or not, the United States is on track to be one of the world’s most visible submerging economies.

On the other side of the economic spectrum are the jobs we really cannot find American labor willing to perform – for example, stoop labor on our farms, housekeepers in our homes and if we ever reignite construction, the lowest, back-breaking labor in that sector. The notion of legal temporary schemes haven’t fared well, and the illegal “coyote” trade is alive and well… except since this economy has tanked, the number of folks coming over our southern border has dwindled significantly.

Despite these obvious needs, America has pretty much succumbed to the slogan callers, people who seem to believe that the above categories of people are sucking the job-blood out of the American labor force. We seem very expert at shooting ourselves in the foot to enhance our ability to walk! With an election looming, and a very critical Hispanic vote literally sitting at a balancing point between Republican and Democratic office-seekers, the Obama administration has seized on an emotional soft-spot that could just tilt the November election slightly in his favor: the children of illegal immigrants who literally have lived here for almost all of their lives and arrived because they had no choice: “Hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants who came to the United States as children will be allowed to remain in the country without fear of deportation and able to work, under an executive action the Obama administration announced on [June 15^th].

“Administration officials said the president used existing legal authority to make the broad policy change, which could temporarily benefit more than 800,000 young people. He did not consult with Congress, where Republicans have generally opposed measures to benefit illegal immigrants… The policy, while not granting any permanent legal status, clears the way for young illegal immigrants to come out of the shadows, work legally and obtain driver’s licenses and many other documents they have lacked.” New York Times, June 15^th.

Dogma, polarization, opposing what the other side embraces “because,” willingness to follow the statistically abysmally-incorrect statements of extremists seeking office because constituents want to will the statistics into truth and their rather complete unwillingness, perhaps because they suffered under our failing educational system where math skills have plummeted, to look at the underlying facts and numbers… are what marks the United States today. But if we don’t find that needed labor to carry our country forward, by educating the necessary masses to take those jobs (expect we are going the other way by slashing our educational budgets) or importing the talent we must have to create true value-added jobs, the United States might just find itself as a leader in a very undesirable category: king of the growing body of submerging economies.

I’m Peter Dekom, and the ability of people seeking office to explain the truth in the issues facing us has never been lower.