Immigration Reform & National Priorities

In times of rising unemployment statistics and chaotic economic times, it is very difficult to generate a sympathetic ear to immigration reform. I tried to open the door on this discussion last year in my “Please Mr. President, Tear Down this Wall” blog, but there are even more reasons why now is not the time to consume our law enforcement agencies with petty immigration crimes, while horrible economic crimes – impacting Americans at profound levels – go without prosecution or even investigation.

Look at how many years Mr. Madoff was able to Ponzi billions, as one obvious example. Many white collar crimes are simply ignored for lack of staff, and yet it seems pretty obvious that hundreds of billions of dollars of economic damage might well have been averted with appropriate federal investigation (often state prosecutors are ill-equipped to handle sophisticated financial crimes).

But immigration prosecutions remain a focus of the Obama administration, with a slightly different emphasis. At her January 15 confirmation hearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, Homeland Security Secretary-designate, Janet Napolitano, pledged to stem illegal immigration by targeting employers that hire undocumented workers, saying, "You have to deal with immigration from the demand side." Is this pursuit worthy of remaining a priority?

The January 12^th New York Times: “Federal prosecutions of immigration crimes nearly doubled in the last fiscal year, reaching more than 70,000 immigration cases in the 2008 fiscal year, according to federal data compiled by a Syracuse University research group. The emphasis, many federal judges and prosecutors say, has siphoned resources from other crimes, eroded morale among federal lawyers and overloaded the federal court system. Many of those other crimes, including gun trafficking, organized crime and the increasingly violent drug trade, are now routinely referred to state and county officials, who say they often lack the finances or authority to prosecute them effectively…

“Immigration prosecutions have steeply risen over the last five years, while white-collar prosecutions have fallen by 18 percent, weapons prosecutions have dropped by 19 percent, organized crime prosecutions are down by 20 percent and public corruption prosecutions have dropped by 14 percent, according to the Syracuse group’s statistics. Drug prosecutions — the enforcement priority of the Reagan, first Bush and Clinton administrations — have declined by 20 percent since 2003.”

But there are other reasons to relax certain aspects of our immigration laws, both practical and selfish. As our schools face budget cutbacks, and the number of qualified graduates need to fill technical vacancies diminishes, immigration is a likely short-term remedy. The fact that America’s generating only 60,000 to 70,000 PhD’s annually in mathematics, applied sciences and engineering falls drastically short of our internal needs has dire consequences for all Americans. A new core focus on science and math needs to be a critical focus for our entire educational system, but until we start rolling out the high-end result of that pressure, the number of hard patents filed in the United States (vs. softer, business method patents that have limited underlying value) is dropping every year, while such patent applications are soaring in places like India and China. We risk losing the technology race that we have always led.

Immigration has also been profoundly beneficial to our economic growth. If we just pulled the Asian-born immigrants out of this country, our telecommunications system would coast to a stop, our advancements in all levels of computer science and most forms of engineering would grind to crawl; advances in biotech and medicine would glide to a tiny fraction of current achievements. A January 4, 2007 Duke University study examined engineering and technology start-ups in the United States between 1995 and 2005. More than one in four of these companies were founded by immigrants (most from Asia, particularly India), creating approximately 450,000 jobs and $52 billion in sales in 2005 alone. We wouldn’t be the great nation we are, a technology leader, without them. We need these new jobs right now! So what seems counterintuitive – that immigration actually creates jobs for U.S.-born citizens – is in fact the case.

Knee-jerk reactions seldom generate the results that a more careful study of the issues might create. We have exceptionally limited resources in this most difficult time; we need a new level of prudence before we literally throw the baby out with the bathwater.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I approve this message.