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Strangers in a Strange Land

peter.suderman@reason.org (Peter Suderman) — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 15:07:00 EDT

Human history is a story of minorities versus oppressors: us against them, one family quarreling with the neighbors next door, one tribe pitted against another. District 9, the first film from South African commercial director Neill Blomkamp, takes this familiar story and extrapolates and exaggerates it into a simple science fiction question. If humanity can't manage peace and equality amongst its own, how would humans fare when faced with the truly foreign? Forget man's inhumanity to man: Blomkamp's debut, part energetic sci-fi romp, part apartheid parable, is a deft satire of man's inhumanity to alien.

District 9's title refers to the name of a shanty town located just outside of Johannesburg, South Africa. Caged inside are nearly 2 million aliens—yes, the kind from outer space—whose ship mysteriously stalled out over the city two decades before. Needless to say, the aliens, who've been derisively dubbed "prawns" by the locals, don't mesh well culturally. They're dirty, fly-attracting garbage foragers who have a tough time with private property and treat cat food as an addictive delicacy. Despised, and often abused, by the city's human residents, the story starts when the contemptuous local authorities begin implementing a plan to forcibly relocate the alien population to an even grimier shack-town 200 kilometers away.

Blomkamp's film, which he co-scripted with Terri Tatchell, is a story of clashing cultures, and it poses questions similar to those raised by Orson Scott Card in the later books of his Ender series: Could an alien mind ever be truly knowable? Is peaceful interspecies coexistence even possible? Card treated these questions philosophically, as problems of culture and empathy. Blomkamp seems more interested in needling the human tendency toward brutal class segregation.

That manifests as a frequent eye toward bureuacracy and cruelty, which, often enough, turn out to be the same thing. Prawns, herded into walled-off slums, are beaten, lied to, and pushed around by heavily armed authorities. Their spawning grounds are deemed illegal, then set alight, while human captors chuckle over the "popcorn sound" the eggs make as they burst into flames. Those who cause problems quickly find themselves faced with a slew of regulations designed to give authorities maximum leeway. And when the aliens resist, or protest, they're casually shot. Still, Blomkamp is no government hater. The film targets the barbarism of private security forces hired to police District 9 as much as it does the local civil authorities.

Granted, the movie's not perfect. There's probably a dose or two of social-commentary too many, and the South African setting makes the film's political parallels too explicit. Blomkamp clearly takes it all very seriously and personally, and at times his outrage veers toward the melodramatic and obvious: Apartheid was a great evil, and so is the continued toll it takes on South African underclass. But no one seriously disputes this, and the film's occasionally weighty tone suggests that the director may be over-impressed with his own boldness.

Still, at the tail end of a cinematic summer of dumb, it's hard to criticize a sci-fi shoot-'em-up for slightly overestimating its own socio-political intelligence. And on the guns-a-blazin' front, the director's action-savvy is unmatched so far this year. The mechanized, no-holds-barred finale is the summer's best action setpiece—all the more impressive considering the film was made for about $30 million, less than a sixth of what Michael Bay reportedly spent on his joyless, insipid Transformers sequel.

Indeed, it's almost certain that the comparatively small budget was what allowed Blomkamp and producer Peter Jackson to buck studio pressure and produce a fantastically gory, socially-engaged film with no stars set in a foreign country. In Hollywood the little guy is also often pitted against uncaring overlords—but as Blomkamp's clever, thrilling movie shows, sometimes outsiders can still eke out a victory.

Peter Suderman is an associate editor at Reason magazine. This column first appeared at Reason.com.

America's Real Immigration Problem

shikha.dalmia@reason.org (Shikha Dalmia) — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 22:10:00 EDT

I have noted in several columns that America's future immigration problem won't be too much - but too little - immigration, especially in the so-called skilled category. That's because as the major donor countries such as India and China liberalize their economies and offer more opportunities at home, these immigrants won't have to travel to America to live the American dream. They'll be able to do so right at home near their loved ones. The best evidence for this trend so far has come from Duke-Harvard researcher Vivek Wadhwa - himself a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur - who found that emigres from these countries are returning home in virtually unprecedented numbers.

Now Business Week is reporting that international applications for MBAs are way down for the first time in five years in the country's business schools. Purdue's Krannert School of Management has experienced a 30% drop whereas Indiana University, Emory and University of Connecticut are reporting a 5% to 15% drop in international enrollment.

"Students from India and China ordinarily account for a large portion of the international applicant pool, but are increasingly deciding to study at home, where a growing number of high-quality MBA programs have emerged in the past decade," Dave Wilson, president of the Graduate Management Admissions Council (GMAC), an international association of business schools and sponsor of the GMAT, the b-school admissions exam, told Business Week.

Given that America owes its global technological edge to its ability to attract the best and the brightest from around the world, the rational response to this declining interest would be to roll out the welcome mat and liberally hand out visas to incoming foreign students. But rationality is a scarce commodity among our immigration authorities who, as it turns out, are becoming even more tight-fisted.

Reports Business Week:

Obtaining a student visa is turning out to be more of a problem this year on some business school campuses than in the past. Jay Bryant, admissions director at the Thunderbird School of Global Management (Thunderbird Full-Time MBA Profile), says he has noticed that more students this summer are running into visa roadblocks when visiting U.S. embassies in their respective countries. The school, known for its globally diverse student body, has managed to keep international enrollment at a steady level, with non-U.S. students comprising 51% of the incoming class this fall. But Bryant says he worries that the figure could decline if students can't get visas in time for the start of the school year.

But America's myopia will just make it easier for its competitors to scoop up this talent, especially since they are fast relaxing their immigration policies, as I noted in this Wall Street Journal column.

Nativist International

info@reason.org (Jeff Winkler) — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 14:56:00 EDT

In March, Japan’s unemployment rate rose to 4.8 percent, a four-year high. To ease the competition for jobs, the government says it’s willing to pay ethnically Japanese guest workers—mostly the descendants of early 20th century Japanese emigrants to Brazil—to permanently cede their right to work in the country. The state is offering ¥300,000 (about $3,320) to the head of each household, plus ¥200,000 (about $2,909) per dependent, to cover the cost of a plane ride back to their country of origin.

The plan is unusual, but it isn’t unique. Spain, with an unemployment rate of 17.4 percent, has adopted a similar program, though participating immigrants there can return to the country to work after three years. And in February, the Czech Republic established a $3.2 million program to purchase one-way tickets for foreigners who can prove they have been laid off and can’t find a job. In Ireland, some political parties are proposing a plan to give unemployed foreigners six months’ benefits if they promise to leave the country.

This column first appeared at Reason.com.

Do Immigrants Make Cities Safer? The El Paso Miracle

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 16:07:00 EDT

Reason magazine

By conventional wisdom, El Paso, Texas should be one of the scariest cities in America. In 2007, the city's poverty rate was a shade over 27 percent, more than twice the national average. Median household income was $35,600, well below the national average of $48,000. El Paso is three-quarters Hispanic, and more than a quarter of its residents are foreign-born. Given that it's nearly impossible for low-skilled immigrants to work in the United States legitimately, it's safe to say that a significant percentage of El Paso's foreign-born population is living here illegally.

El Paso also has some of the laxer gun control policies of any non-Texan big city in the country, mostly due to gun-friendly state law. And famously, El Paso sits just over the Rio Grande from one of the most violent cities in the western hemisphere, Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, home to a staggering 2,500 homicides in the last 18 months alone. A city of illegal immigrants with easy access to guns, just across the river from a metropolis ripped apart by brutal drug war violence. Should be a bloodbath, right?

Here's the surprise: There were just 18 murders in El Paso last year, in a city of 736,000 people. To compare, Baltimore, with 637,000 residents, had 234 killings. In fact, since the beginning of 2008, there were nearly as many El Pasoans murdered while visiting Juarez (20) than there were murdered in their home town (23).

El Paso is among the safest big cities in America. For the better part of the last decade, only Honolulu has had a lower violent crime rate (El Paso slipped to third last year, behind New York). Men's Health magazine recently ranked El Paso the second "happiest" city in America, right after Laredo, Texas—another border town, where the Hispanic population is approaching 95 percent.

So how has this city of poor immigrants become such an anomaly? Actually, it may not be an anomaly at all. Many criminologists say El Paso isn't safe despite its high proportion of immigrants, it's safe because of them.

"If you want to find a safe city, first determine the size of the immigrant population," says Jack Levin, a criminologist at Northeastern University in Massachusetts. "If the immigrant community represents a large proportion of the population, you're likely in one of the country's safer cities. San Diego, Laredo, El Paso—these cities are teeming with immigrants, and they're some of the safest places in the country."

If you regularly listen to talk radio, or get your crime news from anti-immigration pundits, all of this may come as a surprise. But it's not to many of those who study crime for a living. As the national immigration debate heated up in 2007, dozens of academics who specialize in the issue sent a letter (pdf) to then President George W. Bush and congressional leaders with the following point:

Numerous studies by independent researchers and government commissions over the past 100 years repeatedly and consistently have found that, in fact, immigrants are less likely to commit crimes or to be behind bars than are the native-born. This is true for the nation as a whole, as well as for cities with large immigrant populations such as Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Miami, and cities along the U.S.-Mexico border such as San Diego and El Paso.

One of the signatories was Rubén G. Rumbaut, a sociologist who studies immigration at the University of California, Irvine. Rumbaut recently presented a paper on immigration and crime to a Washington, D.C. conference sponsored by the Police Foundation. Rumbaut writes via email, "The evidence points overwhelmingly to the same conclusion: Rates of crime and conviction for undocumented immigrants are far below those for the native born, and that is especially the case for violent crimes, including murder."

Opponents of illegal immigration usually do little more than cite andecdotes attempting to link illegal immigration to violent crime. When they do try to use statistics, they come up short. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), for example, has perpetuated the popular myth that illegal immigrants murder 12 Americans per day, and kill another 13 by driving drunk. King says his figures come from a Government Accountability Office study he requested, which found that about 27 percent of inmates in the federal prison system are non-citizens. Colorado Media Matters looked into King's claim, and found his methodology lacking. King appears to have conjured his talking point by simply multiplying the annual number of murders and DWI fatalities in America by 27 percent. Of course, the GAO report only looked at federal prisons, not the state prisons and local jails where most convicted murderers and DWI offenders are kept. The Bureau of Justice Statistics puts the number of non-citizens (including legal immigrants) in state, local, and federal prisons and jails at about 6.4 percent (pdf). Of course, even that doesn't mean that non-citizens account for 6.4 percent of murders and DWI fatalities, only 6.4 percent of the overall inmate population.

What's happening with Latinos is true of most immigrant groups throughout U.S. history. "Overall, immigrants have a stake in this country, and they recognize it," Northeastern University's Levin says. "They're really an exceptional sort of American. They come here having left their family and friends back home. They come at some cost to themselves in terms of security and social relationships. They are extremely success-oriented, and adjust very well to the competitive circumstances in the United States." Economists Kristin Butcher and Anne Morrison Piehl argue that the very process of migration tends to select for people with a low potential for criminality.

Despite the high profile of polemicists such as Lou Dobbs and Michael Savage, America has been mostly welcoming to this latest immigration wave. You don't see "Latinos Need Not Apply" or "No Mexicans" signs posted on public buildings the way you did with the Italians and the Irish, two groups who actually were disproportionately likely to turn to crime. The implication makes sense: An immigrant group's propensity for criminality may be partly determined by how they're received in their new country.

"Look at Arab-Americans in the Midwest, especially in the Detroit area," Levin says. "The U.S. and Canada have traditionally been very willing to welcome and integrate them. They're a success story, with high average incomes and very little crime. That's not the case in Europe. Countries like France and Germany are openly hostile to Arabs. They marginalize them. And they've seen waves of crime and rioting."

El Paso may be a concentrated affirmation of that theory. In 2007 the Washington Post reported on city leaders' wariness of anti-immigration policies coming out of Washington. The city went to court (and lost) in an effort to prevent construction of the border fence within its boundaries, and local officials have resisted federal efforts to enlist local police for immigration enforcement, arguing that it would make illegals less likely to cooperate with police. "Most people in Washington really don't understand life on the border," El Paso Mayor John Cook told the Post. "They don't understand our philosophy here that the border joins us together, it doesn't separate us."

Other mayors could learn something from Cook. El Paso's embrace of its immigrants might be a big reason why the low-income border town has remained one of the safest places in the country.

Radley Balko is a senior editor of Reason magazine, where this column first appeared.

I.T. Go Home

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Fri, 29 May 2009 14:53:00 EDT

Why do many highly trained immigrants choose to return to countries such as India and China rather than staying in the far wealthier United States? After all, their prospects here are good: Such immigrants were either CEOs or lead technologists in 52 percent of Silicon Valley’s startups from 1995 to 2005. Those immigrant-founded companies created $52 billion in revenue in 2006 and gave jobs to 450,000 workers.

Researchers led by Vivek Wadhwa, a scholar at Duke and Harvard, surveyed 1,203 immigrants who chose to return to India or China. According to their report, “America’s Loss Is the World’s Gain,” issued in March by Duke’s Global Engineering and Entrepreneurship Project, “87.3 percent of Chinese and 62.3 percent of Indians saw better career opportunities in their home countries than in the United States.”

That isn’t to say there isn’t anything Americans could do to lure them back. Each year more than 1 million skilledworker immigrants compete for only 120,000 U.S. permanent resident visas. “Presented with career opportunities or jobs in the United States equivalent to what they have in their home countries and a U.S. permanentresident visa,” Wadhwa and his colleagues found, 63 percent of Indian returnees and 71 percent of Chinese returnees said they would come back to America or seriously consider it.

Solving the Immigration Problem—Once and For All

info@reason.org (Ross Levatter) — Thu, 14 May 2009 14:39:00 EDT

It started when the depression began in 2008.

After the first decade, people lost hope it would end soon. The bailouts and government stimuli didn't turn the market around, nor did government's takeover of the financial sector, Michigan-based automobile companies, and fast-food restaurants west of the Mississippi make much difference. (Although the ads with Barack Obama guaranteeing you could "have fries with that" caused a brief resurgence in the stock market.) It all led to the government's fateful decision to monetize the debt.

After a few years, the country began running out of trees for paper. Congress wavered between reducing the speed with which the debt was monetized and allowing previously off-limit trees in federally protected forests to be used for the production of paper money. There were reasonable arguments on both sides, but the monetization crowd won in the end, leading to the great Federal Deforestation Program of 2013-16.

Despite all that, there was growing concern that something more must be done. It was around this time that Bangladesh suggested it might stop buying our debt. The politicians—some pushed by conviction, others by letter-writing campaigns originated by Fox News opinion-leaders—felt that the problem was illegal immigration. Obviously, there were too many people in the country. Illegal aliens either worked or they didn't. If they worked, removing them would free up more jobs for unemployed Americans (unemployment then hovered around 33 percent). If they were not working, removing them would free up governmental services (unemployment insurance, food-stamps, guaranteed mortgage payments, extended GM car warranties, all the usual suspects) for Americans who really deserved them.

Everyone agreed that legal immigration was good for our country. We were a nation of immigrants, after all. Politicians got choked up all along the Potomac shouting the praises of legal immigration—although the choking might have had something to do with the fumes from all the new paper plants needed to keep up with Treasury's demands.

Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, and the other Fox pundits had nothing but hosannas to sing about legal immigration. But, as they endlessly reminded viewers, we are a nation of laws. (So many laws that the Congressional Register stopped publishing them. Besides, the Treasury hoarded all the paper.) A nation of laws must enforce the law. Who could disagree?

In 2017, during the first term of President Michelle Obama, the bright boys in the Office of Management and Budget worked closely with the president's top economic advisors, Paul Krugman and Lou Dobbs, to calculate how many immigrants would have to go in order to free up sufficient government funding to take care of so-called real Americans. The answer turned out to be the last two generations of immigrants.

When presented with the stark numerical evidence—to say nothing of President Obama's eloquence on the subject—Congress overwhelmingly passed the Save the Endangered Americans Act of 2018, which defined Americans as those people whose grandparents were born in the United States. The rest were illegal immigrants; the law allowed no retroactive immunity. "No one should be grandfathered in, so to speak," said our first Madam President. She was certainly sad to see her husband, the former president, deported, since two of his grandparents were born in Kenya. "But we all have to sacrifice to improve America," she declared.

Fox News hailed the move, running hour-long specials on the worsening immigration crisis. Illegals, the pundits ominously declared, now numbered over 200 million. And like the Communists in the 1950s, they had infiltrated every aspect of the government. Bill O'Reilly denounced those who were destroying America from his remote feed in Ireland, since he, too, was forced to leave the United States.

Things ran smoothly after that. In an interview several years after leaving office, Michelle Obama explained that once the definition of an illegal immigrant was clearly defined, it became quite easy to solve America's economic problems. Hyperinflation ended because the few remaining Americans didn't need that many paper bills, especially with the population's new interest in barter. Government seizures of American businesses became less frequent as American businesses themselves became less frequent.

So the depression finally ended. The few remaining Americans—true Americans—became self-sufficient. People of other lands had little reason to want to emigrate here, so illegal immigration dried up. As Americans developed more rustic ways of cooking—usually with a pot on the hearth—all those Geithner dollars finally came in handy.

Ross Levatter is a writer in Arizona. This column first appeared at Reason.com.

Immigrants to America: Keep Your H1-Bs

shikha.dalmia@reason.org (Shikha Dalmia) — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 12:08:00 EDT

This week brought more evidence that when it comes to high-tech foreign workers, America's future problem is going to be not too much - but too little - immigration. Till last year, the demand for H-1B visas - the temporary work permits that allow high-skilled immigrants to legally work in the country - was so great that the entire year's 85,000 quota would get filled within the first week these visas became available on April 1. Not this time. The Boston Globe reports that immigration authorities last week decided to extend the application deadline for these visas because they have about 20,000 H-1Bs still leftover.

Part of the reason for the plummeting demand of course is the recession. With the economy slowing, companies are hiring fewer people - foreigner or otherwise. But the other reason, as I noted in my column Goodbye Chang, So Long Singh last month is that with the economies of India and China - major high-tech donor countries - doing relatively better than America's, thanks to liberalization, these immigrants have less interest in the U.S. in the first place. Not just that, there is growing evidence that the émigrés already here are returning home. Many of them are even renouncing their green cards - an unprecedented development in U.S immigration history. (About a third of the immigrants in previous waves returned home as well, but that's not because they didn't want to stay but because, for one reason or another, they couldn't).

The real test of immigrant interest will come once the economy picks up again. If new immigrants continue to spurn the U.S. and existing émigrés continue to return, as Duke University researcher Vivek Wadhwa's recent study suggests that they may, then the American economy will have to make some painful adjustments. Indeed, companies that can't bring workers here might well have to move to these workers. In short, more off-shoring and outsourcing.

The liberalization of Third World economies has profound implications for global immigration patterns that our venerable leaders in Washington D.C. have not even begun to grasp. Indeed, while people like Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, have been railing against foreign immigrants taking high-paying U.S. jobs, other countries are putting in place policies to snap up these folks. (Although these efforts have back-tracked a bit, thanks to the global recession.)

President Barack Obama this week announced that he wants a major overhaul of the U.S. immigration system. He should begin by recognizing that the game has changed completely. Going forward, America will no longer be able to count on being the automatic first choice for the world's best and brightest. It will have to compete for them with everyone else, including their home countries.

Goodbye Chang, So Long Singh

shikha.dalmia@reason.org (Shikha Dalmia) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 14:03:00 EDT

This country's floundering economy has never needed the world's best and brightest immigrants more—but, unfortunately, these immigrants have never been interested in this country less. So this would be a good time to roll out the red carpet and stand garland in hand on America's shores to usher in new talent. Far from taking away American jobs (as restrictionists argue), this talent creates more jobs by growing the economic pie.

Yet Congress last month decided to thumb its nose at immigrants who can fill top jobs in the high-tech sector. It added to the "stimulus" bill a provision that will effectively put foreign workers off limits to financial companies that receive bailout money through the Toxic Asset Recovery Program (TARP). The provision was sponsored by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa). Grassley in particular has been acting like he has a new mission from god to chase away foreign high-tech workers who enter the country on temporary visas. These work permits are called H1-B visas and are specifically designed for "workers in short supply."

Besides making it virtually impossible for TARP companies to hire H1-Bs, Grassley has also been sending letters to Microsoft, a non-TARP company, telling it to fire temporary foreign workers ahead of Americans. But like other forms of protectionism, this exercise in nativist labor policy won't "stimulate" America's economy. If anything, it will work to prolong the recession by keeping out precisely the sort of folks who can rejuvenate the economy.

Vivek Wadhwa, a researcher at Duke University, notes that even before the current downturn, a steady stream of highly skilled immigrants from India and China—the major donor countries—had been returning home. In fact, Indian and Chinese companies have been reporting a seven to tenfold increase in job applications from their émigrés in the last five years or so.

According to a recent study that Wadhwa coauthored with Harvard University's Richard Freeman and University of California at Berkeley's AnnaLee Saxenian, most of the people are not leaving because they are having a tough time getting by in the United States. Rather, they are virtually the best of the best with excellent prospects in the United States.

Most of the returning emigres are in their 30s and over half hold advanced degrees in management, technology, or science from excellent schools. That puts them "at the very top of the educational distribution" even for this highly educated cohort. Most stunning of all, 27 percent of the Indians and 34 percent of the Chinese who opted to return home had already obtained green cards or citizenship.

Even a decade or so ago, giving that up to return back to India or China would have seemed pure lunacy. No more.

What's changed? Thanks to economic liberalization, professional opportunities have improved dramatically for these immigrants in their home countries. Over half of the Indian and Chinese polled by Wadhwa said that, relative to cost of living, they were making more money upon returning home compared to what they were earning in the United States.

This means it is no longer necessary for high-tech workers to tear up their roots and make an alien land their home for the sake of economic advancement. They can live the American dream in their own country close to family and friends.

This will have profound implications for America's ability to hang on to its immigrant talent in the coming years. Migration patterns naturally ebb and flow with the business cycle, picking up during a boom and dropping during a recession.

But the problem of reverse brain drain is likely to be particularly acute for America during this downturn given that India's and China's economies are so far on track to outperform the United States'. Despite the global recession, according to the IMF, China is expected to grow 6.7 percent and India 5 percent this year. If this prediction pans out, Indians and Chinese will sprint—not stroll—to the exit doors in coming months.

This would be genuinely unfortunate since people who have willingly uprooted themselves from their homes to travel across oceans and establish themselves on foreign soil are natural risk takers. They are precisely the kind of folks America needs to help jumpstart its sputtering economic engine and create new jobs by starting businesses. It is not a coincidence that one in two companies in Silicon Valley has been founded by immigrants. If America is unable to replenish its crop of immigrants, the next Silicon Valley won't be in California—it'll be in Beijing or Bangalore.

Sens. Sanders and Grassley's crusade against H1-B workers is thus both economically illiterate and outdated. Their stimulus provision, incidentally, was inspired by a single, scurrilous Associated Press story that found that the top 12 banks receiving TARP money had in the six years before the economic downturn filed 20,000 or so H1-B applications—which makes foreign workers anywhere from a whopping 0 percent to 0.74 percent of their total workforce.

Before slamming the door on foreign workers, Sanders and Grassley might have checked to see if there were throngs of crowds still clamoring on the other side. America can no longer count on gifted immigrants automatically flocking to its shore. It will have to compete for them, just like every other country.

Instead of posting "No Entry" signs, Congress should be rolling out the welcome mat. It can begin by scrapping the annual H1-B visa cap. Set at 85,000, this cap is so low that for the last few years it has been getting filled within days after immigration authorities begin accepting applications on April 1, leaving tens of thousands of potential high-tech immigrants in the lurch for the rest of the year.

Beyond that, it should put in place a fast track process that makes these visas available within weeks—not the months and years as is currently the case—of the application. That is what nearly every other industrialized country which is experiencing declining interest by high-tech immigrants is doing.

Otherwise, America, the proud nation of immigrants, might well be the big loser in the global race for talent—hardly something to celebrate.

Shikha Dalmia is a senior analyst at Reason Foundation. This column first appeared at Reason.com.

Immigrants Have Never Been Less Interested in America

shikha.dalmia@reason.org (Shikha Dalmia) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 00:00:00 EDT

This country's floundering economy has never needed the world's best and brightest immigrants more—but, unfortunately, these immigrants have never been interested in this country less. So this would be a good time to roll out the red carpet and stand garland in hand on America's shores to usher in new talent. Far from taking away American jobs (as restrictionists argue), this talent creates more jobs by growing the economic pie.

Yet Congress last month decided to thumb its nose at immigrants who can fill top jobs in the high-tech sector. It added to the "stimulus" bill a provision that will effectively put foreign workers off limits to financial companies that receive bailout money through the Toxic Asset Recovery Program (TARP). The provision was sponsored by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa). Grassley in particular has been acting like he has a new mission from god to chase away foreign high-tech workers who enter the country on temporary visas. These work permits are called H1-B visas and are specifically designed for "workers in short supply."

Besides making it virtually impossible for TARP companies to hire H1-Bs, Grassley has also been sending letters to Microsoft, a non-TARP company, telling it to fire temporary foreign workers ahead of Americans. But like other forms of protectionism, this exercise in nativist labor policy won't "stimulate" America's economy. If anything, it will work to prolong the recession by keeping out precisely the sort of folks who can rejuvenate the economy.

Vivek Wadhwa, a researcher at Duke University, notes that even before the current downturn, a steady stream of highly skilled immigrants from India and China—the major donor countries—had been returning home. In fact, Indian and Chinese companies have been reporting a seven to tenfold increase in job applications from their émigrés in the last five years or so.

According to a recent study that Wadhwa coauthored with Harvard University's Richard Freeman and University of California at Berkeley's AnnaLee Saxenian, most of the people are not leaving because they are having a tough time getting by in the United States. Rather, they are virtually the best of the best with excellent prospects in the United States.

Most of the returning emigres are in their 30s and over half hold advanced degrees in management, technology, or science from excellent schools. That puts them "at the very top of the educational distribution" even for this highly educated cohort. Most stunning of all, 27 percent of the Indians and 34 percent of the Chinese who opted to return home had already obtained green cards or citizenship.

Even a decade or so ago, giving that up to return back to India or China would have seemed pure lunacy. No more.

What's changed? Thanks to economic liberalization, professional opportunities have improved dramatically for these immigrants in their home countries. Over half of the Indian and Chinese polled by Wadhwa said that, relative to cost of living, they were making more money upon returning home compared to what they were earning in the United States.

This means it is no longer necessary for high-tech workers to tear up their roots and make an alien land their home for the sake of economic advancement. They can live the American dream in their own country close to family and friends.

This will have profound implications for America's ability to hang on to its immigrant talent in the coming years. Migration patterns naturally ebb and flow with the business cycle, picking up during a boom and dropping during a recession.

But the problem of reverse brain drain is likely to be particularly acute for America during this downturn given that India's and China's economies are so far on track to outperform the United States'. Despite the global recession, according to the IMF, China is expected to grow 6.7 percent and India 5 percent this year. If this prediction pans out, Indians and Chinese will sprint—not stroll—to the exit doors in coming months.

This would be genuinely unfortunate since people who have willingly uprooted themselves from their homes to travel across oceans and establish themselves on foreign soil are natural risk takers. They are precisely the kind of folks America needs to help jumpstart its sputtering economic engine and create new jobs by starting businesses. It is not a coincidence that one in two companies in Silicon Valley has been founded by immigrants. If America is unable to replenish its crop of immigrants, the next Silicon Valley won't be in California—it'll be in Beijing or Bangalore.

Sens. Sanders and Grassley's crusade against H1-B workers is thus both economically illiterate and outdated. Their stimulus provision, incidentally, was inspired by a single, scurrilous Associated Press story that found that the top 12 banks receiving TARP money had in the six years before the economic downturn filed 20,000 or so H1-B applications—which makes foreign workers anywhere from a whopping 0 percent to 0.74 percent of their total workforce.

Before slamming the door on foreign workers, Sanders and Grassley might have checked to see if there were throngs of crowds still clamoring on the other side. America can no longer count on gifted immigrants automatically flocking to its shore. It will have to compete for them, just like every other country.

Instead of posting "No Entry" signs, Congress should be rolling out the welcome mat. It can begin by scrapping the annual H1-B visa cap. Set at 85,000, this cap is so low that for the last few years it has been getting filled within days after immigration authorities begin accepting applications on April 1, leaving tens of thousands of potential high-tech immigrants in the lurch for the rest of the year.

Beyond that, it should put in place a fast track process that makes these visas available within weeks—not the months and years as is currently the case—of the application. That is what nearly every other industrialized country which is experiencing declining interest by high-tech immigrants is doing.

Otherwise, America, the proud nation of immigrants, might well be the big loser in the global race for talent—hardly something to celebrate.

Shikha Dalmia is a senior analyst at Reason Foundation.

Border Wars Take On a Musical Tone

anthony.randazzo@reason.org (Anthony Randazzo) — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 11:46:00 EDT

In one of the stranger twists in the border wars, DHS has begun developing its own 21st century Tokyo Rose: up-tempo Mexican folk music about the horrors of illegal border crossings. The songs are to be written by an ad company out of DC and will be distributed via radio throughout Mexico.

This is actually a follow up to an EP of sorts, five songs were recorded in 2006 and aired throughout Mexico. This Washington Post article reports that many of the stations who play the songs (and those who hear them) are unaware that Uncle Sam is the producer of the "bouncy ballads of death, dashed dreams and futile attempts at manhood."

On song called "20 Years" ("Veinte Años") warns young men that its better to live then die in the desert:

"Before you cross the border, remember that you can be just as much a man by chickening out and staying / Because it's better to keep your life than ending up dead."

US Customs and Border Patrol have other means of discouraging illegal immigration. The "No Mas Cruces en la Frontera" campaign ("No more crossings on the border") uses ads in newspapers, television, and radio to place images and ideas about how deadly crossing the border can be. And then for those who try anyway there is the fence and famed Minutemen.

Tariffs and trucking restrictions have been mounting between the two large trading partners, and it needs to stop. Mexico is the third second largest import/export partner the US has. Our economy needs immigrants from south of our border to meet market demands for services. Instead of spending money on catchy limericks, perhaps ICE and Border Patrol should invest their budgeted money in making the immigration process easier to open the borders for free flow of trade and human ingenuity and entrepreneurship.

UPDATE:

Mexico's Ambassador to the US, Arturo Sarukhan, wrote in a WSJ op-ed today an excellent, and passionate plea for the US to end its protectionist practices and offered a well argued explanation for why Mexico has levied the new tariffs against American goods.

Global economic growth penalizes US

sam.staley@reason.org (Samuel Staley) — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 23:12:00 EDT

Duke University executive in residence Vivek Wadwah has an article in the Washington Post that makes two crucial points worth repeating about US immigration policy. First, US immigration policy creates significant barriers to retaining the best and the brightest. Second, global economic growth is making it harder and harder for the best and the brightest to justify living and working in the US.

This article is the best one I've read in a long time that examines the economic implications of our inept and dysfunctional immigration policy.

The United States has always been the country to which the world's best and brightest -- people like Sandeep -- have flocked in pursuit of education and to seek their fortunes. Over the past four decades, India and China suffered a major "brain drain" as tens of thousands of talented people made their way here, dreaming the American dream.
But burgeoning new economies abroad and flagging prospects in the United States have changed everything. And as opportunities pull immigrants home, the lumbering U.S. immigration bureaucracy helps push them away.

But that's not all. Even foreign graduate students, often seeing the US as a beacon of opportunity, are flocking back to their homeland.

When I [Wadwah] started teaching at Duke University in 2005, almost all the international students graduating from our Master of Engineering Management program said that they planned to stay in the United States for at least a few years. In the class of 2009, most of our 80 international students are buying one-way tickets home. It's the same at Harvard. Senior economics major Meijie Tang, from China, isn't even bothering to look for a job in the United States. After hearing from other students that it's "impossible" to get an H-1B visa -- the kind given to highly-skilled workers in fields such as engineering and science -- she teamed up with a classmate to start a technology company in Shanghai. Investors in China offered to put up millions even before 23-year-old Meijie and her 21-year-old colleague completed their business plan.

In a nation where 25% of all inernational patent applications list foreign nationals as inventors, and 25% of technology companies were founded by immigrants, our immigration policy is cutting the legs out from under our long-term growth and our ability to compete globally.

Shot by the Sheriff

info@reason.org (Mike Riggs) — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 14:22:00 EST

Immigrants have plenty of reasons to fear authority in Arizona. Border Patrol Agent Nicholas Corbett shot and killed an unarmed illegal immigrant at point-blank range in 2007 and remains on the force after two mistrials. The country’s most draconian employee verification law turns bosses into immigration law enforcers. And Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Phoenix’s Maricopa County has become both famous and infamous for stopping brown-skinned people at checkpoints and having the paperless deported.

A group of anonymous artists in Tucson has responded with lifesized cutouts depicting the border cops aiming their guns at bewildered immigrants. They placed these creations at intersections all over the city. Painting in eerie detail, the artists mixed and matched the cutouts to illustrate various types of conflict. In some spots, Arpaio stood with his legs spread, gun at the ready, opposite a supplicating suspect. In others, a cutout of an immigrant woman and her child roamed, unaware, near officers. With just a few black-and-white figures, the artists captured a wide range of border control interactions.

Asked about the spooky cardboard images which the city removed within a few days, Arpaio told KVOATV, “I will continue my fight against illegal immigration, and these people here in Arizona…are not going to deter me.”

Mike Riggs was Reason magazine's Burton C. Gray Memorial Intern during the summer of 2008. He now works for Washington CityPaper. This column first appeared at Reason.com.

Checkpoint Diego

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 14:13:00 EST

In September 2008, social worker Vince Peppard and his wife drove to Mexico to purchase some tiles. On the way back, Peppard was stopped at a federal border security checkpoint on a road east of San Diego. According to Peppard, once he reached the checkpoint, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents asked to search his car. He refused. He says he was then detained and his car “ransacked.” The agents found nothing illegal.

Peppard, a member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), is now a plaintiff in a suit the organization has filed against the federal government. The ACLU says that since September 11, 2001, the federal government has been steadily stretching the limits of U.S. v. Martinez-Fuerte, the 1976 Supreme Court decision that allows the government to set up checkpoints like the one where Peppard was stopped. Under that decision, the checkpoints must be within 100 miles of the border, and they have to be aimed at catching illegal immigrants or smugglers. The ACLU says the Department of Homeland Security is using that case coupled with the terrorism threat to conduct searches more aggressive and invasive than the “minimal intrusion” allowed by Martinez-Fuerte.

The territory within 100 miles of every border and coastline encompasses about 190 million people, nearly two-thirds of the U.S. population. Should the courts uphold suspicionless and increasingly invasive border searches under a vague national security exception, most Americans could essentially forfeit their Fourth Amendment rights in exchange for the privilege of driving.

Radley Balko is a senior editor of Reason magazine. This column first appeared at Reason.com.

Alien World

info@reason.org (Alexander Zaitchik) — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 14:05:00 EST

It’s a little before 10 p.m. when I climb into the back of a pick-up truck full of crouching young Mexicans. We’re in the lush Mezquital Valley just outside Ixmiquilpan, a dusty strip town cramped with car part shacks and taqueria stalls a couple hours’ drive north of Mexico City. The late model GMC is scheduled to take its cargo—10 of us—north toward the Sonora-Arizona line. After the dropoff starts a treacherous pre-dawn border trek past armed U.S. patrols and the fanged, baying beasts of the desert wilds. Tonight we escape Mexico. El Norte or bust.

The truck is still idling when a young girl in an L.A. Dodgers jacket loses her nerve. “I’m worried about snakes and coyotes,” she says in a quiet voice. “There are rattlers in the mountains. My brother said the little green ones are also poisonous.” This is the first I’ve heard about poisonous snakes since signing up for this adventure.

“The clouds are no good,” adds someone else. “We won’t be able to see anything.”

“Like the snakes,” says the girl in the Dodgers jacket, her voice softer than before.

It’s just possible to make out the faces of the group in the faint moonlight. These aren’t the frightened, soiled migrants captured on green-lit night cams for network news investigations into “America’s broken border.” Not yet, anyway. These would-be migrants wear Diesel jeans and John Deere mesh caps, nose studs and gelled emo haircuts. Like me, each has paid $125 for two days of camping and a midnight “border crossing” experience in central Mexico. The staged run, 700 miles from the real U.S. border, covers a bruising adventure course that winds through the valley and is riddled with muddy riverbanks, bristly thwap-you-in-the-face brush, and jagged mountain passes.

The course is also flecked with gritty and realistic dramatic accents. Men in U.S. Border Patrol T-shirts bark insults in broken English through megaphones. Women and children are tossed into Border Patrol vehicles and driven off into the night. M-80s stand in for shotgun fire. Then there are the female screams in the distance, a soundtrack of rape.

It all adds up to the world’s most elaborate simulation of the Mexican migrant experience. One much safer, and about $3,000 cheaper, than the real thing.

On my night as a hunted migrant, the Caminata Nocturna (“Night Hike”) was celebrating its fourth sellout year under the direction of Mexico’s leading purveyor of domestic meta-tourism, the Alberto Eco Park in the central Mexican highlands. The park was founded in 2004 by indigenous locals known as the Otomi in an attempt to staunch the flow of their working-age population, 90 percent of which has migrated to the United States over the last two decades. Faced with the extinction of the local community and culture, a few entrepreneurial Otomi decided to tap into the regional boom in culturally aware ecotourism. Their land is remote but nestled within a mountain range blessed with sheer cliffs and clean rivers. The Mexican government paved a road leading into the mountains, and with the help of a few small grants and sponsors, the Otomi built a campground replete with a rappelling cliff, zip lines, and a dock for canoes and kayaks. There is also a large riverside stage, upon which the Otomi perform their music in the local tribal dialect for Mexico’s middle class and a smattering of European tourists. Today the camp is thriving. Among the growing list of sponsors is Corona.

The riverside picnics are pleasant enough on a summer’s day, but it is the mock border run that is the park’s primary draw and claim to fame. As America works on designs for its high-tech virtual border fence, middle-class Mexicans have been flocking to this low-tech virtual border, hungry for a taste of the danger experienced by their desperate compatriots who every year make the treacherous journey north. Tonight 130 of us pack into 12 pick-ups. Many are repeat visitors who have brought friends and relatives. “I heard about it from friends at school,” says a teenage girl in my group. “They said it was fun.”

Part of the fun, I learn, is staying in character. Sitting in the truck, I ask a kid in an Abercrombie sweatshirt why he came.

“Because there are no jobs in Mexico,” he deadpans. “I want to find a better life, to live the American Dream.”

The imitation of a pitiful migrant sparks a group laugh. But the chuckling is awkward and short-lived, as if everyone realizes a line has been crossed. The Otomi market the border crossing as an act of solidarity with Mexico’s poor, but it can quickly start to feel a lot like what we gringos call slumming. When the truck finally starts moving, Abercrombie admits in perfect English to studying communications at Puebla University. When he visits the United States, which is about once a year, he gets a tourist visa and flies Mexicana. “I’m here for kicks,” he says.

So is the girl in the Dodgers jacket with the fear of snakes. Her name is Daisy De Vasca, and she is from Lakewood, California, in Mexico visiting her aunt. Yet she swears tonight’s snake threat is real. When she again begins describing the poisonous breeds that live in the mountains, I wave her off the subject. Better to talk about the American Dream, which can also bite you in the ass but usually lets you live to tell the tale.

The Otomi know about American dreams and nightmares. Most have made the trip north to work seasonally or settle in the large Otomi communities of Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Many have returned to Mexico, but the majority stay in the U.S., unable or unwilling to make the trip twice. An unknown number have disappeared or died along the way, their bloated, hyperthermic corpses returned to their families in state vehicles if they were carrying ID cards, dispatched to anonymous graves if they weren’t.

One of those who left and returned is Laura Basuado, a fresh-faced 27-year-old park employee who crossed the border when she was 17. She says the border simulation is designed to offer well-off Mexicans a small but bitter dose of the ordeal endured by migrants. It is her hope that the experience will build solidarity between what she calls “the two Mexicos”—one middle class and thriving, one dirt poor and sinking.

“The Night Walk is not even 1 percent of what it’s really like,” says Basuado, whose own journey to the U.S. involved a four-day march through the Sonoran desert. “I have never been so terrified in my life as when I went north. I was so sure we would die that I prayed the border police would catch us.” Basuado eventually found her way to Minnesota, where she stayed four months before deciding she’d rather be poor and jobless in Mexico than poor and marginally employed in the U.S., living in constant dread of arrest and deportation.

The most painful memory for Basuado is the abuse she suffered at the rough hands of her coyote, or hired guide, known more commonly in Mexico as a pollero. These guides are usually part of violent criminal networks and are often indifferent to the safety of their charges once money has changed hands. In recent years polleros have become famous villains in the Mexican migration drama. In the interest of realism, they are well represented in the Night Hike. From beginning to end, park employees impersonating polleros scream “Vamos rapido!” while pushing participants through some of the course’s most dangerous terrain.

Then there are the screams that come from behind the bushes. During quiet lulls in the walk, female park employees periodically issue bloodcurdling cries that echo through the mountains. It is not an overly histrionic touch. Rape has become so endemic to the border crossing experience that women often start taking birth control before making the trip, expecting abuse from coyotes or the bandits that travel with them. “Even if a woman is traveling with a brother or cousin, they are at the mercy of the coyotes for survival,” says Walt Staton, spokesperson for No More Deaths, a humanitarian group that provides assistance to migrants on both sides of the border.

Nobody actually gets raped, robbed, or murdered during the Night Hike, but the simulation is not for the weak of heart or the pregnant. There are full-speed runs down steep unlit paths as sirens wail in pursuit and stretches along raging river waters where the mire is almost knee high. In most countries participants would be required to sign multiple waivers before even getting in the back of the truck. During periodic breaks, everybody collapses in exhaustion, many tending to bloody knees and sprained ankles.

It was during one of these pauses that screeching tires and high pitched sirens called our attention to the foot of the hill we were resting on. Down below, a truck marked U.S. Border Patrol stopped before a group of migrants.

In one of the night’s few dramatic set pieces, actors in camo and Border Patrol T-shirts throw several young girls into the back of the truck. Before driving away, an officer looks up at our group and yells, “Go back to Mexico! We don’t want you here!”

Watching the drama unfold, a kid next to me pulls out a Snickers bar and offers me half. “Pendejos,” he mutters. Assholes.

When Parque Eco Alberto opened in 2004, curious reporters immediately set upon the camp with cameras and notepads. The Mexican media came first, followed by a trickle of international outlets, including the BBC, which called the border crossing simulation “Migrant Mountain.” Most of the coverage was and remains positive, if sometimes bemused. “The media sees we are trying to build understanding and create jobs, and they support us,” says Eduardo del Plan, a park employee who scripts much of the simulation based on his own multiple trips across the border. “We have become an example of an indigenous community standing on its own feet, trying to stop the bleeding to the north.”

The loudest exception to the chorus of approval is the Spanish language television network Telemundo. The Miami-based channel has accused the Otomi of using the Night Hike as a training course for migrants, akin to the mercenary firm Blackwater’s North Carolina training compound, where it prepares its employees for Iraq. When asked about this charge, del Plan laughs, saying the network purposely misrepresented the entire point of the exercise. “Telemundo is always trying to be sensational,” he says. “They should stick to covering soap operas.”

But the charge of preparing migrants for their journey mirrors one frequently leveled against Mexico City in Washington: that the Mexican government tolerates and even encourages migration north because it is one of the Mexican economy’s three pillars (the others being oil and the maquiladora factories along Mexico’s northern border). Mexicans living in the U.S. send more than $25 billion in annual remittances to their relatives south of the border. After oil exports, this money constitutes the country’s second largest stream of foreign revenue. “Migration used to be an economic safety valve for Mexico,” says Laura Carlson, director of the Americas Policy Program, a Mexico City think tank. “Now it’s an economic motor. The government has little incentive to crack down, and frankly views border security as a domestic issue for the U.S.”

Community initiatives like the Eco Alberto Park aren’t going to reverse these numbers. The income from the roughly 100 jobs created by the park is dwarfed by the regular bundles of cash sent back by Otomi working construction jobs in Las Vegas. Migrants will continue to go north as long as there is work there, no matter the mounting dangers illustrated by the border simulation. The same is true at border points around the globe where the poor live within walking or swimming distance of a better life. You can see it in Spain’s African enclave of Ceuta, bordering Morocco, where would-be migrants routinely charge guarded double walls topped with razor wire or attempt to swim the 13-mile Strait of Gibraltar.

Ask any struggling Mexican if U.S. plans for a high-tech border fence will stop the flow, and he will tell you the idea is fanciful, that you cannot deter the desperate. “If you build a wall, they will build taller ladders or dig deeper tunnels,” says del Plan. “If the entire border becomes clogged with armed guards, they will take boats, as the Cubans and Haitians do.” Indeed, this shift is already happening. Coast Guard interdictions of Mexican boats off the coast of San Diego are on the rise, as are reports of fatal capsizings.

But none of this directly concerns the kids with whom I pretended to be a migrant. Mexico’s growing middle class has more in common with its American counterpart than with people like the Otomi. Despite the Otomi talk of “one Mexico” and hopes of building solidarity with the migrants, the two Mexicos reappear as soon as we return, exhausted and bruised, to the Eco Alberto campsite. At a fire I sip Modelos with a group of university students ruminating on the night’s adventure. There is a comparison of light wounds, some laughter over the simulation’s low-fi effects. The talk quickly turns to football.

Alexander Zaitchik is a freelance journalist. This column first appeared at Reason.com.

Competitive sourcing leads to new immigration management initiative

anthony.randazzo@reason.org (Anthony Randazzo) — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 11:40:13 EST

U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services (USCIS) has decided to upgrade is processing systems and used competitive sourcing to find a contractor. Despite attempts this summer by federal unions to limit the use of public-private contractors and a lack of clarity about if, or how much, the upcoming Obama administration might scale back federal competitive sourcing, the USCIS launched a major overhaul of America's immigration services management last week. IBM was given a five-year, $500 million contract to reinvent how the government handles about seven million applications each year for visas, citizenship and approval to work in the United States. Here's the story from the Washington Post:

International Business Machines Corp. was selected over rivals CSC and Accenture to serve as a "solutions architect" for the $2.6 billion-a-year agency, which employs 10,700 government workers and 8,000 contractors at 200 locations nationwide. The contract, awarded this week and the largest federal homeland security bid on the market, includes a $14.5 million, 90-day assessment period with options over five years worth $491.1 million. Government investigators have reported that the agency's pre-computer-age paper filing system incurs $100 million a year in archiving, storage, retrieval and shipping costs; has led to the loss or misplacement of more than 100,000 files; and has contributed to backlogs and delays for millions of cases. Modernization efforts, proposed in 1999, have been delayed by funding problems, inertia, post-Sept. 11 security demands and reorganization triggered by the creation of the Homeland Security Department. The department's inspector general in 2007 faulted the agency for being "entrenched in a cycle of continual planning, with little progress."

Wisely realizing that outsourcing rarely works without a well structured contract, analysts said USCIS has been working carefully over the past few years in structuring the project in such a way that it avoids some of the flaws that have derailed other major Homeland Security contracts including SBInet (an initiative with Boeing to build a "virtual" border fence using surveillance technology), and Deepwater (the Coast Guard's massive fleet-replacement effort with Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman).

Can You Navigate the Immigration Maze to U.S. Citizenship?

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Los Angeles (August 21, 2008) - The immigration debate is often reduced to - why don't immigrants just get in line and come into this country legally? If only it were that simple.

A new chart details how complicated the immigration maze is, demonstrating the countless requirements that must be met, and the red tape that must be navigated, by everyone from English soccer star David Beckham to an Indian engineer.

What's the best-case immigration scenario? Five or six years: If you are the spouse or a minor child of a U.S. citizen, you should be able to enter the country and get a green card. Then, after three to five years, you can apply to become a citizen.

The worst case scenario? You are an unskilled worker hoping to make a better life for yourself in America. "Unlike previous periods in our history, there is virtually no process for unskilled immigrants without family relations in the U.S. to apply for permanent legal residence," the chart by Reason Foundation and the National Foundation for American Policy states.

Unskilled workers just have to hope they get lucky. That's because only 10,000 green cards are given to these workers each year and "the wait time approaches infinity." Skilled workers may have better chances, but still face strict caps, thousands of dollars in fees, and an 11 to 16 year wait to obtain a green card and gain U.S. citizenship.

"Our country's immigration system is broken," says Shikha Dalmia, a senior policy analyst at Reason Foundation and one of the chart's authors. "Workers with family already here or college degrees face a convoluted, cruel and uncertain process. And they are the lucky ones. For poor laborers, who pick our crops and build our homes, there is virtually no legal process and no 'line' to wait in if they hope to permanently work and live in this country."

"Our high-tech companies are starving for qualified engineers and skilled workers," declares Mike Flynn co-author of the report and director of government affairs at Reason Foundation. "These are American companies trying to find the best workers so that they can compete globally. Instead our system handicaps American companies and denies them the skills and talents of thousands of potential workers. It is economic suicide."

"The American Civil Liberties Union commends Reason Magazine for graphically capturing how burdensome the federal government has made the citizenship process for people hoping to become Americans," says Timothy Sparapani, ACLU senior legislative counsel. "But this process not only affects those hoping for a chance to contribute to our society - it has also created problems for innocent American citizens.

"There have been far too many stories of innocent Americans being arrested and detained for hours, and even deported, on the suspicion of being here illegally. The government engages in rampant ethnic profiling, targeting Americans solely on the basis of their names or ethnicities. Similarly, the voluntary employment verification system the government hopes to make mandatory for all new hires is plagued with errors, and expansions have been forced on the Social Security Administration - an agency already facing substantial service backlogs for its central mission of assisting the elderly and disabled. Innocent Americans cannot earn a living because the federal government thinks added layers of bureaucracy will solve our border issues.

"As Reason makes clear, we have got to go in a different direction and dramatically overhaul our immigration 'system.' It is illogical, burdensome and long past time those in Washington chose to address these issues in ways that will continue to allow our nation to grow and prosper."

Helen E. Krieble, President of the Vernon K. Krieble Foundation, says, "Reason Foundation's flow-chart graphically demonstrates how badly broken our system is. It will help show the desperate need for a program to handle workers who wish to come to the US legally. Quite simply, these people cannot wait in line because there is no line. We hope this effort will help prod Congress to create a workable program for non-citizen workers."

"The flowchart published by the Reason Foundation clearly demonstrates that the current U.S. visa and immigration system is broken. The Golden Door Foundation shares the belief that without a functioning legal work visa process, the illegal immigrant population will continue to grow. An aging population exiting the workforce and companies moving operations outside the U.S. are issues that need to be addressed to deal effectively with the immigration crisis and current labor shortages facing the United States. The Golden Door Foundation applauds the work of the Reason Foundation to show that there is a need to fix the overly bureaucratic and unfair visa program," states Jason LeVecke, founder of Golden Door Foundation.

Full Chart Online

The full chart, "Our Nation's Broken Immigration and Naturalization System," produced by Reason Foundation and the National Foundation for American Policy, is online at: http://reason.org/files/a87d1550853898a9b306ef458f116079.pdf

A cartoon version of the chart that will appear in the October 2008 issue of Reason magazine is here: http://reason.org/files/cb299f0134ca8bb75243c69caa92eea7.pdf

About Reason Foundation

Reason Foundation is a nonprofit think tank dedicated to advancing free minds and free markets. Reason Foundation produces respected public policy research on a variety of issues and publishes the critically acclaimed Reason magazine and its website www.reason.com. For more information, please visit www.reason.org.

Contact

Chris Mitchell, Director of Communications, Reason Foundation, (310) 367-6109

Charting the Legal Immigration Maze

chris.mitchell@reason.org (Chris Mitchell) — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 10:14:08 EDT

The immigration debate is often reduced to - why don't immigrants just get in line and come into this country legally? If only it were that simple. A new Reason Foundation chart details how complicated the immigration maze is, demonstrating the countless requirements that must be met, and the red tape that must be navigated, by everyone from English soccer star David Beckham to an Indian engineer. What's the best-case immigration scenario? Five or six years: If you are the spouse or a minor child of a U.S. citizen, you should be able to enter the country and get a green card. Then, after three to five years, you can apply to become a citizen. The worst case scenario? You are an unskilled worker hoping to make a better life for yourself in America. "Unlike previous periods in our history, there is virtually no process for unskilled immigrants without family relations in the U.S. to apply for permanent legal residence," the chart by Reason Foundation and the National Foundation for American Policy states. Unskilled workers just have to hope they get lucky. That's because only 10,000 green cards are given to these workers each year and "the wait time approaches infinity." Skilled workers may have better chances, but still face strict caps, thousands of dollars in fees, and an 11 to 16 year wait to obtain a green card and gain U.S. citizenship. "Our country's immigration system is broken," says Shikha Dalmia, a senior policy analyst at Reason Foundation and one of the chart's authors. "Workers with family already here or college degrees face a convoluted, cruel and uncertain process. And they are the lucky ones. For poor laborers, who pick our crops and build our homes, there is virtually no legal process and no 'line' to wait in if they hope to permanently work and live in this country." "Our high-tech companies are starving for qualified engineers and skilled workers," declares Mike Flynn co-author of the report and director of government affairs at Reason Foundation. "These are American companies trying to find the best workers so that they can compete globally. Instead our system handicaps American companies and denies them the skills and talents of thousands of potential workers. It is economic suicide." "The American Civil Liberties Union commends Reason Magazine for graphically capturing how burdensome the federal government has made the citizenship process for people hoping to become Americans," says Timothy Sparapani, ACLU senior legislative counsel. "But this process not only affects those hoping for a chance to contribute to our society – it has also created problems for innocent American citizens. "There have been far too many stories of innocent Americans being arrested and detained for hours, and even deported, on the suspicion of being here illegally. The government engages in rampant ethnic profiling, targeting Americans solely on the basis of their names or ethnicities. Similarly, the voluntary employment verification system the government hopes to make mandatory for all new hires is plagued with errors, and expansions have been forced on the Social Security Administration – an agency already facing substantial service backlogs for its central mission of assisting the elderly and disabled. Innocent Americans cannot earn a living because the federal government thinks added layers of bureaucracy will solve our border issues. "As Reason makes clear, we have got to go in a different direction and dramatically overhaul our immigration 'system.' It is illogical, burdensome and long past time those in Washington chose to address these issues in ways that will continue to allow our nation to grow and prosper." Helen E. Krieble, President of the Vernon K. Krieble Foundation, says, "Reason Foundation's flow-chart graphically demonstrates how badly broken our system is. It will help show the desperate need for a program to handle workers who wish to come to the US legally. Quite simply, these people cannot wait in line because there is no line. We hope this effort will help prod Congress to create a workable program for non-citizen workers." "The flowchart published by the Reason Foundation clearly demonstrates that the current U.S. visa and immigration system is broken. The Golden Door Foundation shares the belief that without a functioning legal work visa process, the illegal immigrant population will continue to grow. An aging population exiting the workforce and companies moving operations outside the U.S. are issues that need to be addressed to deal effectively with the immigration crisis and current labor shortages facing the United States. The Golden Door Foundation applauds the work of the Reason Foundation to show that there is a need to fix the overly bureaucratic and unfair visa program," states Jason LeVecke, founder of Golden Door Foundation. Full Chart Cartoon Version in October 2008 Issue of Reason magazine

"WE CAME HERE TO WORK, NOT TO DO HARM TO ANYONE."

info@reason.org (Katie Hooks) — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 07:50:11 EDT

As in most US cities, immigrants have always been the backbone of the economy and culture of the small Iowa town, Postville. The town was settled by Norwegian and German Lutherans and Irish Catholics, and it is now home to a diverse community of Hasidic Jews, Eastern Europeans, Guatemalans, Mexicans, and Somalis. Postville was once home to people from 24 nations, speaking 17 languages. The peaceful reality of this microcosm of the American landscape was violently interrupted on May 12, 2008 when federal agents invaded Postville to conduct the largest immigration raid in U.S. history. The raid cost Postville one-fourth of its pre-raid population of 2,300. Monica Rhor at myway news examines the effects of the Postville raid 3 months later. Displaced immigrants and other Postville residents discuss the jolting effects the raid has had on the town and its residents. The immigrants who escaped federal agents are monitored by tethers and no longer allowed to work. Without a stable income, they fear they will fail to provide opportunities for their families. Other Postville residents are apprehensive about experiencing a drastic cultural shift in their town. ICE spokesman, Tim Counts, claims no liabilities for "any disruption, whether to families or communities," since illegal immigrants are no different than common criminals in the eyes of the federal government. One now-unemployed single mother speaks for the community of criminalized workers when she says, "We came here to work, not to do harm to anyone." Having experienced the horrible unintended consequences of our country's broken immigration policy first hand, Postville residents are calling for immigration policy reform. Postville's high school principal, Brian Gravel, notes: "What happened here is a microcosm of what's happening in the country. If nothing is done, there will be many many more Postvilles around the country, and that's not healthy for anyone." For more on immigration policy and the American situation, check out Reason Foundation's Shikha Dalmia discussing the question of whether or not "American is still built to receive those huddled masses" at Bloggingheads.tv.

Immigration Nation at Bloggingheads

chris.mitchell@reason.org (Chris Mitchell) — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 07:19:58 EDT

The big headline on Drudge last night was "Whites No Longer Majority by 2042." So perfect timing for this new Bloggingheads.tv immigration debate featuring Reason Foundation Policy Analyst Shikha Dalmia and Mark Krikorian, author of The New Case Against Immigration. Bloggingheads says "Shikha strikes at the immigrant welfare-queen stereotype" and answers the question of whether or not "America is still built to receive those huddled masses." Dalmia Columns: Scrap the Visa Cap Reagan Embraced Amnesty, So Should Bush Queueless on Immigration

Video: Immigration Nation at Bloggingheads.tv

shikha.dalmia@reason.org (Shikha Dalmia) — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Bloggingheads.tv

Watch the full video here.

Scrap the Visa Cap

shikha.dalmia@reason.org (Shikha Dalmia) — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EDT

The Wall Street Journal

America's political leaders are so fixated on illegal immigration they've barely noticed that the U.S. is losing the race for the best high-tech minds. This country won't keep its edge in the global economy until legislators stop behaving like border sentries and start acting like international recruiters - a switch virtually every industrialized country is making.

A good way to begin is for Congress to pass pending legislation to scrap the cap on skilled worker (H1-B) visas. This cap is currently so low (65,000) that in April last year it got used up within a day of these visas becoming available, leaving thousands of left over engineers to be scooped up by America's competitors. Immigration authorities started accepting 2009 applications last Tuesday - and expect a similar flood.

Two decades ago, professionals from developing countries such an India and China who managed to obtain a visa from Uncle Sam and got a job from an American company - or admission in a U.S. graduate program - took a one-way flight across the Atlantic. Returning home, instead of landing a job and a coveted green card here, was a sure-fire way of being branded a loser. Only those who couldn't get to the U.S. tried other Western destinations or Australia.

But America's ability to attract new foreign-born workers - and just as importantly, to keep the existing ones - is diminishing, thanks to the enticing opportunities opening up for them elsewhere, including in their own countries.

A 2005 study by the Pew Hispanic Center's Jeffrey Passel showed that new temporary legal arrivals - the vast majority of them skilled workers, university students or their dependents -- dropped to 185,000 in 2004 from 268,000 in 2000. From 2001 to 2003, applications from foreign students to American universities dropped by 26% while they increased in the United Kingdom (36%), France (30%) and Australia (13%). While some of this might be due to the aftermath of 9/11, there's another, stunning trend: Many high-tech immigrants are voluntarily returning home.

There is no comprehensive data to quantify this trend, because the U.S. government does not track people who leave. But Indian and Chinese newspapers have been abuzz for three years with stories about returning compatriots. Bangalore, India's outsourcing capital, is home to over 35,000 returnees - many from America. Tata Consultancy Services, India's Information Technology giant, reports a seven-fold increase in resumes from expatriates.

The most compelling evidence of this reverse brain drain, however, comes from Vivek Wadhwa of Duke University: The preliminary results of a company survey he is conducting reveal that returnees constitute 10% to 50% of the R&D staff of Indian high-tech firms; he expects similar results in China. In a related study last year, he found that one in three new immigrants holding high-tech jobs in the U.S. plan to leave. Why? With comparable jobs available closer to home and family, the frustrating five-year wait for a green card or permanent residency is not worth it anymore.

The number of foreign professionals coming here no doubt still exceeds those leaving. But the new immigrants are less inclined to make America - or, for that matter, any country besides their own - their permanent home. Like Western professionals, they increasingly regard stints abroad as personal growth opportunities, not permanent moves - a change in attitude with profound implications.

In response, most industrialized countries, facing their own skills crunch, are liberalizing their immigration policies to make themselves more attractive. England recently scrapped its Byzantine work permit program in favor of a Canadian-style point system that will allow entry to some skilled workers even before they get a job. New Zealand has a remarkable program that gives accredited private companies fast-track access to work visas that they can hand to foreign workers along with a job offer. Australia is considering modifying its skilled visa program along similar lines.

Even more radical is the blue card program that the European Union proposed last year to bump up its skilled workforce by 20 million over 20 years. The card will admit not only skilled workers - but their entire families - and give spouses the legal right to work in all 27 EU countries within three months of applying. By contrast, the U.S. Congress recently questioned even a relatively modest suggestion by Bill Gates to raise or scrap the annual H-1B visa cap. Astoundingly, this cap was lowered to 1990 levels four years ago.

Not all that other industrialized countries are doing is worth emulating. Canada's point system, which is gaining popularity, often recruits foreigners whose skills don't match employers' needs. Yet at least they realize that the real immigration problem is not too many foreign workers knocking at their door -- but too few. America should worry less about keeping unskilled immigrants out -- and more about keeping skilled immigrants in. Otherwise, it'll lose the race for the most crucial resource in the knowledge economy: intellectual capital.

Why Penalize Peter to Deport Pablo?

shikha.dalmia@reason.org (Shikha Dalmia) — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Detroit News

Reasonable people can disagree about the best solution to illegal immigration. But everyone can agree that, whatever the solution, it should not compromise the right of ordinary Americans to work. Yet that's precisely what a bill sponsored by U.S. Reps. Heath Shuler, D-N.C., and Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., would do.

The bill, called the SAVE Act (Secure America through Employment Verification), is opposed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi -- a California Democrat. To overcome her opposition, the bill's sponsors have gotten 181 fellow legislators, including five Michigan Republicans, to sign a discharge petition.

Should they obtain another 44 signatures when they return from recess this week, they will be able to over-rule Pelosi and bring the bill to the House floor for a vote. If the House approves the bill, a virtual certainty if it comes for a full vote, it will give a tremendous boost to an identical bill in the Senate -- and become virtually unstoppable, since neither party wants to appear soft on immigration in an election year.

That would be a terrible outcome for American workers.

The bill's most controversial aspect is that it would make the E-verify program mandatory. Currently, employers can choose to enroll in this program and verify the work eligibility of new hires against the federal Social Security database. About 43,000 employers nationwide -- or less than 1 percent -- have enrolled.

But if this bill becomes law, within four years every employer nationwide would be required to verify the work credentials of its entire work force, including 160 million existing workers plus 60 million new hires. Since the program prior to the huge proposed expansion has a 5 percent error rate, this would mean that more than 12 million legal workers could potentially be thrown out of work by no fault of their own. Nor will improved technology eliminate these errors, as its authors claim, because most of them are the result of data entry mistakes.

What's more, workers -- not their employers -- would have to clear things with Uncle Sam when their credentials are thrown into question. To do so, they'll have to deal with the same agencies that issued visas to 9/11 terrorists after they flew planes into buildings. But even if one assumes that the program has 100 percent success in catching every one of the 12 million illegal immigrants in the country, that would still translate into one American worker being hurt for every illegal snagged. That is a lousy deal.

But the fundamental problem with the program is that it would require workers to prove that they are eligible to work rather the government to prove they are not. We're all guilty until proven innocent.

Using employers to crackdown on illegals may seem like a good idea. But there is no program that can surgically incise illegals from the workplace while leaving everyone else unscathed. The cleanest way to slash the population of such workers is by opening more avenues for them to legally work here through a guest worker program.

This is the approach that was close to becoming law as part of the comprehensive immigration reform effort last summer before it got ambushed by Rush Limbaugh and his talk show comrades. If the House leadership can't push sensible reforms now -- it at least ought to stop such pernicious ones as the SAVE Act. And President Bush can help by threatening to veto this train wreck.

Drew Carey Calls for Open Borders In New Reason.tv Video

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Los Angeles (April 1, 2008) - "I think we should welcome all peaceful people to our country," says Drew Carey in a new Reason.tv video examining the contentious immigration debate. "They get to pursue the 'American Dream' and we get to benefit from all the wonderful things that immigrants bring to our country - like good old fashioned soccer. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me."

While workers from Mexico draw the ire and fiery rhetoric of anti-immigration forces, Carey points out that there was no outrage or concern when English-speaking soccer star David Beckham brought his family and curling free kicks to America.

"Americans, especially, LA Galaxy fans were very excited and greeted David Beckham with open arms when he came here to play in Los Angeles, even though he took the roster spot away from some poor, hard-working American kid," Carey says in the Reason.tv video. "So I guess we're very welcoming when it comes to rich famous Brits. And we love our Beatles. But are we as welcoming when it comes to people from other countries?"

"You can't get through a day of news without some politician or pundit complaining that the greatest security threat to the United States is the influx of Spanish speakers from across the border with Mexico," says Nick Gillespie, editor of Reason.tv and Reason.com. "This anti-immigrant panic and the worries that the country is being taken over by Spanish-speakers isn't grounded in reality. Statistics show that about 80 percent of third-generation Latinos in the United States speak English as their dominant language-and exactly 0 percent speak Spanish as their dominant language. For over 200 years, immigrants have been assimilating and making this country better and they're still doing that today."

Full Video Online

The Reason.tv Drew Carey video, Immigration: The Beckham Factor, is online at: http://reason.tv/video/show/62.html.

An archive of Drew Carey's Reason.tv videos, including features on medical marijuana, school choice, poker bans, America's middle class, and eminent domain, is here: http://reason.tv/featuredvids/.

About Reason.tv

Reason.tv is an online community showcasing the best libertarian ideas and videos on the Internet. Reason.tv gives you the opportunity to create videos, share videos and suggest topics for Drew Carey's upcoming documentaries. For more information, please visit www.reason.tv.

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Contact

Chris Mitchell, Director of Communications, Reason Foundation, (310) 367-6109

Reason.tv Drew Carey Video on Immigration

chris.mitchell@reason.org (Chris Mitchell) — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 21:10:53 EDT

"I think we should welcome all peaceful people to our country," says Drew Carey in a new Reason.tv video examining the contentious immigration debate. "They get to pursue the 'American Dream' and we get to benefit from all the wonderful things that immigrants bring to our country - like good old fashioned soccer. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me." While workers from Mexico draw the ire and fiery rhetoric of anti-immigration forces, Carey points out that there was no outrage or concern when English-speaking soccer star David Beckham brought his family and curling free kicks to America. "Americans, especially, LA Galaxy fans were very excited and greeted David Beckham with open arms when he came here to play in Los Angeles, even though he took the roster spot away from some poor, hard-working American kid," Carey says in the Reason.tv video. "So I guess we're very welcoming when it comes to rich famous Brits. And we love our Beatles. But are we as welcoming when it comes to people from other countries?" Archive of Reason.tv Drew Carey Videos

Employers and Workers Are Victims of New Immigration Policy

shikha.dalmia@reason.org (Shikha Dalmia) — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Los Angeles Business Journal

President Bush came into office promising to fix the country's broken immigration laws that, he said, were preventing willing American employers from hiring willing foreign workers. Nothing could be further from this vision than the employer crackdown that his Department of Homeland Security recently announced.

Why has the administration so totally reversed course?

It is not like it does not understand that the "problem" of illegal immigration is purely a function of existing immigration laws, not "evil doers." These laws don't exactly roll out the welcome mat for high-skilled immigrants that California's Silicon Valley badly needs. But they are downright hostile toward "unskilled" workers who form the backbone of the agricultural, landscaping and hotel industry in the Golden State and elsewhere.

On paper, there are two types of visas available for unskilled workers: H-2A for campesinos, or farm workers, and H-2B for other seasonal jobs. But thanks to copious red tape, these visas rarely ever arrive on time for the job. Even worse, they are usually good for less than a year and can only be renewed a few times. Once they expire, workers have to return home because neither they, nor their employers, can apply for a green card or permanent residency. Such a dead-end process leaves workers no choice but to work illegally.

The White House tried to get Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform with a guest worker component to create a way for future foreign workers to legally live and work in this country – and also regularize the status of undocumented aliens already in the country. But GOP nativists – aided by conservative talk radio and some Democrats – killed the bill as "amnesty," insisting instead on a tough, enforcement-only approach.

The Homeland Security Department's employer crackdown effectively embraces their approach. In 30 days, the Social Security Administration (SSA) will start sending letters to employers alerting them to any discrepancy in the Social Security numbers their employees are using and government records. Employers who discover that employees have given them false numbers – something that undocumented workers often do -- will be required to fire them within 90 days – or face up to $10,000 in fines per employee. Repeat violations could bring jail time.

Michael Chertoff, the Secretary of Homeland Security and the architect of the crackdown, noted that the SSA expects to send 140,000 of these "no-match" letters covering more than 8 million people. But how precisely any of this will enhance national security, the core reason why his department exists, he has yet to explain. Does he really believe that Al Qaeda operatives are holding jobs illegally and will drop their plans to scurry for the border once these letters start rolling in?

This crusade won't improve national security, but it will disrupt the economy. To the extent that it succeeds in slowing the tide of foreign immigrants, it will cause labor shortages and raise prices of produce -- and other goods and services in immigrant-dependent industries. California employers, especially farmers, will be among the worst hit given that they employ 2.5 million illegal immigrants – the highest of any state. Even before the crackdown, California's farmers were projecting 30 percent crop losses because intensified border patrolling had already shrunk the labor pool this year. Dianne Feinstein, California's Democratic Senator, expects the situation now to be nothing short of "catastrophic."

Curiously, Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, who joined Chertoff in announcing the crackdown, doesn't deny any of this. "We do not have the workers our economy needs to keep growing," he readily admits.

So why drive out the workers we have? Employer sanctions have been on the books for years. Why enforce them if there are no upsides for national security – only downsides for the economy?

One explanation is that the administration is hoping that this campaign will prove to Congress how much the economy depends on undocumented workers and force it to once again tackle comprehensive immigration reform. However, it is highly doubtful that the administration can genuinely believe that driving California farmers out of business will convince a determined immigration foe like Republican Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado to see the light.

The only plausible reason is that the administration has not just abandoned rational immigration reform, which would be understandable under the circumstances. It has actually made a conscious decision to embrace its opposite to win back its lost base before next year's elections. In short, its immigration policy now is driven neither by conviction, nor the needs of the economy - but naked political calculation, even if that involves targeting "willing employers" and "willing foreign workers," the very victims of that policy.

That is a new low.