On November 19, RealClear Politics (RCP) ran a commentary headlined “Immigration Is a Team Sport”, by a professor of economics at the University of Austin who’s also a fellow at Stanford’s prestigious Hoover Institution. As an avid follower of both immigration and team sports, I took the bait and read it, coming away with two conclusions: (1) immigration isn’t really a team sport; and (2) except to the extent it is. Limiting immigration and focusing visa issuances more on skills and less on extended family relationships could boost the U.S. economy by offering the best and the brightest abroad a spot on our team.
“What Kind of an Idiot Coach Would Say No to Players from the Other Team?” The fundamental though unspoken premise of that well-written piece is that immigration — or more precisely the process by which the United States decides whom to admit for permanent residence — is akin to the transfer portal in college sports.
For those like my colleague Mark Krikorian who couldn’t care less about college sports, let me explain how the portal works, in an overly simplistic manner.
Some players, particularly at the lower Division III (DIII) level attend that DIII school with the hope they’ll be able to transfer to a higher-level Division I (DI) school. In other instances, some DI players begin their athletic careers believing they’ll play in a certain system, or for a given coach, or that they will receive significant playing time, and one or more of those conditions doesn’t pan out.
As 247 Sports explains, those:
Players inform their compliance department when they’d like to enter the transfer portal. Typically, a player's name is listed in the database within 48 hours of the request. Players are not required to tell their coaching staffs of their intention to enter the portal.
Once a player is officially listed in the portal, schools are free to contact them without restriction. Communicating with a player before they enter the portal is a violation and is considered tampering.
Players never technically exit the transfer portal once they submit their name. If a player signs with a new school, they're listed as "matriculated" in the portal. If a player chooses to return to their previous school, they're listed as "withdrawn."
The RCP author asks a facially reasonable question about the potential prospects for players who want to switch from one team to another where their skills would be better used: “What kind of an idiot coach would say no to players from the other team who want to join his roster?”
“A Different Context”. After some discussion of how that team-switching process has benefited specific players and teams, the author then moves the question to immigration: “Let’s consider that question in a different context: Would it be fair if the top 5,000 scientists in China defected to the United States?”
You can likely guess where this is going, but in case you can’t, suffice it to say that the author thereafter talks how many “American” Nobel Prize laureates were immigrants before adding the following:
International law allows the United States to recruit an unlimited number of talented foreigners to join our team. The only constraint comes from current U.S. law, in place for decades, which caps employment-based (EB) green cards at 140,000 each year, no matter how brilliant or educated the people are. This constraint applies to people who work in America, reside in America, pay taxes in America, and have college degrees from American universities. The EB-cap may be the stupidest anti-American law on the books, a law established by Congress to keep America weak on purpose.
Why Immigration Isn’t a Team Sport. Actually, the EB-cap wasn’t established to keep America “weak on purpose”, it was intended to protect the wages and working conditions of those already here. Which helps to explain why immigration isn’t actually a team sport, at least now as the author suggests it is.
On any DI, DIII, or professional team, there are only so many roster spots. That’s why when, for example, Kansas State’s quarterback goes through the portal and ends up at Ohio State, some unnamed Buckeye on the bubble gets a note telling him to come to the coach’s office and to bring his playbook with him, because he’s getting cut (the note usually leaves that last part out, but it’s assumed).
In much the same way, when the United States allows 5,000 Chinese scientists to “defect” here, some unnamed U.S. scientists (both citizens and lawful immigrants) are likely to either lose their positions, see their prospects dimmed, or be outright fired.
They’ll still be on the U.S. roster, though, meaning that citizen or lawful immigrant scientist will suffer real, psychic, or economic damage, and thus imposing some cost on society as a whole.
These esoteric adverse impacts are easier to appreciate when you swap out potential geniuses from the Middle Kingdom for more prosaic professionals from abroad, like engineers, or more specifically, legions of them.
As my colleague Steven Camarota recently explained:
The idea that there is a “shortage” of science, technology, engineering, and math workers in the United States has become an article of faith among many journalists, industry advocates, academics, and politicians. Consequently, they believe we need to allow significantly more STEM workers from abroad to meet this unmet demand. A new report from the National Academies of Sciences again makes this argument. Despite the advocates’ claims, however, the evidence indicates that demand is not outstripping supply for workers in STEM fields.
Imagine that you, like me, were born in Baltimore and (unlike me) went to your state’s flagship University of Maryland to study engineering. The Terps are in the Big 10 athletic conference after defecting themselves a few years back from the ACC, but more importantly their engineering school is ranked 18th best in the country by U.S. News and World Report.
Being the 18th best engineering school in the United States is pretty solid, until you consider that seven Chinese engineering programs are ranked higher by U.S. News than the top U.S. finisher on its global list, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (“MIT”, number 11 globally and tied for that honor with China’s Xi'an Jiaotong University).
On that global list, the University of Maryland ranks number 110, which means that if you are a Terrapin engineering graduate and the limited number of engineering jobs in the United States are open to comers from around the world, your prospects of finding a good job here are significantly diminished.
At some point, even lower-ranked U.S. engineering schools will struggle to find would-be candidates, and many will eventually close, leaving the United States at the mercy of a steady flow of foreign graduates to fill positions here.
Which leads me to the next reason why the RCP commentary offers an inapt analogy. When that K-State quarterback leaves Manhattan, Kansas, to take his skills to Columbus, Ohio, we can assume he’ll play his heart out for OSU, if for no reason other than he hopes to get picked in the NFL draft.
Those 5,000 defecting Chinese scientists are already playing in the big leagues but, most saliently, we can’t be sure some of them aren’t still also really playing for their old team, the government of the People’s Republic of China.
Intellectual property theft through espionage by Chinese nationals is so common as to almost not need citation, but I will offer this analysis from the Center for Strategic and International Studies:
It should be noted that the incidents of Chinese espionage far outnumber those by any other country, even Russia. The long-term cost to the American economy and national security cannot be precisely measured, but estimates run into the billions of dollars for commercial and technological espionage. Chinese espionage also created immeasurable damage to national security with the theft of weapons technology, including nuclear weapons test data. In the last few years, China has added the theft of massive quantities of personal information (PII), political coercion, and influence operations, to its espionage activities.
That’s a whole lot worse than copying your playbook and sending it to your old Wildcats football coach, and it won’t take even a fraction of those 5,000 of them to do real harm.
How Immigration Can Be a Team Sport. That said, there are definitely some aspects of the U.S. immigration process that do, or more specifically could, take a page from the NCAA.
The world is full of experts in their fields who would gladly come here to offer their skills and expertise to not only support themselves but also to grow the U.S. economy, and thus provide for the players who aren’t quite so adept further down the bench or holding clipboards.
Or, as Barbara Jordan — civil rights icon, former member of Congress, and at the time chairwoman of the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform put it during congressional testimony in June 1995:
Unless there is a compelling national interest to do otherwise, immigrants should be chosen on the basis of the skills they contribute to the U.S. economy. The Commission believes that admission of nuclear family members and refugees provide such a compelling national interest, even if they are low-skilled. Reunification of adult children and siblings of adult citizens solely because of their family relationship is not as compelling.
Jordan might as well have been talking to herself for all the good she was doing, as Congress never amended the immigration laws to shift the visa-issuing process away from those “adult children and siblings of adult citizens” to a more sensible, skills-based immigration system of the sort she proposed.
Consequently, the majority, 61 percent according to the Center’s 2017 analysis, of visas are issued to foreign nationals based solely on their familial relationship to someone already here.
That would be like picking the next Ohio State quarterback from the siblings of the current one. Buckeye Will Howard may be a great passer, but it’s unlikely either of his brothers are going to inherit his skills.
Then-President Trump asked Congress to reduce those family-based “chain-migration” categories Jordan complained about in his 2018 State of the Union address in exchange for an amnesty of 1.8 million aliens brought here illegally as children and skills-based reforms, but that effort went nowhere.
Democrats controlled the House of Representatives in that Congress, and so perhaps he will make a push in the GOP-controlled 119th Congress that convenes in January for a similar effort. He’s known to be a football fan, having owned the short-lived USFL’s New Jersey Generals, so perhaps he would appreciate the analogies.
Opening our doors to untold numbers of foreign-national “experts” may sound like a good idea, but the downsides make it a bad one. Closing the U.S. immigration portal to shirttail relatives of those here and widening it for those who would strengthen our nation and grow our economy, however, is a better pick.