One of the reasons that the American immigration system needs reform so badly is that it has been changed part-by-part over time without great attention to its overall design or consequences. And when the obvious unintended problems crop up, or the intended fixes worsen other problems, calls are heard for "comprehensive reform" that attempts to fix every problem by giving more of what every connected group favors. Such was the rationale of the failed 2007 "comprehensive reform" and the stalled and almost certainly dead 2013 Senate bill.
One major problem with "comprehensive" reform is that it attempts to fix problems, like the number of highly-skilled IT workers, which may or may not be actual problems.
Another major problem is that such efforts attempt to resolve the demands of different constituent groups for more of what they want — more agricultural workers, more high tech-workers, more low-skilled workers, and so on — by simply increasing the number of visas and green cards in existing immigration categories.
It is a long American tradition to try and increase the size of the pie, rather than make informed choices about the best policies regardless of the size of the pie. For a country that takes in over a million new legal immigrants a year and also has issued hundreds of thousands of temporary work visas in the last decade, this is not a viable or sensible option.
If we take the word comprehensive to mean wide-ranging in its import and impact, and if we require focus on core elements of reform, there are four essential elements that must be addressed:
- Illegal migration, whether from crossing borders or overstaying visas, must be drastically reduced.
- The current visa allocation system "under which two-thirds of the more than one million green cards awarded annually are on the basis of family ties, as opposed to about 13 percent on work-based criteria" must be adjusted so that fewer extended family members are given visas and more educated and skilled workers are given a chance to come to the United States.
- The United States needs to think about the overall number of immigrants that it can viably and effectively take in every year. What are the absolute numbers of new immigrants that the United States can take in without adverse economic, cultural, and political consequences? Is that figure 10 million-plus over a decade, as is now the case? Twenty million or more as the 2013 Senate bill would allow? More? Less?
- Any effort to reform American immigration policy and law would be strongly advised to give considerable thought to the question of how best to integrate new immigrants into the American national community. Right now, in keeping with America's laissez-faire traditions, it is mostly sink or swim for new immigrants. America has an enormous stake in the success of the immigrants it admits, but could do a great deal more to ensure it. However, we cannot only be interested in whether new immigrants are able to buy more things, but whether they (and Americans for that matter) are steeped in the virtues and the struggles that have made this country worth coming to.
These four elements are comprehensive in that they address absolutely core essential elements of any immigration reform. They are also comprehensive in that reforming these four elements will fundamentally recast American immigration policy in a manner that will allow the advantages of reform to cascade through the entire immigration system.
At the top of the list, though, and essential to any immigration reform is putting a halt, in so far as possible, to the political curse of illegal migration.
Next: The Damaging Civic Consequences of Illegal Migration, Pt. 1