Immigration

I have some opinions about immigration, and it might sound elitist or whatever, but I really think it’s practical. On one hand, I believe fairly strongly that we shouldn’t make it too onerous for talented people to come to the U.S. A big reason the country has remained so strong is that talented people keep coming from all over the world into the U.S. Our students are generally mediocre in tests compared to other countries. But smart people around the world keep coming here, and that’s good for the country. So this post-9/11 approach of making immigration difficult for everyone willy-nilly strikes me as being a bad thing.

I don’t think however, that we should open up the borders for everyone. In particular, and here’s the maybe bad sounding part, but I think we need to enforce our borders with Mexico much better.

Some people seem to think that minority groups forming strong, lasting subcultures is a good thing. That’s always happened somewhat, but groups tend to assimilate in time. Most Caucasians are just a mix now, and even with say Japanese, the majority of marriages involving people of Japanese descent in the U.S. are with non-Japanese, I want to say (not sure) mostly with Caucasians.

That’s not happening with Mexicans, partly because they’re coming now in unprecedented numbers, in absolute terms and in percentage of all immigrants. So they’re forming subcultures and not leaving them. Some people think it’s a good thing, and people dream of there being essentially two Americas, one English-speaking, one Spanish-speaking. After reading a bit of Huntington (I think that’s his name) I’ve come to believe that this is a very bad thing for the country.

Samuelson’s latest column in Newsweek kind of echoes this. He notes research showing that not only do Mexican immigrants have a hard time socio-economically, but their children have trouble advancing. And, the research suggests it’s not discrimination at play. As a group, Mexican-American’s incomes have dropped the past couple years, the only group to do so. One problem he mentions is that since there are so many Mexican immigrants coming in, they compete with one another for jobs, so it makes it harder for any of them to advance in society.

Anyway, his stance is we must be pro-immigration, and to do this, we need to control immigration. Sounds paradoxical. But without doing the latter, we prevent immigrants from succeeding in America. So he thinks we should declare everyone who’s already in the U.S. legal immigrants, and then be strict about immigration control for the future. And I think this makes a lot of sense.