Immigration preferences

Charles Krauthammer:

As the most attractive land for would-be immigrants, America has the equivalent of the first 100 picks in the NBA draft. Yet through lax border control and sheer inertia, it allows those slots to be filled by (with apologies to Bill Buckley) the first 100 names in the San Salvador phone book.

The immigration compromise being debated in Congress does improve our criteria for selecting legal immigrants. Unfortunately, its inadequacies in dealing with illegal immigration -- specifically, in ensuring that 10 years from now we will not have a new cohort of 12 million demanding amnesty -- completely swamp the good done on legal immigration.

Today, preference for legal immigration is given not to the best and the brightest waiting on long lists everywhere on Earth to get into America, but to family members of those already here. Given that America has the pick of the world's energetic and entrepreneurial, this is a stunning competitive advantage, stunningly squandered.

The current reform would establish a point system for legal immigrants in which brains and enterprise count. This is a significant advance. But before we get too ecstatic about finally doing the blindingly obvious, note two caveats:

(a) This new point system doesn't go into effect for eight years -- eight years of a new flood of immigrants chosen not for aptitude but bloodline. And who knows if a different Congress eight years from now will keep the current bargain?

(b) It's not enough to just create a point system in which credit is given for education, skills and English competence. These points can be outweighed by points given for -- you guessed it -- family ties, which are already built into the proposed point system. There are already amendments on the Senate floor to magnify the value of being a niece rather than a nurse. ( Barack Obama is proposing to abolish the point system entirely in five years.) A point system can be manipulated to give far more weight to family than skills -- until it becomes nothing but a cover for the old chain-migration system.

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He goes on to complain about the ineffectiveness of the border protection measures in the bill. Critics of those measures certainly have reason to doubt that there will be serious border enforcement since their is no history of seriousness in that area.

While he has a point on the selection by preference part, we have always had a self selection immigrations standard where the industrious and the adventurous are the ones who come. The lazy and cautious stay home. One of the reasons that the US surpasses all the other countries in the world is that it is made up almost entirely of the descendants of people who were courageous enough to leave home and come here to work. Having said that, we must ensure that the rule of law is respected by those who come. If we do not we will lose who we are.