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Jewish World Review
December 6, 2012 / 22 Kislev, 5773
Let's open the door to lots more immigration
By
A. Barton Hinkle
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Last week, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor wrote a pitch for a GOP-backed measure to admit more foreign-born scientists and engineers. The piece, meant to telegraph a post-election Republican shift on immigration, shows how fervently some conservatives hope greater openness on the issue could save the GOP's neck. Maybe it will, and maybe not. But it could save everyone else's.
Compared with native-born Americans, immigrants are more likely to start a business, more likely to launch a hugely successful one, more likely to work and less likely to commit crime. They're also willing to take jobs many Americans refuse to do.
Immigrants make up 13 percent of the U.S. population but 18 percent of small-business owners, notes Jillian Kay Melchior in National Review, and they employ 4.7 million Americans. According to The Economist, immigrants or their children make up 40 percent of the founders of Fortune 500 firms. A higher percentage of immigrants legal or otherwise work than do native-born Americans. Many of them, present through a temporary visa program known as H-2A, do a lot of hard agricultural labor, such as picking crops and working in poultry plants. Yet because the program does not allow enough guest workers in, "Plant managers in the Carolinas … have been forced to turn to prisons to man assembly lines," reports McClatchy Newspapers. Unfortunately, the H-2A program is a bureaucratic, burdensome, inefficient mess. It permits only seasonal workers, not year-round ones. And it "doesn't deliver workers quickly enough when farmers need them most," as another recent news story put it. But wait with so many Americans unemployed, why not hire locals instead of shipping in labor from abroad? That's exactly what Colorado farmer John Harold tried to do last year. "It didn't take me six hours to realize I'd made a heck of a mistake," he later told The New York Times. "Six hours was enough," the paper reported, "for the first wave of local workers to quit. Some simply never came back [after lunch] and gave no reason. Twenty-five of them said specifically, according to farm records, that the work was too hard." The story gets even worse. In a little more than a decade, the number of visas the U.S. hands out to skilled workers has dropped by a third, says The Economist. The result: Talent that could be creating jobs here in the U.S. is setting up shop elsewhere. The magazine recounts the story of Indian engineers Anand and Shikha Chhatpar, who started a company that creates applications for Facebook. Despite enough business success to pay more than $250,000 in taxes, they were denied visas and went back to India. According to The Economist, "the proportion of Silicon Valley startups with an immigrant founder has fallen from 52 percent to 44 percent since 2005." Americans who resent having to compete with immigrants for jobs suffer from a double delusion. First, they assume the supply of jobs is fixed and that we would all be better off with a smaller population. That's flatly wrong. Immigrants are not just employees, they are also employers and consumers. Second, talk of immigrants taking "our" jobs implies some people have prior claims to jobs they have not yet been hired for. The term for that is "entitlement mentality." But aren't immigrants driving up crime rates? Nope. Take Arizona, the ground zero of anti-immigration sentiment. As a 2010 piece in The Washington Times noted, "In the past decade, as illegal immigrants were drawn in record numbers by the housing boom, the rate of violent crimes in Phoenix and the entire state fell by more than 20 percent, a steeper drop than in the overall U.S. crime rate." As Arizona goes, so goes the nation: A 2007 study found that "for every ethnic group, without exception, incarceration rates among young men are lowest for immigrants." The Immigration Policy Center, which produced that report, elsewhere has said that "a century's worth of research has demonstrated that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes … than the native-born." Not every immigrant-related tale is quite so glowing. In her National Review piece, Melchior notes that the number of non-citizens on food stamps has quadrupled since 2001. Much of the blame for that, however, rests at the feet of Washington. From USDA-produced Spanish-language radio novelas encouraging food stamp enrollment to get-your-free-stuff-now pitches on the www.WelcomeToUSA.gov website, the "deliberate expansion of welfare has been particularly targeted at immigrants." Given the natural immigrant preference to strive for upward mobility, that's a rotten shame. Anyway, welfare dependency has soared among native-born residents, too. There are now only 2.5 workers for every Medicaid recipient, down from an 18-1 ratio four decades ago. For every person on public assistance in the U.S., there are only 1.65 people employed in the private sector. As baby boomers age out of the workforce, the weight of social-welfare spending is going to grow even heavier on those who remain. Without deep and therefore politically unlikely cuts, we're going to need a lot more shoulders to help carry it.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
A. Barton Hinkle is Deputy Editor of the Editorial Pages at Richmond Times-Dispatch
Comment by clicking here.
Previously:
• 12/04/12: Who's watching the kids? Just about everyone
• 11/29/12: The Real Middle-Class Champion was Mocked and Opposed
• 11/26/12: It's time to cut a deal on the budget
• 11/20/12: The case for a carbon tax
• 11/15/12: Cue the hysterics. Reports of Democracy's Death Greatly Exaggerated
• 11/07/12: The $4,000 Trash Can: We need regulation, but not this much
• 10/23/12: The Ballad of Islamist Rage Boy
• 10/17/12: Undermining the values that enable people in poverty to escape it? Sadly, yes
• 10/11/12: How Much Is This Tax Cut Gonna Cost Me, Doc?
• 10/04/12: Warrantless spying skyrockets under Obama
• 08/20/12: The wrong side absolutely must not win
• 08/14/12: America was not built on dirt alone
• 08/02/12: Libs Discover Their Inner Cheney
• 07/30/12: Feds want to help you --- whether you want help or not
• 07/23/12: Barack Obama, Storyteller-in-Chief
• 07/23/12: Nation's worst outsourcer? You
• 07/19/12: Listen up, America: You need to knuckle under
• 07/12/12: Obama, Romney: As Different as Two Peas in a Pod
• 07/05/12: Are teenagers big children --- or little adults?
• 06/25/12: Minorities treated as mere numbers
• 06/21/12: Memo to the the Little Guy: Seemingly innocuous activity could bring the federal hammer down out of a clear blue sky
• 06/19/12: We mustn't let America be buffaloed
• 05/31/12: Drop and Give Uncle Sam 20
• 05/15/12: The feds would like to know if you enjoyed that video
• 05/03/12: Obama inspires: 'America --- Still Not as Bad Off as Venezuela!'
• 04/26/12: It's everyone's favorite time of year again
• 03/29/12: GOP disillusionment is a good thing
• 03/27/12: Just what America needs: more red tape
• 03/20/12: Nation wondering: what happening to language?
• 02/21/12: Culture warriors resort to propaganda
• 02/15/12: Step away from that cookie and grab some air
• 02/08/12: Lessons in heresy
• 02/01/12: Do We Really Need Pickle-Flavored Potato Chips?
• 01/11/12: Shut up, they explained
• 12/30/11: A Modest Proposal: Let's Ban All Sports!
• 12/26/11: A Christmas letter from the Obamas
• 02/24/11: Will the next Watson need us?
• 12/24/10: Here Are Some Good Gifts for People You Hate
• 06/15/10: The Presinator
• 05/26/10: More than equal
• 04/08/10: Angry Right Takes a Page From Angry Left but guess who is ugly?
• 02/16/10: Either Obama owes George W. Bush an apology, or he owes the rest of us a very good explanation for his about-face on wiretapping
• 02/03/10: Talkin' to us 'tards
• 01/27/10: I never thought I'd see the day when progressives would howl in ragebecause the Supreme Court said government should not ban books
• 01/07/10: Gun-Control Advocates Play Fast and Loose
• 12/31/09: Nearly everything progressives say about neoconservative interventionism abroad applies to their own preferred policies at home
© 2011, A. Barton Hinkle
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