As the immigration debate rages on in the senate and the house, rallies and protests around the country highlight its importance to various constituencies. The most important constituent of them all is our future generation. America’s competitiveness is at stake and this single bill can help defend our position as the most advanced nation in history and further that position. That’s a “weighty statement” one might say – here’s why:
Physical muscle powered the pioneers as they transformed the prairies, followed by a capital-intensive industrial revolution that built this nation. Financial capital reigned supreme for more than two hundred years until now – it has been supplanted by intellectual capital. The fickle thing about intellectual capital is you can neither inherit it like money, nor buy it like a piece of machinery. It resides in human beings and more importantly it is randomly distributed among human beings irrespective of their race, language, religion or geographical location. As we the humans, pass through the portals (in more than one way) into the golden age of information, where curing cancer is more than a possibility, communicating with anyone anywhere is a reality and access to information is free and instantaneous, nothing is more valuable and hard to find than intellectual capital.
But then that’s exactly the raw material you need to flourish and that’s the connection to the Immigration Bill under discussion. We can’t buy it, we can’t grow it (history points to a few flawed attempts) but we can attract the best minds from around the globe to this great country. The new F-4 visa provision (in Chairman Specter’s mark) which will be granted to students who intend to study math, science, engineering or physical sciences with a potential to adjust their status to permanent residence is a much needed fillip in attracting the best minds. Of course, it could be a bonanza to all educational institutions in this country – hopefully the universities that are not attracting the best and brightest will use this new pathway to the American dream to create more stars on the American firmament rather than leveraging below-average international students as out-of-state tuition paying budget fillers.
Enabling the F-1 and F-4 students to work for 20 hours/wk outside campus could have greater implications than obvious. Poor students from developing countries can now fund their education through off-campus work – but more importantly this legislation could release as much as 600,000 mostly English-speaking students in the temporary workforce – creating some competition for the now-illegal workforce.
Competition – that word is missing from the debate – the existing illegal workforce of nearly 12 million workers faces no competition from a global labor pool. While the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 abolished the national origins quota system eliminating national origin, race, or ancestry as a basis for (legal) immigration to the United States, the majority of this illegal workforce is dominated by workers from a few countries, with little or no education, lack of English fluency and yet they find employment generally at wages twice the minimum wage. How did this happen? Our current immigration policy has limited visas for (less skilled) temporary workers – but the economy created jobs that pulled in workers who experienced a higher “migration rate of return” in crossing the border and working illegally – and more than a decade later (after the last amnesty program) we have 12 million illegal workers. Yes, the border security enforcement will increase the cost of crossing, but the coyotes have become specialized. They may have to increase the rates from the current estimate of $400 per crossing – but it used to be about $270 before the last round of border enforcement.
What the border security enforcement cannot accomplish -competition may be able to. With the proposed H-2C guest worker program in the Chairman Specter’s Mark of “Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006″, competition is finally arriving for these jobs. If this bill passes, a restaurant owner may the choice of hiring an English speaking culinary institute graduate from Philippines or India for the assistant cook position. A farmer may be able to hire English speaking agricultural degree holding trained farm managers. This provision falls a bit short at 400,000 visas – given that the estimated annual illegal migration is 700,000. The student work permit may alleviate this a bit – but if the cap is met every year for the first few years, the 400,000 visas could be revised up annually to reach 600,000 per year. With competition being introduced, it will be wonderful to see market forces at work
Filed under: Immigration | Tagged: debate, Immigration, mexico, USA, visa, visa cap
