Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan recently suggested that an increase in the influx of skilled immigrants would help arrest the steep decline in housing prices in the last two quarters. Since skilled immigrants tend to form new households relatively rapidly, their arrival in growing numbers would quicken the sale of existing housing inventory and in doing so stabilize prices.
Raising the share of visas that go to educated immigrants is an idea that ought to be getting a hearing in the presidential campaign, all the more since it is one on which the candidates disagree. While John McCain and Barack Obama both supported last year's immigration bill, agreeing on amnesty and border security, they were pointedly at odds over whether U.S. policy should continue to prioritize family reunification above the admission of immigrants with economically desirable skills. Last year's bill would have introduced a point system, under which possession of valuable skills would have weighed heavily in a visa applicant's favor, overturning the strong bias of current law in favor of family members, including those beyond the immediate family.
This is one instance where McCain is the candidate of change, applauding a point system designed to orient immigration toward national needs. Obama, by contrast, proposed an amendment adding a sunset provision that would have ended the point system after five years.
Obama offered several arguments in favor of the status quo. He cited tradition: "How many of our forefathers would have measured up under this point system?" he asked in a speech on the Senate floor. "How many would have been turned back at Ellis Island?" He cited Americans' respect for family. A skills-based system, he said, "does not reflect how much Americans value the family ties that bind people to their brothers and sisters or to their parents." And he warned against a "radical experiment in social engineering." But none of these objections bears much scrutiny.
Whatever their rhetorical power, Obama's invocation of "our fore-fathers" and his historical analogy to Ellis Island are both anachronistic and misleading. During the great immigration wave of the late 19th and early 20th century, manufacturing was at the cutting-edge of the American economy and demanded multitudes of unskilled workers. Skills mattered less than sheer ability to work. The situation these days is different; employment has shifted from industry to services, and fewer than 10 percent of American workers are employed in manufacturing. Today, innovation and technological expertise are in high demand--and both require advanced-degree holders in numbers that exceed the output of U.S. higher education. Extending visas to foreigners who already have the requisite skills and degrees would contribute to a virtuous cycle of higher GDP and higher tax revenues, translating into a better quality of life for the average American.
Obama's point about family values is similarly misleading. His nightmare scenario of parents or children of U.S. citizens being turned away at the border is unreal. Under most plans being considered, immediate family members--that is, parents, siblings, and children--would still get a leg up, if not a free pass for entry. The people newly downgraded under a point system would be more distant relatives--and unless the United States is to admit everybody, lines have to be drawn somewhere.
As to the charge of "radical social engineering," it is difficult to understand what Obama means by it. The point system is not "radical" in the sense of being new or untested; Canada and Australia have had such a system for 40 years and by all accounts have profited from it. And any immigration system is a form of "social engineering," in that choosing whom to admit and whom to exclude will affect the shape of a society in the long run. Obama's preference for admitting both immediate and extended family members is every bit as much "social engineering" as any other set of priorities--except that he is the engineer and the ends chosen are his.
As a matter of fact, our current arrangement is already radical. If in 1965 Americans had been told that a new U.S. immigration law would spark the arrival of tens of millions of people from Asia, Africa, and South America with the effect of greatly altering our ethnic composition, there would certainly have been more opposition than there was to the immigration reform of that year--which ended country-of-origin quotas and instituted unlimited family-reunification visas. Yet the results of that sweeping liberalization are now the starting point for any new reform.
In particular, family immigration has a strong lobby in the large Latino community, which depends mostly on the Democratic party to push its agenda. A President Obama would likely toe the Democratic line on unskilled immigration and, working with a Democratic Congress, would easily stall reforms to fix a broken immigration system. This at a time when Britain and the European Union are moving in precisely the opposite direction, joining Canada and Australia in using a point system weighted towards the admission of people with skills.
Britain made the move earlier this year, for the same reasons of national interest that were well expressed decades back by a speaker during the 1966 debate on the point system in the Canadian parliament:
The trend of [economic] requirements is in the direction of higher levels of education and higher levels of skills. Now how do you want to get at this? You can bring in immigrants who are already educated and trained as much as possible, or if you want to, you can bring them in and train and educate them here. But that means you must be prepared from a social and political point of view to do this. In other words it costs money; it takes time and it requires capital.
It sounds like something Alan Greenspan might have said, and it's sound advice. If Barack Obama is serious about making immigration a "top priority," as he declared the other day, he should do it in a way that puts the country's long-run competitiveness first.
Sahil Mahtani is a reporter-researcher at the New Republic . Pierpaolo Barbieri is a senior at Harvard College.