Among the concessions that Jon Kyl supposedly extracted from Ted Kennedy in exchange for
immediate, permanent amnesty for all illegal aliens was a change in the legal-immigration system that placed more emphasis on an immigrant’s education and less on family relationships. The goal of such a “merit-based” system is to eliminate some of the current immigration categories for adult relatives in order to limit future chain migration of family members. At the same time, the current employment-based immigration categories would be replaced by a system along the lines of how Canada and Australia select some of their immigrants, awarding points for various attributes (education level, English ability, age, etc.)
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So at least these parts of the bill are good, right?
Wrong.
It’s true that the nepotism problem in our immigration system is serious. The Raleigh, N.C., newspaper recently
illustrated the chain migration problem by talking to Mexican immigrant Pablo Baltazar. He snuck over the border 30 years ago, got amnesty as a result of the 1986 immigration law, and has brought over his nine siblings and their spouses (each of whom has his or her own relatives) and children. Through the power of demographic compound interest, the Baltazar clan is “now too numerous to count,” in the reporter’s words.
The problems this causes include slower assimilation due to constant infusions of unassimilated relatives from the old country, and the takeover of the immigration flow by people from a handful countries.
National Review Online’s own Stanley Kurtz has explored the issue in the context of Muslim family chain immigration to Europe (see
here and
here).
But
Kurtz and others have also discovered that the Senate bill’s provisions that would supposedly end family chain migration are a sham, like almost everything else in it. For the first eight-ten years or more, the measure would actually
increase family immigration so as to accommodate almost everyone (maybe seven million people) on the current waiting lists for the family categories slated for eventual elimination — siblings of U.S. citizens and adult sons and daughters of citizens and legal residents. (See how much the bill would increase total immigration in
this pdf chart from
Numbers USA, the most active group fighting this noisome bill.)
Borjas also
surmises that the changes would be gutted in short order: “Any bets on how long it would take weak-kneed legislators to back off, strip the point system of its ‘discriminatory’ impact, and make the whole thing meaningless?” We don’t need to guess because we already know; Ted Kennedy recently
told a newspaper in his state that “The day it passes we’re going to put in legislation to try to fix it.” And he’ll succeed, for he is truly Sun Tzu to the Senate GOP’s Colonel Klink.
But suppose we lived in an alternate universe where Sen. Kennedy’s promises actually meant something (the same universe where “temporary” really
means temporary) — would the system set out in the bill be worth it then?
Well, it certainly would cost less. Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation has
calculated that the average low-skilled immigrant household consumes nearly $20,000 more in government services that it pays in taxes. College-educated immigrants, on the other hand, pay more in taxes than they use in services.
Likewise with the other problems that attend low-skilled immigration: higher-skilled immigrants would be more likely to speak English, less likely to be involved in gangs, and less likely to cluster together in neighborhoods brimming with third-world dysfunction.
