Saturday, May 26, 2007

No Brainer

As an immigrant abroad, I've got no choice but to follow the immigration reform bill from afar. Two things I can say, though. First, inviting people to work in America while withholding the possibility of assuming an American identity (which is my understanding of what the guest worker program entails) is a mistake. That's exactly what has undermined French society which, although it offered citizenship to the immigrant laborers who rebuilt the country after WWII, never embraced them into the national identity. The result is an enormous group of people who, at the level of identity, feel that they are neither French nor of the country of origin. In other words, alienated.

Second, Tom Friedman and Matthew Yglesias have got it all wrong when they call for automatically offering visas to foreign-born PhD graduates. Yglesias responds to the obvious drawback, that it encourages braindrain from the countries of origin, by proposing an "exit tax" to be paid (presumably) by the graduate to the home country:

The economic benefits of allowing the highest-skilled people in the world to work where their skills are the most in demand would be very large -- much bigger than the benefits involved in letting low-skill people work in the first world as hotel maids and day-laborers -- so it would be both possible and worthwhile to find ways to distribute those gains relatively equitably.

Unfortunately, applying Major League Baseball's free agent compensation rules to international labor markets overlooks the fact that to a country in desperate need of an educated cadre, money is not an "equitable" substitute for know how.

Furthermore, in a time when well-paid productive labor is increasingly outsourced and poorly-paid "unskilled" labor is increasingly done by immigrants, artificially boosting the supply of PhD labor seems to be a cruel blow.

Posted by Judah in:  Domestic Policy   

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