To me, it is good that we accept more immigrants than some countries, including genuine refugees who are fleeing danger, and we even give some of these immigrants paths to citizenship.
But the system they have to endure is chaotic and full of contradictions and dysfunction. I realize that many of the hurdles and uncertainty prospective immigrants face are somewhat intentional, in order to deter legal immigration. Of course, this can backfire if it ends up causing more illegal immigration — which is only one of the problems I see.
Let me start with something we all agree on: we all want our loved ones to be economically and emotionally at least as well off than we were growing up. It turns out that a growing body of economic research seems to suggest that immigration can be, and often is, an economic boost to local economies. The idea is that, instead of predominantly stealing natives’ jobs, immigrants often take jobs that natives wouldn’t have been as interested in, which are jobs that often work to improving the neighborhood in tangible ways. Think of the construction industry — the country desperately needs to boost its housing supply, and immigrants often are more interested in filling open construction positions than natives. Or local restaurants: my personal belief is that it takes just one fat, cheesy pupusa to bring a person around to supporting more immigration.
Not only that, but without immigration, our population would be aging, due to low fertility rates (because we’d have fewer young people per old person than in previous generations). We need immigration to support the services and provide the tax revenue that our growing elderly population will need. Other countries, particularly in Eastern Asia and Europe, are already dealing with these issues.
So, this is not a time for us to be restricting immigration — much to the contrary, we should be letting far more immigrants in.
One more thing. I grew up in the NYC suburbs, around the time of 9/11. I am very sensitive to concerns that we don’t want to let terrorists (or any criminals) into our country, to the extent that we can detect who is and who isn’t within that category. But think for a second: is our current immigration system preventing those types of people from coming in? No, it’s allowing thousands of people to slip into the country (or overstay their legal visas) illegally each month, with no background checks whatsoever. The Trump admin is trying to clamp down on this, but here’s the thing that we’ve learned with the war on drugs: if we put tight legal controls on access to things people want, lucrative black markets will arise to fill that demand. Just like our drug laws fuel a violent, transnational drug trade, our tight immigration restrictions fuel a chaotic and dangerous market for illegal immigration.
And I’m not going to say whether or not we should be doing that for drugs (a topic for another day), but for immigration, we appear to gain relatively little from all these immigration restrictions, and at an enormous cost.
So for all these reasons and more, please, let’s open up our immigration system to more legal immigration.
But how should we open it up?
To start, I think there are things we can learn from Canada. They have had a very interesting system that, from what I understand, attempts to encourage immigrants to come in especially to fill roles where there are more vacancies. I think doing that could help us improve many industries that are currently often understaffed, like nursing homes, healthcare, construction, etc. Of course, the reason for labor shortages is often low pay, long hours, and dangerous or exploitative work conditions, so those root causes should probably be addressed (e.g. by antitrust policy breaking up local labor monopsonies), but again, that’s a story for another day.
I mentioned construction. One of the mistakes Canada has allegedly made was bringing immigrants in faster than local housing markets were able to absorb them. One idea that could help would be to especially incentivize immigration into local construction and other housing-related industries, so that local housing supply can grow as fast as possible and hopefully accommodate more immigrants. Fortunately, we have more large cities that city-bound immigrants can disperse across than Canada does, which should help too.
And why not have USCIS employ more immigrants? USCIS is a classical example of an understaffed employer, and it would be even more understaffed if more legal immigration comes through. Encouraging immigrants to come and work for USCIS could be a win-win for everyone, as long as, you know, the new employees are held accountable if they take bribes or do anything else illegal.
And it’s not like the current USCIS employees always do a great job. My wife (from Brazil) has a friend who tried to get a tourist visa to come to our wedding and got denied for arbitrary reasons (“because of the [Brazilian] financial crisis” was the quote we heard, I.e. I think you’re poor and desperate, so I won’t give you a visa even though all your documents and explanations are in order). And compare that to another person we are aware of who literally lied on their whole application and got the tourist visa. This person overstayed their visa but later became a US citizen anyway.
Here’s something else that should help USCIS workers: revise federal regulations so that prospective immigrants only have to submit background checks, send in whatever fees are required to sustain USCIS (maybe with waiver options) and that should be pretty much it. There are a lot of questions on immigration papers that don’t make a lot of sense to me, and a person on the path to citizenship will answer them on their visa application, on every green card application, and on their naturalization application, so even dropping one useless question can go a long way for USCIS workers to have less work to do.
Some examples of what I think we should keep:
- biometrics/fingerprinting? YES, keep this part of the process. That’ll help keep track of the immigrants in case they commit any crimes
- asking about literally every school/job they’ve been in for the past several years? MAYBE, but it really only seems relevant if it either somehow contributes to the background check or if it helps match them to an industry in need of workers
- asking about past terrorist, communist, coup, and related organizations/activities? MAYBE, but if the person is really a terrorist, do you really think they’ll say yes? Come on. The background check should be able to investigate this without needing to take the applicant’s word
- ask for their social media handles? YES, I think that’s actually a possibly good idea, as long as it’s just used as a brief part of the background check
- medical/gynelogical exams? NO, you creeps. That’s none of your business.
More broadly, I would move to simplify our visa system away from the dozens of different types of visas we have, toward a streamlined, simplified version. There could be two types of visas, immigrant and non immigrant (tourist or business), with both going through simplified versions of their current processes. Set a high bar for rejection, based mostly on the background check for past crimes or current red flags. Accept everyone else within a reasonable time frame.
For those immigrants open to going anywhere, provide a user-friendly tool to help them to choose where to go. Help them understand local home prices, rental rates, demographics, major industries and maybe whether they’re looking for workers, maybe crime rates, etc.
And maybe provide incentives for them to go to industries or locations that need more people. Or maybe not. Incentives can cost money. The tool I talked about above could hopefully help them reconsider going to places with high housing prices or things like that. And maybe that’s all the government should provide. Or maybe the government shouldn’t even provide that, I don’t know. There are benefits and costs to all of these things, so the governments would do well to at least pilot ideas like these to see what works, before scaling up.
And once the immigrants are here, make it easy for them to thrive! Being allowed to work and travel should be a default for anyone with an immigrant visa, no additional application necessary. All immigrant visa holders should have straightforward paths to permanent residency and citizenship.
Harkening back to what I said about construction, I think the federal government should be sensitive to local impacts. The average effects of immigration seem to be positive, like I said, but there could be locations where housing or labor markets get temporarily strained. I don’t think the government should intervene too much (or at all, usually), but there may be a case for somehow guiding immigrants toward places with more slack housing markets or tight labor markets.
Tl;dr: make immigration easy again. Do background checks on them but don’t require anything more than what’s necessary to make sure they’re not a threat. Give immigrants basic rights and paths to citizenship. Be sensitive to local impacts on housing and labor markets.
