The immigration issue has always been an important topic for the U.S., which historically has been essentially a country of immigrants. From early on in the history of this country, it has also been an ambivalent issue, ranging from idealism to realism associated with human behavior and shortcomings. For example, on the one hand, when the Statue of Liberty was erected in 1886, it contained the famous inscription ”give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.\u201d On the other hand, in 1882, four years before the erection of the Statue of Liberty, the U.S. Congress enacted the first immigration restrictions, specifically excluding “paupers, ex-convicts, mental defectives and Chinese.” Because the immigration issue has significant impacts on so many aspects of life in the U.S., ranging from the economy to taxes to national security, I would like to discuss some of my thoughts on this issue.<\/p>\n
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Before discussing some of the specific issues on immigration, first I want to state three general principles that I use to guide the discussion of these issues. These principles are:<\/p>\n
The U.S. is a country of immigrants. Aside from the Native Americans, all Americans are immigrants or descendants of immigrants. If it weren\u2019t for the continuous inflow of immigrants, the U.S. would not have become such a rich and powerful country. By allowing many foreign students to be able to continue to work in this country and convert their foreign student visas into permanent residency, the U.S. is taking the cream of the crop from foreign countries while not needing to invest the large amount of resources needed to raise these high-potential students from the time they were born to the time they graduated from high schools or colleges. Similarly, by giving higher immigration priorities to technical and business professionals who have already established their credentials as bona fide contributors to society, the U.S. is again taking the cream of the crop and taking advantage of the resources already spent by the foreign countries to groom these contributors to society.<\/p>\n
Taking the cream of the crop from foreign countries is especially important, as world competition and the U.S.\u2019s ever-increasing standard-of-living continue to rise. The U.S. must then move up the economic food chain by focusing more on work activities that require more specialized skills and more creativity and originality. The more manual-intensive or routine manufacturing work activities will be taken up more by those countries with a lower cost-of-living and therefore cheaper labor. It is therefore not a coincident that the richest and most powerful country in the world is the country that has accepted more legal immigrants as permanent residents than the rest of the world combined. However, as the competitive playing fields between industrial and emerging market countries have been leveled (as described in Thomas L. Friedman\u2019s book The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century), the desire to come to the U.S. to study and to work has, relatively speaking, decreased. For example, as Taiwan\u2019s standard-of-living continues to rise and more high-end technical and business jobs become available in Taiwan, the number of college graduates from Taiwan coming to the U.S. to attend graduate school and then to continue to work permanently in the U.S. has decreased significantly during the last 10-15 years.<\/p>\n
At the opposite end of the work spectrum, there is also another advantage to the U.S. to allow people to come to this country to work, as permanent residents, or as temporary workers, or even as illegal aliens. There are a lot of manual-intensive and low-paying jobs, e.g., jobs of seasonal farm workers in California, which may not be attractive enough to get enough Americans to fill those jobs. Explicitly or implicitly allowing foreigners (including illegal aliens) to work on these low-paying jobs helps to keep the American economy moving and also helps to control inflation. When the American economy is booming, the issue of temporary workers and illegal aliens may not be a significant issue. However, when the American economy is experiencing stagnation or recession, the issue of temporary workers and illegal aliens can become very significant. As a matter of fact, most of the controversy with respect to the immigration issue revolves around the illegal aliens, including the social services provided to family members of illegal aliens.<\/p>\n
From the above, we can conclude that in general, immigration can be good for both the immigrants and the host country, i.e., it can be a win-win situation. On the other hand, the host country should also have the right to restrict immigration, especially when the circumstances are no longer a win-win situation. For example, depending on the economy, the host country should be able to reduce the number of immigrants allowed into the country. The host country should be able to forbid certain people to migrate to this country if there is creditable evidence that these people may pose security threats to the host country. More importantly, the taxpayers of the host country should not be obligated to provide free education and medical benefits to illegal aliens or their children, especially if they have not been paying their share of the taxes. <\/p>\n