High-Skill Only Immigration Won't Work

We already have the super efficient police state out chasing drug peddlers and users. Oh well.

Once again it is all about ending poverty and doing so in a manner that provides a natural labor force for agriculture and forest management both of which our civilization badly needs.  It is not about compulsion but about making the process sensible for everyone.

It is my argument that this can be done while doi9ng away with our present inefficient ad hoc system that actually leaves millions idle  while subsidizing millions more to everyone's frustration.
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High-Skill Only Immigration Won't Work


Alvaro Vargas Llosa 
 
Thursday, March 23, 2017

https://fee.org/articles/high-skill-only-immigration-wont-work/




President Trump said he might pursue an immigration policy that skews permits toward high-skilled workers according to language proficiency, educational and professional background, and age. He is not the first U.S. president to espouse this idea.


An economy needs highly trained workers but also people willing to perform other activities.


President John F. Kennedy pushed for something similar, but under President Lyndon Johnson, the view that family reunification should play a larger role led to the 1965 watershed law partly responsible for the shift in immigrant origins from Europe and Canada to Latin American and Asia.

High-skilled immigration is more palatable, politically speaking than low-skilled foreign workers.

 But such a policy does not necessarily reflect the needs of the economy. It sets politically acceptable quotas and then picks the immigrants to fulfill them. Because low-skilled immigration is indispensable, it causes supply and demand for low-skilled workers to interact outside of the law.

With a need for less-educated immigrants, Australia has seen a big influx of low-skilled workers using other types of visas, such as (ironically) international student or working holiday visas. In Canada, where provincial governments play a significant role in immigration, federal restrictions on low-skilled visas have had unintended consequences. Among them, a constant tension between the provinces that need low-skilled workers and the federal government, which has had to raise caps and accept less-skilled workers through various visa arrangements.


The less the disconnect between the law and reality, the fewer undocumented immigrants there will be.


An economy needs highly trained workers but also people willing to perform other activities. Just as internal migration adjusts the asymmetries between states, international migration adjusts differences between countries. Foreign workers lift the economy at all levels. Economist Benjamin Powell has estimated the net benefit of immigration to the economy to amount to more than $36 billion.


The job market has an ability to adjust itself that no government has. Between 2007 and 2009,
undocumented entries were less than two-thirds of those between 2000 and 2005 because of the recession. In recent years, net immigration from Mexico has been negative.


Is it realistic to expect a points-based merit system to keep away all the low-skilled immigrants needed in the U.S.? Only a super-efficient police state could accomplish such a task—at a terrible cost to the country.


Ultimately, the less the disconnect between the law and reality, the fewer undocumented immigrants there will be.

Reprinted from the Independent Institute.



Alvaro Vargas Llosa 
 
Alvaro Vargas Llosa is a Senior Fellow of The Center on Global Prosperity at the Independent Institute. He has been a nationally syndicated columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group and his book, Liberty for Latin America, received the Sir Antony Fisher International Memorial Award for its contribution to the cause of freedom in 2006.