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[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

America attracts the wrong immigrants

Midway through his term of office, not in a tweet or a campaign rally but in the calm of an almost conventional speech, Donald Trump said: “America is a cutting-edge economy but our immigration system is stuck in the past.” Many Americans, including some who cannot stand Trump, would agree with that. The immigration question of the next decade is not, “should America be welcoming to immigrants?” Or even “what do we do about the southern border becoming overwhelmed by desperate people?” No, the question is whether America welcomes the wrong type of immigration and needs to change. “Is it time to favour computer programmers over gardeners?” That’s the question. Same numbers — a million a year, legally — but different people.

But the question is not posed. Not because Americans fear people speaking other languages or cooking with strange ingredients or praying to other gods. The problem is not them, many Americans say: the problem is us. Our society, our community, has become — with the best intentions — a more dangerous place. The anti-Trump campaigner and former Bush aide David Frum made the point in a piece in The Atlantic magazine a couple of years ago: “More and more of the people who live among Americans are not on equal legal footing with Americans. They cannot vote. They cannot qualify as jurors. If they commit a crime they are subject not only to prison but to deportation. And because these noncitizens are keenly aware of those things, they adjust their behavior. They keep a low profile. They do not complain to the authorities if, say, their boss cheats them out of some of their pay, or if they are abused by a parent or partner at home.”

This is the result of the array of an immigration policy that broadly allows family ties — and ingenuity in hopping across the southern border — to trump skills. A policy that brings in adult siblings of already poor, semi-legal residents. As a result not everyone in America gets the full right to stay: some will be legal temporary residents, some students who should not be working, some came illegally but can stay (like the Dreamers whose parents brought them to America illegally as children) on some kind of sufferance.

Of course, there are plenty of wealthy Americans to whom this doesn’t matter much. They lead lives insulated from the masses. They have cheap gardeners on tap: cheap labour — desperate labour — which enables the low-wage America that keeps so many people so poor. Bernie Sanders used to point out that open immigration policies were very much the plaything of the rich — of faceless, placeless corporate America. There are sociologists who point out, too, that a nation desperate for labour, having to pay more for it, might not have incarcerated so many black men so readily in recent decades.

What is unquestionably the case is that America a few decades ago was almost entirely filled by citizens with equal rights. It has morphed in recent years into a place with graded citizenship; in some big states, like California, fully 10% of residents are not full citizens. As Frum put it, “No intentional policy has led the US to accept more low-wage low-skill labourers and fewer cancer researchers. Yet that is what the United States is doing.”