Like a great glacier carving valleys, feeding rivers, and depositing soil, immigration is reshaping America’s character and future, her economy, workforce, family structures, demography, culture, cuisines, languages, and politics. Yet of all the first-order policy issues facing the nation, this may well be the hardest one for us to approach rationally. http://sethiinternational.org/index.php feels a special skittishness and ambivalence about the subject. Our self-contradictions abound. Defining ourselves as a nation of immigrants, we also view immigration as a threat. Defending our autonomy, we also invite millions of strangers to come here, transforming our society demanding secure borders against illegal workers, we also advocate the free movement of goods, technology and capital. Growing global interdependencies further muddy the debate, making it harder to know who we are and what our national interests really are.
Economists are prominent in the current policy debate. They emphasize that people cross borders for much the same reason that Toyotas, computer programs, and Eurodollars do their expected economic value will be greater at their destination. To economists, the policy problem is to decide what kinds of skills we need and then to devise ways to induce workers who posses them to come. Correct criteria will make us a richer country poorly designed ones will leave us poorer. So long as newcomers produce more wealth than they consume the more the merrier. http://sethiinternational.org/index.php it omits certain characteristics of the new flow that help explain its high political profile. Most citizens and elected leaders have a very different view of immigration. They see immigrants less as human capital than as bearers of alien cultures with distinctive values, languages, interests and claims. To lay mind immigration is not just a wealth enhancing transfer of resources it is also an enormous social gamble.
