issue: Immigration

The Government Takes on Arizona

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

On Tuesday, the federal government fired its first legal shot at Arizona’s controversial immigration law. The law as it stands now is slightly less stringent than it was in its original form.  The original law allowed law enforcement officers to inquire into the immigration of anyone that they contacted. The amended law does not allow officers to stop and look into the immigration of a person if the stop is based solely on the person’s race. However, the law does require authorities to determine the immigration status of every person that breaks a state or local law, no matter how minor. It also attempts to address other immigration-related issues such as alien registration, smuggling, and employment, among others. The state became the target of national and international scorn when its Governor Jan Brewer signed the law on April 30th.

The law is set to take effect on July 29th, but the federal government is seeking an injunction that will stop that. The U.S. is actually seeking two types of injunctions: 1) a permanent injunction that will stop the law from ever being enforced, and 2) a preliminary injunction that will stop enforcement of the law while the case winds its way through the courts. The government is concerned that if the Arizona law is allowed to stand, it will lead other states to pass similar sweeping legislation that will further encroach on the federal government’s regulation of immigration, and drain federal resources that would have to be used for enforcement.

Cutting away all the legalese in the U.S.’s 58-page brief, the government’s argument boils down to this: the Arizona law impermissibly conflicts with federal immigration laws, and it will have adverse effects on federal resources used to regulate immigration and U.S. foreign policy. Part of the argument is that Arizona’s blanket treatment of all unlawful aliens affects the discretion given to the federal government under federal law. That discretion allows the federal government to more effectively target aliens that are a national security risk. Other areas of discretion allow the federal government to allow unlawful aliens to remain in the U.S. for humanitarian reasons. Also, requiring Arizona law enforcement officials to check the status of every person that breaks a law in the state will place too heavy a burden on federal resources that keep track of individuals’ immigration status.

Furthermore, U.S. foreign policy is affected by the Arizona bill because the current immigration framework arose in part from negotiations with other countries on how foreigners in the U.S. could expect to be treated. The Arizona law criminalizes actions by certain aliens that are treated with civil laws under the federal system. The federal government argues that this broad criminalization does not account for potential foreign policy concerns with respect to some aliens, and does not allow the U.S. to “speak with one voice” in the area of immigration.

This is the first step in what is sure to be a contentious legal battle. The federal government makes a convincing constitutional argument that Arizona’s law impermissibly strays into an arena meant to be controlled by federal law. Arizona’s response will most likely be that it was forced to enact the law in an effort to protect the well-being of the state in the face of the federal government’s inability to stem the tide of undocumented immigrants that stream across Arizona’s border every day. I would not be surprised to see the federal court in Arizona grant an injunction that stops the state from enforcing the law during the litigation process in order to allow it time to get to the Supreme Court, which will certainly make the final determination.

Photo credit: Fibonacci Blue’s Photostream

Just Cops or Teachers, Too?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

A debate among Republican gubernatorial candidates in Georgia this week illustrated just how far the GOP (particularly in the South) has drifted from the impulse that led George W. Bush and John McCain to support comprehensive immigration reform back in the day. Now it’s all about deporting the undocumented pronto, and the only difference of opinion is over how many public employees need to spend their time in the dragnet for illegals.

According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Jim Galloway, candidate Eric Johnson, who’s struggling to land a runoff spot, came out for requring both teachers and hospital employees to verify the citizenship status of their patrons. Candidate Nathal Deal professed frustration that few cops in Georgia viewed themselves as immigration enforcement officers, but did draw the line at teachers being enrolled in the chore.

All the GOP candidates, of course, supported the idea of Georgia enacting a law like Arizona’s; this is a position that’s becoming as much a litmus test for southern Republicans as attacking unions. That will become significant nationally in 2012 when the Republican presidential nomination contest moves south.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Head Scarves, Minarets and the Arizona Immigration Law

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

I’ve been following the story of a Muslim French woman who was given a ticket in April for driving while wearing her hijab, or veil.  She was issued the ticket for driving with obscured vision. Yesterday, it jumped into mainstream American media over at the Washington Post. The story is the high water mark in a public debate on Islam in France that’s been brewing for over a decade.The incident underscores France’s uneasy relationship with its sizable Muslim minority. Depending on your source, 10 to 12 percent of French citizens are of Arab or Muslim extraction, or nearly six million total (it’s difficult to verify these numbers because the French census, rigidly adhering to the country’s secularism, does not permit racial or religious background information from being collected).

French Muslims’ growing prominence has become particularly notable in the south, for obvious geographic reasons. Jean Marie Le Pen’s racist and xenophobic National Front consistently draws its base of support in this region (it’s no coincidence that Le Pen calls Marseille home). If you’re not terribly familiar with French politics, don’t write them off — they’ve been around a lot longer and are much better organized than America’s far-right Tea Party. In the regional elections this March, the party took home 12 percent of the total vote and over 20 percent in Le Pen’s home base.

The National Front creates problems for center-right French President Nicolas Sarkozy, son of Hungarian parents and a first-generation citizen himself. Essentially, Sarko wants to channel France’s xenophobia through a different mechanism — his. Sarko’s ruling UMP party in January offered a draft law to ban the veil and partial ban on burka (the entire Islamic dress for women), which he champions as defending France’s secularism and women’s rights. Sure, that’s plausible, but the debate is really a sop to racists.

What’s difficult about the issue is that I actually think there is a public safety concern. I can see how wearing a veil while driving might reduce your vision in ways a helmet would not — the hijab is loose cloth and could cover one eye while turning your head. A concerted effort should be made to balance religious freedom and public safety, while being mindful that bans on clothing are distinctly ill-liberal.  Even conservatives should have a problem with the government telling you want to wear.

France is unfortunately not alone — Belgium passed a similar law (25 percent of Brussels follows Islam, five percent countrywide), and Switzerland (five percent) voted last year to ban construction of minarets on mosques. It would seem, therefore, that Europe is developing something of a trend in largely symbolic anti-Islamic legislation.

But what do head scarves and minarets have to do with the recently signed “immigration law” in Arizona? Just substitute “Hispanic” for “Muslim” and “U.S.” for “Europe” and you’d get the picture. With 15 percent of the country now claiming Hispanic origin, the Arizona law is the same type of symbolic legislative effort that channels voters’ racism. The thing is, some 60 percent of Americans support it nationally.

So where do we go from here? If progressives scream “racism” at the top of their lungs, the legislation’s supporters will concoct non-racial justifications. The best answer, in the U.S. at least, is to pass comprehensive immigration reform before we tread too far down Europe’s path.

Photo credit: DVIDSHUB’s Photostream

New Poll Shows Tradeoffs on Immigration

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

It’s been pretty obvious for a while that there’s a major split between Hispanics and non-Hispanics on the immigration policy furor sparked by Arizona’s new law authorizing state and local law enforcement agencies to enforce federal immigration laws.

A new MSNBC/NBC/Telemundo poll helps outline the political choices this situation poses for both parties.

To put it simply, white Americans tend to support the Arizona law while Hispanics tend to oppose it, by roughly even two-to-one margins. But the internals of the poll tell a more interesting story. The short-term advantage to Republicans of loudly backing the Arizona law is reinforced by the fact that many Democratic-leaning voters — notably suburban women and women over 50 — say they’d look favorably on candidates raising Arizona. And the long-term problem for Republicans is reinforced by the finding that hostility to the Arizona law — and to the GOP — is especially strong among younger Hispanics.

Complicating the picture further is the fact that a sizeable majority of all Americans (60-29) continue to support some sort of comprehensive immigration reform with provisions that include stronger border security and sanctions against both employers of undocumented workers and the workers themselves–short, however, of deportation. (This is what Democratic Strategist Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira has been pointing out). And big majorities want Congress to do something about the problem.

This last finding may tempt Democrats to move ahead with comprehensive reform in Congress, heightening Hispanic hostility to alternative approaches while convincing non-Hispanic voters that it’s possible to increase enforcement without deportation schemes or potential harrassment of citizens and legal immigrants. But as Jon Chait notes today, certain GOP obstruction of comprehensive immigration reform legislation might simply increase the frustration of both Hispanic and non-Hispanic voters about the status quo, while shifting attention away from Republican extremism on the subject. And as William Galston recently argued, highlighting this issue is a perilous strategy for Democrats, given the likely composition of the 2010 electorate.

There are big risks and big tradeoffs for both parties in making immigration a big issue in 2010. I doubt Republicans in most parts of the country are going to be able to keep themselves from expressing solidarity with Arizona and trying to make this a wedge issue. Democrats need to be more consciously strategic than that, which probably means a principled position that avoids the extremes of “amnesty” as well as deportation or ethnic profiling by law enforcement agencies — but that also makes Republicans play offense on immigration, and lets them become truly offensive.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Charting the GOP Shift on Immigration

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Like observers from all over the partisan and ideological spectrum, I’ve been following the fallout from Arizona’s new immigration law (compounded by conflicting reports that the Obama administration and/or congressional Democratic leaders might be moving up federal immigration legislation in the queue) very closely, given the implications this issue has for both 2010 and (particularly) beyond.

But in his weekly column for National Journal over the weekend, Ron Brownstein has done us all the great service of carefully documenting how far and how fast Republican members of Congress have moved on this subject since the Senate passed a comprehensive immigration reform bill in 2006:

Just four years ago, 62 U.S. senators, including 23 Republicans, voted for a comprehensive immigration reform bill that included a pathway to citizenship for illegal aliens. That bill was co-authored by Arizona Republican John McCain and Massachusetts Democrat Edward Kennedy. President Bush strongly supported it. The Republican supporters also included such conservative senators as Sam Brownback of Kansas and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky….The measure almost certainly could have attracted the necessary 218 votes to pass the House. But it died when House GOP leaders refused to bring it to a vote because they concluded that it lacked majority support among House Republicans.

Since 2006, Republican support for comprehensive action has unraveled. In 2007, Senate negotiators tilted the bill further to the right on issues such as border enforcement and guest workers. And yet, amid a rebellion from grassroots conservatives against anything approaching “amnesty,” just 12 Senate Republicans supported the measure as it fell victim to a filibuster. By 2008, McCain declared in a GOP presidential debate that he would no longer support his own bill: Tougher border enforcement, he insisted, should precede discussion of any new pathway to citizenship.

So the GOP position was moving rightwards at warp speed even with a supporter of comprehensive immigration reform, George W. Bush, still in the White House, being advised by Karl Rove, who viewed such legislation as critical to maintaining a competitive position for Republicans among Hispanic voters. But it’s shifted even more since then, even though levels of immigration have significantly dropped.

For months, Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., have been negotiating an enforcement-legalization plan that largely tracks the 2006 model with some innovative updates, including a “biometric” Social Security card to certify legal status for employment. On balance, their proposal appears more conservative than the 2006 bill.Yet it has been stalled for weeks because Graham had demanded that a second Republican sign on as a co-sponsor before the legislation is released, and none stepped forward. Even Graham angrily backed away this week, after Senate Democratic leaders briefly suggested they would move immigration reform ahead of climate-change legislation he is also negotiating. Reform advocates suspect that Graham is withdrawing from the immigration effort partly to avoid embarrassing his close ally McCain, who faces a stiff primary challenge from conservative former Rep. J.D. Hayworth.

So it appears that Senate Republican support for comprehensive immigration reform (or to be exact, a more conservative version of it) has dropped from 23 to 1 and perhaps soon to nada.

Underneath this shift, notes Brownstein, is the self-replicating demographic isolation of the GOP, which, as Rove forsaw, could make the construction of a Republican majority much harder in the medium-to-long-range future:

[T]he hardening GOP position also shows how the party is being tugged toward nativism as its coalition grows more monochromatic: In a nation that is more than one-third minority, nearly 90 percent of McCain’s votes in the 2008 presidential election came from whites. That exclusionary posture could expose the GOP to long-term political danger. Although Hispanics are now one-sixth of the U.S. population, they constitute one-fifth of all 10-year-olds and one-fourth of 1-year-olds.

This may not matter to Republican candidates in tough primaries this year, who aren’t looking beyond their noses and figure they can’t afford to get outflanked by opponents who are “getting tough” on immigration. But they are in danger of taking an existing demographic problem facing the GOP and making it immeasurably worse, and more immediate.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/takomabibelot/ / CC BY 2.0

The New Prop 187?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

It’s increasingly clear that Arizona’s new immigration law, signed by Republican governor Jan Brewer last Friday, is going to be a galvinizing force in national, not just state, politics. This will be true whether or not Congress gets serious on comprehensive immigration reform legislation, this year or next.

While conservatives will predictably object that support for draconian measures to reduce illegal immigration — and I’d say instructing police officers to regularly roust anyone deemed “suspicious” for proof of citizenship is pretty draconian — does not indicate hostility to legal immigrants, it is not seen that way by most Hispanic citizens. And you’d think Republicans might have learned their lesson in 1994, when California’s Prop 187 — which like Arizona’s bill, purported to affect no one other than undocumented workers — triggered a major backlash against the GOP among Hispanic voters, especially but not just in the Golden State.

The timing of the Arizona action seems almost providential for Democrats, who can now benefit from a similar backlash without taking the lead on controversial national legislation (though they may choose to promote such legislation anyway). And the more Republicans continue to dutifully obey the Almighty Conservative Base on this subject, the more the prospect of a Republican-controlled Congress will begin to seem dangerous to Hispanic voters. Indeed, armed round-ups of brown-skinned Arizonans, to the cheers of Tea Party activists, could be a more potent GOTV force than anything Democrats could themselves devise.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jackazphotography/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

The News That Wasn’t: The Senate Climate Bill

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

This morning’s biggest story is about what’s not happening. This weekend, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) announced that he could not support the tripartisan climate bill in the Senate that he is co-sponsoring in the wake of reports that Democrats will be prioritizing immigration reform. Graham’s surprise move led to the scuttling of the bill’s long-anticipated rollout today — and grim predictions that the legislation may have breathed its last.

What ticked Graham off? Graham called the decision to move immigration to the top of the legislative agenda “nothing more than a cynical political ploy.” He expressed his belief that with immigration taking up badly needed bandwidth in the Senate, the chances for climate policy’s passage would be slim. “I’ve got some political courage, but I’m not stupid,” he said.

For their part, Democrats are continuing to push forward with both priorities. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid underscored his commitment to passing climate legislation this session, saying that “energy could be next if it’s ready.”

Iffy though its chances of passage may be, it would be a real shame if the climate bill were to not get a chance at all. For weeks, Graham, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) and Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) have been working to put together a workable compromise that could get 60 votes. The bill they were to present today seemed promising, their efforts winning the support not just of progressives but of energy companies like Exelon, ConocoPhillips and Duke Energy. It’s a wobbly coalition that may not be easily put back together, especially if the Republicans reduce the Democrats’ margins in Congress (or take it back altogether) this November. If climate change legislation doesn’t move this year, it will be a while — a long while if Obama loses in 2012 — before it gets revisited.

As others have pointed out, Graham’s hissy fit over immigration seems mighty hypocritical given that he wrote about the urgency of passing immigration reform just over a month ago in the Washington Post. But that doesn’t make his criticism incorrect. He’s right that the decision to devote Senate attention to another, no less divisive priority is going to dim the prospects for the climate bill.

While the political calculus of fast-tracking immigration makes sense — it’s clearly intended to fire up the Hispanic base, which has felt neglected under Obama — it’s also a shortsighted decision. Both issues are important, of course, but momentum was already behind climate legislation. The House had already passed it, Kerry, Graham and Lieberman had lined up crucial industry support, and an environmental community that was growing disillusioned with the administration could at least rally behind a bill that would put a cap on carbon. If the administration fails to throw its full weight behind getting climate over this one last hump, then the disappointment of the environmental community will have been earned.

A Larger Failing

But the death of climate policy — and, yes, we shouldn’t shovel dirt on it quite yet — speaks to a larger failing. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), who considers the issue one of his top five priorities, told the Washington Post that when he’s back home talking to constituents, “nobody talks about this. I never hear about it.” His experience is borne out by polls, which show increasing public apathy about solving our energy and climate problems.

It’s understandable that an abstract threat like climate change would give way to more narrow concerns in a time of economic crisis. And to be sure, the media and our leadership — particularly on the right — bear some of the blame for the public disinterest. For their part, progressives perhaps haven’t done the best job of framing the issue and selling it to a skeptical public.

But the pattern of the past year has been worrisome. Despite the scale of our public problems, we shown little appetite for bold, collective action. We’ve seen it in our quivering in the face of health reform’s passage, in our refusal to accept the connection between taxation and benefits, in our willingness to be gulled by cynical entertainers.

When he came into office, President Obama promised to bring an end to the “smallness of our politics.” Despite some signal accomplishments, he hasn’t succeeded in reforming the mindset of our political class. But Washington isn’t the only problem. To overcome the smallness of our politics, it’s not just our politicians who need to think big — the American people do, too.

Immigration, the Tea Partiers and the GOP’s Future

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

It’s long been apparent that immigration is an issue that is the political equivalent of unstable nitroglycerine: complex and dangerous. It arguably splits both major parties, although national Democratic politicians generally favor “comprehensive immigration reform” (basically a “path to citizenship” for undocumented workers who meet certain conditions and legalize themselves, along with various degrees of restriction on future immigration flows), and with George W. Bush gone, most Republicans oppose it.

It is of most passionate concern, for obvious reasons, to Latino voters, and also to many grassroots conservatives for which widespread immigration from Mexico into new areas of the country has become a great symbol of an unwelcome change in the nation’s complexion. But the fact remains that perceived hostility to immigrants has become a major stumbling block for Republican recruitment of otherwise-conservative Latino voters, which explains (along with business support for relatively free immigration) the otherwise odd phenomenon that it was a Republican administration that last pursued comprehensive immigration reform. (Some may remember, in fact, that immigration reform was and remains a big part of Karl Rove’s strategy for insuring a long-range Republican majority.)

I’m not sure how many progressives understand that immigration policy is a significant part of the narrative of “betrayal” that conservatives have written about the Bush administration — right up there with Medicare Part D, No Child Left Behind, and big budget deficits. And implicitly, at least, when Republicans talk about “returning the GOP to its conservative principles,” many would make repudiation of any interest in comprehensive immigration reform — or, as they typically call it, “amnesty for Illegals” — part of the litmus test.

This is one issue of many where professional Republican pols are almost certainly happy that Barack Obama is in office right now — they don’t have to take a definitive position on immigration policy unless the president first pulls the trigger by moving a proposal in Congress, and it’s unlikely he will until other priorities are met.

But at some point, and particularly if Republicans win control of the House in November and inherit the dubious prize of partial responsibility for governance, they will come under intense pressure to turn the page decisively on the Bush-Rove embrace of comprehensive immigration reform. And no matter what Obama does, immigration will definitely be an issue in the 2012 Republican presidential competition.

So it’s of more than passing interest to note that the pressure on Republicans to take a national position on this issue has been significantly increased by the rise of the Tea Party Movement.

At 538.com today, Tom Schaller writes up a new study of tea partiers and racial-ethnic attitude in seven key states from the University of Washington’s Christopher Parker. While the whole thing is of considerable interest, I can’t tease much of immediate political signficance from the fragmentary findings that Parker has initially released, beyond the unsurprising news that Tea Partiers have general views on race, ethnicity and GLBT rights that you’d expect from a very conservative portion of the electorate.

But one finding really does just jump off the page: Among the 22 percent of white voters who say they “strongly support” the Tea Party Movement in the seven states involved in the study, nearly half (45 percent to be exact) favor the very radical proposition that “all undocumented immigrants in the U.S. should be deported immediately.” That’s interesting not only because it shows how strong anti-immigrant sentiment is in the Tea Party “base,” but because it embraces a very specific and proactive postion that goes far beyond resistance to comprehensive immigration reform or “amnesty.” The finding is all the more remarkable because it comes from a survey on “racial attitudes”; I don’t know what sorts of controls Parker deployed, but polls that dwell on such issues often elicit less-than-honest answers from respondents who naturally don’t want to sound intolerant.

So if and when push becomes shove for the GOP on immigration, the shove from the Tea Partiers could be especially strong. And that won’t make the GOP happy: Republican elites understand that however bright things look for them this November (in a midterm contest that almost always produces an older-and-whiter-than-average electorate), their party’s base of support is in elements of the population that are steadily losing demographic ground. Beginning in 2012, that will become an enduring and ever-worsening problem for the GOP, and a position on immigration guaranteed to repel Latinos would be a very heavy millstone, just as Karl Rove concluded when he pushed W. to embrace comprehensive immigration reform.

The issue is already becoming a factor in the 2010 cycle. This is most obvious in Arizona, where J.D. Hayworth’s Tea-Party-oriented challenge to John McCain is in part payback for McCain’s longstanding support for comprehensive immigration reform. But it could matter elsewhere as well. You’d think that Cuban-American Senate candidate Marco Rubio would be in a good position to do very well among Florida Latinos. But actually, his potential achilles heel in a likely general election matchup with Democrat Kendrick Meek (who, as it happens, is an African-American with his own close ties to South Florida’s Cuban-American community) is a weak standing among Latinos, particulary the non-Cuban Latino community in Central Florida, attributable in no small part to his vocal opposition to comprehensive immigration reform. Indeed, even if he defeats Meek, if Rubio gets waxed among Florida Latinos, Republicans will have an especially graphic illustration of the continuing political peril of opposing legalization of undocumented workers, even when advanced by a Latino politician.

The real acid test for Republicans on immigration could come in California, the state where in 1994 GOP governor Pete Wilson fatally alienated Latino voters from his party for years to come by championing a cutoff of public benefits for undocumented workers (a far less draconian proposal than immediate deportation, it should be noted). Underdog conservative gubernatorial candidate Steve Poizner has made his campaign all about reviving Wilson’s proposal. If Republican front-runner Meg Whitman can crush Poizner without any accomodation of his views on immigration, it could help her overcome a problem with Latino voters that emanates not only from Democrat Jerry Brown’s longstanding ties to the Latino community, but from the fact that her campaign chairman is none other than Pete Wilson.

In any event, whether it’s now or later, in 2010 or in 2012 and beyond, the Republican Party is going to have to deal with the political consequences of its base’s hostility to the levels of Latino immigration, and to growing demands for steps ranging from benefit cutoffs to deportation of undocumented workers. With the Tea Partiers exemplifying instensely held grassroots conservative demands for a more aggressively anti-immigration posture, even as the political costs of obeying these demands continues to rise, Republicans will be juggling explosives on this issue for the foreseeable future.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/people/vpickering/

Brain Gain: Why We Should Grant Visas to Immigrant Entrepreneurs

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

A recent post highlighted the importance of new and young companies to job creation in the U.S., implicitly raising an important question for policy makers: How can we increase the number of startups? Assuming it can be done, such an increase would not solve all of the economic challenges facing this country, but it would certainly help. New companies not only create millions of jobs across all sectors of the economy — they also introduce product and process innovations, boosting overall productivity.

Saying startups are important is one thing, of course; actually designing policies to increase their number is something else entirely. Before making any recommendations, for example, we need to know more about the universe of startups. Are they more prominent in some sectors than others? Does the impact of new companies differ across sectors or geographic regions? Should policy focus on encouraging more new firms, or on enhancing the growth of those already in existence? How would any such policies affect established companies, large and small?

Policymaking around entrepreneurship is evidently not clear-cut as there is still quite a bit we do not understand regarding startups. In the coming weeks we will try to explore these questions and illuminate the world of startups for policymakers. We’ll start with the lowest-hanging fruit of all, though one that may seem like poison to some in Washington: immigration.

It’s commonly accepted that the United States is a nation of immigrants, settled and populated by those fleeing persecution, seeking commercial opportunities in a new land or looking for a fresh start. We have always recognized the important contributions of immigrants to the U.S. economy, from entrepreneurs like Samuel Slater (textile mills) to Andrew Carnegie (steel) to Andy Bechtolsheim (Sun Microsystems) to the laborers and workers who built this country with their hands.

Recently, researchers have begun to paint a broader picture of the economic role of immigrant entrepreneurs. For example, Vivek Wadhwa and his research team have found that, from 1995 to 2006, fully one-quarter of new technology and engineering companies in the U.S. were founded by immigrants. In Silicon Valley, the figure was one-half. These firms constitute only a sliver of all companies, yet contribute an outstanding number of jobs and innovations to the economy.

It makes sense, then, that if we are seeking to increase the number of new companies started each year in the U.S., we might look to immigrants. It turns out that Sens. John Kerry (D-MA) and Richard Lugar (R-IN) are thinking precisely along these lines, introducing the StartUp Visa Act (PDF) in the Senate. This bill would grant a two-year visa to immigrant entrepreneurs who are able to raise $250,000 from an American investor and can create at least five jobs in two years. Without question, such a visa is a good idea and this legislation hopefully paves the way for future actions that would reduce the pecuniary threshold and focus more on job creation.

Quite naturally, however, the promotion of immigrant entrepreneurs arouses suspicion among those on the right who harbor nativist views, and those on the left who perceive progressive immigration policies as a threat to American labor. Such views take the precisely wrong perspective: immigration, as we have seen, is a core American value. Immigrant entrepreneurs, moreover, come to the U.S. to make jobs for Americans, not take them.

Further, many of those who promote immigration as a way to boost economic growth narrowly focus on “high-skilled” entrepreneurs, those who might start technology companies. Clearly, as Wadhwa’s research indicates, such companies are important to American innovation. But we exclude non-technology entrepreneurs at our peril — every new company, including those founded by immigrants, represents pursuit of the American dream. By closing our borders to immigrants in general or welcoming only those with certain skills, we leave out many who will start new firms in other industries. If not in the United States, they will go elsewhere to start their companies and create jobs.

Entrepreneurs are implicit in Emma Lazarus’ poem: “Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Entrepreneurs start from nothing and work endlessly to build their companies, expressing their individual freedom through commerce. Why should we want to exclude them from the home of entrepreneurial capitalism?

A Way Forward on Immigration

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Since November 2008, I have been participating in roundtable discussions on immigration policy with a group of academics, policy analysts, community leaders, and former government officials brought together by the Brookings Institution and the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. The participants ranged across the political spectrum and had different perspectives on immigration. But over the course of 10 months, we were able to converge on a set of broad recommendations that we believe can win political support and bring about long-delayed reform in immigration policy.

Below are some of the report’s most noteworthy proposals:

  • It unequivocally sets a goal of dramatic reduction in illegal immigration, and creates a mechanism to achieve that.
  • It offers a carefully synchronized plan for stricter enforcement in workplace. It would establish a mandatory verification system and legalization regime simultaneously. This “trust but verify” approach is intended to avoid a repeat of what happened after the last major reform in 1986: there was legalization but not a sustained effort to identify undocumented workers, so that there was no effective deterrent against further illegal immigration.
  • It begins to shift the basis on which immigrants are admitted from reunification of extended families to skills, and increases visas for skilled immigrants.
  • It replaces temporary work visas with provisional, five-year ones. The point is to require that foreign workers go home after five years or get on track for legal permanent resident status.
  • It calls for an immigration commission that would make specific recommendations to Congress on how many immigrants to admit. It’s an action-forcing mechanism: Congress would have to adopt, amend, or replace the recommendations within a set period of time.
  • It puts a new office in the White House to oversee efforts to assimilate new Americans.
  • It acknowledges the special case of Mexico as by far the biggest source of illegal immigrants, and calls for new ways to promote regional cooperation on immigration, guns, and drugs.

To read the report, click here.