The Trouble With Immigration’s “Legal Way”

If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a thousand times:  why can’t people without papers do it the “legal way”? Well a great story in Newsweek has the answer: the legal way sucks — but not like you think it would. Edward Alden characterizes the U.S.’s disastrous immigration system as “national suicide” because of the great amount of talent we are losing as a result of its dysfunction.

Essentially the story focuses on the terribly outdated and non-functional immigration system that, at once, allows for people to come to the U.S. to become educated and amazing workers — then is so difficult that it won’t let them stay here to work. Or, in a nutshell, we are exporting the most educated people in the U.S. because our work immigration system is terrible. Here’s an excerpt:

One of the ways in which the U.S. is committing “national suicide” is through its vast, opaque system of visa checks, which affects several hundred thousand people every year—even though government officials acknowledge that fewer than 1 percent of those screened raise any legitimate security concerns…Another way the U.S. is doing itself in is through the quota on temporary work visas for skilled foreigners, which is less than half what it was a decade ago. And although a growing educated population in Asia and Latin America has hugely expanded the pool of qualified applicants, skilled migrants are limited to only one third of the roughly 400,000 permanent-resident green cards handed out every year. Some skilled immigrants from India face waits of up to 35 years for a green card; even those with the most advanced university degrees wait between four and 15 years…

While there has been much debate about how to secure the southern border against illegal immigration, the deterioration of the system for attracting and retaining skilled immigrants has received scant notice, though the consequences for the U.S. economy are far more significant. Since much manufacturing and back-office work has been sent overseas, what the United States has left is its brains and still-unmatched ability to design and market the next big thing. In a country where economic success depends largely on innovation, it is worth noting that foreign-born researchers account for a quarter of all patents earned by American companies, and that nearly half the Ph.D. scientists and engineers working in the U.S. were born abroad. Furthermore, between 1995 and 2005 more than a quarter of the technology companies launched in the United States had a key founder who was foreign-born; in Silicon Valley that number was more than half. At General Electric, 64 percent of researchers weren’t born in America; at Qualcomm, the figure is close to 72 percent.

So there you have it. The “legal way” is torturous even for the people that are highly educated and can contribute enormous financial wealth to this country — do you think the system is any better for unskilled labor? As a former immigration reporter, one thing I learned quickly was how backward and outdated our current immigration system is. When people say “do it the legal way,” it’s a sign of their ignorance about how the system actually works and more of an indication that, legal way or not, some people simply don’t want people unlike themselves to come to this country.

Follow Sara Inés Calderón on Twitter @SaraChicaD