In 2012, Fareed Zakaria dedicated an episode of his CNN show GPS to exploring Canada’s skills-based immigration system, discussing why such a program accords with the modern economy. On Twitter, Zakaria proclaimed that “Canada has the most successful set of immigration policies in the world.” His praise continued in the pages of Time, where he stated America “is losing the best and brightest” to countries, like Canada, with an “immigration advantage.”
As recently as this March, Zakaria focused CNN airtime on what the United States could learn from its northern neighbor. He noted that Donald Trump applauded Canada’s immigration program in the president’s speech to Congress. “You have a really innovative reform system,” Zakaria said of Canada’s point system, which prioritizes immigration applicants based on education, work experience, and language skills.
Viewers of CNN could be forgiven, therefore, if they were confused by the network’s frenzied response to Trump’s endorsement of the Reforming American Immigration for a Strong Economy (RAISE) Act, sponsored by Republican senators Tom Cotton and David Perdue. CNN reporter Jim Acosta placed himself at the center of this debate as the liberal ideological opponent to a merit-based system. In a bitter exchange, Acosta provided an emotional appeal for low-skill immigration while White House senior adviser Stephen Miller impatiently explained the rationale behind the reforms.
It was curious to see a CNN reporter so vehemently defend the same policies the network’s immigration expert lampooned as dysfunctional. As drafted, the RAISE Act would take the country in the Canadian direction. RAISE proposes to cut legal immigration by half over the next decade by reducing green cards for family members of U.S. citizens and allotting the remaining spaces based on skills and merit. It also seeks to end the green card lottery, known officially as the Diversity Immigrant Visa, and cap the annual intake of refugees offered permanent status at 50,000.
While the RAISE Act is not perfect, it does address a fundamental disconnect between immigration selection and economic suitability. RAISE attempts to help focus the selection criteria to produce a better immigration experience, for both migrants and Americans, by emulating a model championed by level-headed analysts: the skills-based Canadian system.
Canada’s immigration system is successful for three key reasons: It’s designed to maximize economic growth; the system is fair, selecting newcomers based upon merit; and it works to achieve social integration, which in turn promotes broader trust in the immigration system.
The first factor to consider is the economic impact of immigration. Despite a misconception popularized by activists, immigration programs are not intended to serve as a global charity. Western democracies facilitate immigration not from benevolence, to paraphrase Adam Smith, but from regard to their own interest. Welcoming young and motivated workers helps boost innovation and entrepreneurship. Newcomers start businesses, file patents, and spark economic renewal.
Immigration, when managed carefully, can work as a countervailing force to an aging population and retiring workforce. Young immigrant families help reverse the falling birth rates and help with population growth; about two-thirds of current Canadian population growth is the result of immigration.
In Canada, immigration is divided into three categories: economic immigration (63 percent), family reunification (24 percent), and refugees (13 percent), and there are stark differences in the productivity of each stream. It’s worth noting that the economic stream itself is divided into principal applicants (45 percent) and immediate family members (55 percent), making the true number of economic immigrants closer to 28 percent of the total annual intake—still more than double the comparable ratio in the United States (13 percent).
Canada selects its economic immigrants using a merit-based points system. Objective and easily measurable criteria for selection include an applicant’s education, work experience, language skills, as well as age and adaptability. The point system allows for a neutral and unbiased assessment of the elements that are empirically proven to lead to more successful outcomes.
When a migrant is selected to come to Canada, the assumption is that he or she will begin work on day one. The government has devised criteria that lead to productive, self-sufficient, and successful migrants. Research from the Canadian government finds that “highly educated immigrants are more likely to generate a net positive fiscal balance over the longer run, paying more taxes and using less government benefits than their less-skilled counterparts.”
The second factor to consider is that of fairness. A common criticism of RAISE is that it unfairly punishes those wishing to bring extended family members into the country. The National Immigration Law Center, for instance, issued a statement saying the bill would “devastate families, eliminating the traditional and long-accepted means by which family members such as grandparents, mothers, fathers and siblings are able to reunite with their families.”
To these activists, the privilege of U.S. citizenship has morphed into the right to bring extended families into the country, in a phenomenon known as chain migration. The obvious problem with an immigration program dominated by family reunification is that economic and social considerations are not weighed, and therefore many newcomers arrive without the skills or training needed to be successful in America.
There is also a moral problem. America’s current immigration program gives individuals with family ties preferential treatment over those applying based on their own capabilities. In America, nepotism and family connections have never been considered superior to hard work and merit. Rather than being “cruel, anti-family and un-American,” as the Anti-Defamation League claims, RAISE places limits upon secondary family sponsorship, following the example of the Canadian system.
Advocates of the family reunification program may be surprised to learn that it has its origins in racism. The program was designed specifically to restrict non-European migration. In his seminal book The Ethics of Immigration, Joseph H. Carens explains:
From the 1920s to the 1960s American immigration policy had a “national origins” quota, which tied the number of spaces available for immigrants from other countries to the proportion of people from those countries already in the United States. This was explicitly intended to restrict the flow of immigrants from outside Europe and to maintain the ethnic, racial, and religious composition of the United States as it was. It was indeed an unjust policy.
Third, it’s important to consider the social impact of immigration, both in terms of how well newcomers integrate in the host society and how the public views immigration. A host of studies find that knowledge of the local language is the number-one indicator of economic, and therefore social, integration and success in a new country.
Canada has an obsession with protecting languages and promoting knowledge of its official languages, French and English. This impulse affects immigration selection. In 2015, 76 percent of all permanent residents self-identified as having a proficiency in English, French, or both. That number jumped to 96 percent for principal applicants in the economic immigration stream. By contrast, a 2012 U.S. census study found that only 44 percent of immigrants who have arrived since 2000 report the ability to speak English.
Inability to speak English creates a social divide, isolating newcomers in their own cultural silos and increasing divisions between newcomers and the host population. Sponsoring elderly family members into these isolated communities only increases the social divide and produces more hostility toward and mistrust in the immigration system. Canada’s solution is, once again, more economic immigration focused on selecting high-skilled applicants. A 2016 government report stated that “the high educational and skill level of immigrants and their children may be partly responsible for the relatively . . . positive social integration of immigrants and the high level of acceptance of immigrants in Canada.” Canadians trust that the government is welcoming newcomers who will strive to integrate and achieve economic independence.
Despite what critics of the RAISE Act say, Canada’s focus on skills-based economic immigration is neither racist nor a veiled policy of race-based nationalism. Jim Acosta, for instance, implied the RAISE Act was racist and that Republicans were “trying to engineer the racial and ethnic flow of people into this country.” He asked Stephen Miller, “are we just going to bring in people from Great Britain and Australia?” Facts, however, show that a focus on skills-based immigration increases racial diversity. The top source countries of immigration to Canada in recent years have been the Philippines, China, and India. Meanwhile, Canada’s foreign-born population is now 20 percent, compared with the United States’ 13 percent.
The RAISE Act has borrowed its core tenets from Canada’s skills-based program. Despite the hysteria pushed by Jim Acosta and others, CNN’s own Fareed Zakaria, the network’s most knowledgeable immigration expert, declared last year that in this arena, “Canada should be a role model.”
Canada has struck a successful balance with its skills-based immigration system, and the numbers back it up. Immigrants welcomed to Canada through the economic stream collected social assistance at half the rate of the native-born population. In 2005, only 2 percent of Canada’s economic immigrants used social assistance. In the U.S., welfare use for immigrant households is over 50 percent.
At a time when populist backlashes against mass, unchecked migration have erupted across the Western world, it’s common sense to focus immigration selection on economic skills and readiness for success. The RAISE Act seeks to put U.S. immigration on just such a path.
Candice Malcolm is a nationally syndicated columnist for the Toronto Sun and a fellow with the Center for a Secure Free Society.
