Do immigrants and their children make positive contributions to the economy and the nation generally? Yes, says the Wall Street Journal editorial page, a longtime booster of immigration. In a Tuesday editorial, the paper cites the results of the Regeneron Science Talent Search, in which 83 percent of last year’s finalists were children of immigrants. “Immigration literally spawns innovation,” the Journal writes.
Yup. But not all immigrants are equally represented. Of the 40 finalists interviewed by the Journal’s source, 25 were children of immigrants from China and India. Others (apparently one apiece, since 7 were children both of whose parents came from the United States) came from Canada, Cyprus, Iran, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Nigeria. Notice what’s missing from that list? Mexico, the source of the largest number of immigrants in the 1982-2007 quarter-century. Or any other country in the Western Hemisphere except Canada and the U.S.
The Journal makes much of the fact that 30 of the 40 finalists had parents who were admitted to the United States with H-1B visas. But that fact doesn’t necessarily make the case for maintaining the current immigration system, or for maintaining the H-1B program as is. H-1B visas tend to bind high-skill immigrants to a single employer. An alternative is to increase the number of high-skill immigrants admitted without such restriction. “Immigration really is an economic multiplier,” the Journal concludes. It might be an even greater multiplier if the immigration system gave higher priority to high-skill immigrants.
As it happens, that is one of the goals enunciated by Donald Trump in his August 31 speech in Phoenix and in his February 28 address to Congress, as I indicated in my Washington Examiner column last week. And, as I also pointed out, in the post-2008 period the immigration flow from Asia has increased while that from Mexico has sharply diminished. That means we’re already getting a higher-skill immigration flow than we were before 2007. We could accelerate that trend with legislation adopting Trump’s proposal for a shift from extended family reunification of mostly low-skill immigrants to an increased number of high-skill immigrants, as legislation introduced by Sens. Tom Cotton and David Perdue does. That could bring in a lot more high-skill immigrants than the current H-1B program — and as their children grow up. even more competition for the Regeneron Science Talent Search.
