http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/597274e1e4b0545a5c31000
Nolan writes:
“In 1903, these lines were engraved on a plaque and placed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty:
Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
But should our immigration system be based on a desire to help immigrants from around the world? Or should it be based on our own national interests?
The main difference between legal and illegal immigration is that with legal immigration, the government decides which aliens will be allowed to come to the United States. Whereas, with illegal immigration, the aliens decide themselves whether they are going to come.
That distinction loses significance when the government does not base its immigration policy decisions on the country’s needs.
President Donald Trump believes that the current system for legal immigration does not meet our national interests.
. . . .
“Should we reject this approach and honor Lady Liberty’s invitation? That might have been possible when the plaque was put on the base of the Statute of Liberty more than a century ago, but it is no longer possible. Even if we limited the invitation to the huddled masses who have been driven from their countries by war, criminal violence, and persecution, there are too many of them.
And is it really wrong to base America’s immigration system on our own national interests instead of on a desire to help people from other countries? Trump and the Jordan Commission concluded not only that we should do what’s in our national interests, but that the current immigration system is hurting us.”
********************************
Read Nolan’s complete article over at HuffPost at the above link!
Sorry, Nolan, but I think it’s all lots of White Nationalist bull. We wouldn’t even be having this debate if the immigrants were White Christians. It would be in the country’s best interests to legalize everyone who is here now and also to boost legal immigration limits for skilled, unskilled, and family to levels that more realistically match the market of supply and demand. And, we can take many more refugees than we take now.
By having a bigger and more realistic legal immigration system, our need for all the wasteful and largely ineffective law enforcement we have now would be reduced. We could concentrate on folks who really don’t belong here. And, by having a real “line,” instead of the fake one we have now, we would increase the incentives for folks to wait their turn and come in an orderly manner.
Most economists who have looked at our situation are appalled at the so-called RAISE Act. One has only to look at who sponsors it to see the motives behind it.
I largely agree with the recent article in the Washington Post by Heather Long which demonstrates how harebrained the Trump and RAISE policies would be. However, I don’t agree with the idea of some interviewed in the article that family immigration should be cut to raise employment-based immigration. Family immigration does great things for America, and folks with family ties here have a “leg up” in getting started and making a difference.
Trump doesn’t care two hoots and a holler about America’s future. He’s out to 1) cement his position with the White Nationalists in his base, and 2) to loot the U.S. for his and his family’s benefit any way he can. Cotton and Purdue also are about cultural issues and white Nationalism, not what’s best for America’s future.
I reprint Heather Long’s article below in full:
Cutting legal immigration 50 percent might be Trump’s worst economic idea
President Trump talks to the media during his meeting with crime victims at the White House on June 28. (Yuri Gripas/Reuters)
President Trump’s “to do” list still includes cutting legal immigration. Economists say that’s a “grave mistake.”
A Washington Post survey of 18 economists over the weekend found that 89 percent said it’s a terrible idea for Trump to curb immigration to the United States. Experts overwhelmingly predicted it would slow growth — the exact opposite of what Trump wants to do with “MAGAnomics.”
“Restricting immigration will only condemn us to chronically low rates of economic growth,” said Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist at the Economic Outlook Group. “It also increases the risk of the recession.”
Thomas Simons, senior economist at the Jefferies investment firm, called the idea “absolutely harmful to an economy with a population undergoing the demographic transformation.”
The bottom line is: The United States needs more workers. Growth happens when one of two things occurs: The economy gets more workers or the existing workers become more productive. At the moment, both of those factors are red flags. Productivity growth is sluggish, and, as Trump has pointed out many times, the percent of American adults who actually work — the labor-force participation rate — is hovering at the lowest levels since the 1970s.
A big part of the problem is the baby boomers are starting to retire. The United States needs more people to replace them, but the U.S. birthrate just hit a historic low, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s why many economists, demographers and business owners keep calling for more immigration, not less.
“Limiting immigration to the U.S. is a grave mistake,” says Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “The only way to meaningfully increase U.S. economic growth on a sustained basis anytime soon is to increase immigration.”
During the campaign, Zandi predicted that Trump’s protectionist stances on trade and immigration would lead to a “lengthy recession.” According to Zandi’s economic models, Trump’s worst policy was his plan to deport 11 million immigrants currently in the country illegally.
Now scaling back on legal immigration is a serious part of the policy discussion.
Congress and the White House are dealing with a slew of issues. Immigration appeared to be sidelined until a much-cited Politico report last week that top Trump aides are actively working with Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and David Perdue (R-Ga.) to cut legal immigration by as much as 50 percent. It would be a revised version of the RAISE Act that the senators introduced in February and that would cut back on the number of refugees allowed in each year and make it much harder for anyone other than spouses or minor children of U.S. citizens or permanent residents to immigrate.
Trump still sees action on immigration as a critical part of his agenda. He brought it up on his trip to France last week.
“What I’d like to do is a comprehensive immigration plan,” the president told reporters on his way to Paris. “But our country and political forces are not ready yet.”
If Trump can’t get the bigger immigration overhaul he wants, he’s likely to push for something like the RAISE Act. Trump says the United States needs to limit immigration, legal and illegal, to give workers at home a better chance. One of the proposals Cotton and Perdue are considering is slashing the number of legally issued green cards from 1 million a year to 500,000 over the next decade.
Trump portrays immigrants as scooping up American jobs. But the data appears to tell a different story.
U.S. unemployment is at 4.4 percent. In May, unemployment hit the lowest level since 2001, a milestone Trump celebrated. That implies there aren’t many people struggling to find work. At the same time, the United States has 5.7 million job openings, which is near a record high. It’s been that way for a year now. Business leaders with big and small firms say they can’t find enough workers. They are especially vocal about not being able to find enough people for really low-skilled, low-pay work and for really highly skilled jobs.
Take Bayard Winthrop. He is founder and chief executive of American Giant, a company that Slate said produces the “greatest hoodie ever made.” American Giant makes those masterpiece sweatshirts by using only U.S. workers, U.S. cotton and U.S. manufacturing. In other words, Winthrop is the living embodiment of the “Made in America” a movement Trump is trying to resurrect. Yet one of the biggest problems Winthrop faces is not enough American workers want to do the hard work of picking cotton.
“If you go through our supply chain and talk to a lot of the business that are ginning cotton, dyeing and finishing cotton, what you hear pretty universally is they have open job requests but few people actually want these entry-level, lower-wage jobs,” he said Monday in an interview with WAMU radio. His message to Trump is, “Make immigration much more accessible.”
Trump is already heeding the calls for more lower-skilled workers. His administration just bumped up visas for seasonal foreign workers by 15,000, a 45 percent increase from last year.
There’s little love among economists and business leaders for a 50 percent cut in immigration overall, but there is growing support for moving the United States to a more merit-based immigration system. The idea is to attract more of the immigrant workers that the country desperately needs. At the moment, only 15 percent of green cards are issued for employment reasons, according to Department of Homeland Security data.
“There is a case for adopting a Canada-style system of ‘points’ whereby preference is given to people with desired skills,” said Martin Barnes, chief economist at BCA Research in Montreal.
The vast majority of legal immigrants are entering the country because they are relatives of someone already in the United States. It’s known as “chain immigration,” and the RAISE Act wants to limit that substantially so only spouses and children could come with a visa holder, not more-extended relatives.
From an economics standpoint, the key is to get more workers with the desired skills into the country. It’s why the tech community is lobbying so hard for more H-1B visas.
Immigrants also tend to start more businesses. While start-up founders in Silicon Valley are glorified, the reality is, business formation in the United States is near a 40-year low. That worries Carl Tannenbaum, chief economist at Northern Trust.
“Countries that get collectively older are granted fewer patents, start fewer small businesses and take fewer risks with capital,” Tannenbaum said. All of that hurts economic growth.
Tannenbaum is concerned not only that Trump will cut immigration in the future but also that the president’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and controversial travel ban are already encouraging the best young minds in the world to look elsewhere for their college educations and early careers.
“If smart kids get educated elsewhere, the U.S. will experience a talent drain that we will certainly come to regret,” Tannenbaum warned.”
PWS
07-21-17
Paul, I am not endorsing the decision to cut legal immigration in half. I am endorsing the idea of basing immigration policy on our national interests.
I won’t debate Trump’s motives with you. You have an opinion of him that is carved in stone, as do many other people.
The articles on self interest being the reason for raising the H-2B visa numbers is a good example. People jumped on the fact that Trump applied for 70 H-2B visas and assumed that this was why he authorized the increase. This is in line with the 9th circuit reasoning when it comes to Trump, which is, he is a bigot so anything he does must have improper reasons.
But the 70 H-2B visas that Trump’s company, Mar-a-Lago is requesting are for fiscal year 2018, beginning October 1, 2017. These visas would have been available even if the president had not ordered a 15,000 annual increase in the number of visas.”
I don’t disagree that self-interest should be a major factor in immigration policy. It should be “enlightened self interest.” From that perspective, more, not less legal immigration would be in our national interest from both an economic and a national values standpoint. Immigrants have built America (albeit that the largest single contribution was made by what more properly should be termed “forced migrants” — enslaved African Americans without whom there would be no U.S.A. at all) are continuing to do so, and will do so in the future. I personally interacted with thousands of so-called “undocumented individuals” in Immigration Court. The overwhelming majority were decent, law abiding, tax-paying (or potentially tax-paying) folks who were working at things that build and advance America — construction, health care, teaching, painting, fixing, repairing, installing, growing our food, preparing our food, delivering our food, taking care of our houses, yards, and families, cleaning and maintaining our buildings, and serving society in hundreds of other important ways. The concept that these folks are bad for America or that there should be fewer of them is absurd — driven by bias rather than enlightened self-interest. And with a more generous legal immigration system we wouldn’t need such a huge and inefficient bureaucracy to enforce laws against people who are actually good for the U.S. Immigration enforcement could concentrate on the relatively small number of terrorists, criminals, and others who might might actually harm, rather than help us. With a more rational and generous system the threat of putting “line-jumpers” at the “back of the line” to promote orderly screening and admission would become more meaningful. Most folks are willing to wait for something if they see the “light at the end of the tunnel.” Guys like Trump, Bannon, Miller, Sessions, Cotton, Perdue and others are being driven by a White Nationalist agenda that clearly is not in the self-interests of the U.S. Those of us who do have the best interests of the U.S in mind should resist these dangerous dudes and their outmoded idealogy at every opportunity. Eventually due process and enlightened self-interest will win out, even if not in my lifetime. Finally, for those of a true (rather than fake) religious bent, helping others in need, even to the point of risking one’s own life or comforts, is at the core of almost every established religion (except “Trumpism” — a “fake” religion of selfishness, intellectual dishonesty, and disdain for others, particularly the less fortunate and those with different ideas).
PWS
07-22-17
Agree with Paul that Nolan’s argument is nothing more than White Supremacist Bull. Unfortunately Nolan has recently become the most shameless immigration lawyer defending our least qualified and worst President.
Nolan’s statement that PWS opinion on Trump is “set in stone” is typical of the White Supremacist assumption that preventing minorities from gaining political power is in the USA’s best interest. No different than the Southern defenders of Slavery who insisted African Americans could never be good American citizens or fend for themselves without a White master telling them what to do. That’s why almost 60% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s performance as President. We care about our precious democracy and that’s what’s set in stone. Specifically, the stones in the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials about all men created equal.
If you want to learn the specifics of this Trumpian racist ideology, read any article explaining Trump’s goals from his campaign manager Steve Bannon’s own writings about a White Northern Christian Alliance between the USA and Russia to prevent “Whites” losing their political dominance at https://www.google.com/search?q=Steve+Bannon%27s+Northern+Christian+coalition&rlz=1C1CHZL_enUS703US703&oq=Steve+Bannon%27s+Northern+Christian+coalition&aqs=chrome..69i57.39818j0j8&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
Their theory is simple to follow, and disgusting: to create a Northern Christian Coalition with Putin’s Russia, the other powerful “White” nation with the most nukes. And also the one “White” nation that presently does not have millions of dark skinned immigrants.
Then, according to Bannon, the USA and Russia together can rule the world and return to the 19th Century political status quo.
That’s where Trump’s wall on the Southern border to end our 400 year traditional Mexican immigration across the Southern border that first settled this country in the 16th Century, and Trump’s proposed mass deportation ethnic cleansing, as well as Trump’s secretly plotting with Putin to destroy American democracy fit in.
We heard something similar from the Nazis about “untermensch” and a Final Solution 80 years ago, and from pro-Slavery advocates 80 years before that. History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes, and the enemies of human freedom always have their fellow travelers like Nolan who actually believe their claptrap.
At the risk of continuing to beat a dead horse, I just want to add the following points:
1. Note Nolan’s comment about the “national interest”. It assumes that Emma Lazarus comment about “give me your poor…” is about an act of mercy for the poor. And that preventing the poor from coming here is in “the American interest”. Nolan misses the entire point of Emma Lazarus that we want the wretched poor yearning to be free is in the American interest.
2. It is apparently an irrefutable presumption that the wretched poor yearning to be free are a contagion, instead of the necessary ingredient for American exceptionalism. And that we only take them in as an act of charity. Unlike President John Adams who once explained that life in the USA is so good that after 3 generations in the USA most people reach a comfortable plateau and become more interested in preserving that comfortable status quo instead of taking the chances and doing the extra work required to keep improving their lives.
3. You see that specially with Rust Belt displaced workers whose fathers deservedly got great jobs lifting things or moving them from one place to another, in the years after WWII when the rest of the world’s industrial base was devastated, our industrial base was intact, and pent up demand from the Depression guaranteed prosperity for all.
4. That’s where or all CIS “studies” about the costs of immigrants and the vicious barrage of anti-Mexican propaganda as untermensch fits in.
Without belaboring the point, that’s a dangerous fantasy. Jobs that only require lifting and moving things around are rapidly being replaced by machines not foreign darkies. Truck drivers are the next to go, replaced by drones and self driving vehicles. But it is true that Civil Rights laws have expanded the pool of applicants for that rapidly dwindling kind of jobs.
For the best analysis read George Mason economist Tyler Cowan’s “The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better.”
5. What Trump did successfully was scapegoat immigrants, Democrats, etc., and desperate people always prefer blaming others for their plight. Trump, with the assistance of Putin and Cambridge Analytics, found these people and motivated them to vote for him to smite these “enemies”. In Wisconsin, where election day registration exists, rural counties were surprised by an increase by 10% previously unregistered voters motivated by Trump’s demagoguery into rejoining the political process. That’s how Trump won.
It’s called kakistocracy in political science. It means government by the least able and the least scrupulous. i.e. Trump. Described by Alexis De Tocqueville in his 1830s classic “Democracy in America” and what happens when rulers govern pitting one group against another, and the “winners” enjoy those short term benefits. Like the Germans who immediately benefited by receiving the homes, businesses and goods the Nazis confiscated from the Jews.
Trumpians either cynically or truly believe that if Trump eliminates those “enemies of the people” and Darkies drinking their milkshake, they will magically be restored to that idyllic post WWII world when if you were a hard working white man you could get a steady union job, support your family and buy a decent home without taking chances or getting an education beyond high school.
And the ultimate harm to our Democracy from Kakistocracy is that elections, if any, become merely a rubber stamp of decisions already made secretly by the “Great Leader” and kakistrocats, just like you see in North Korea, Russia, Cuba, etc, instead of the vigorous debate to reach enlightened consensus our Founding Fathers prescribed for our republic.
As Benjamin Franklin famously answered when he was asked what kind of government we had chosen: “A Republic, if you can keep it” and to repeat Lincoln’s famous words at Gettysburg:
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. ”
Enough said! Thanks for your patience.