http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... KEICE1.DTL

Strategic immigration
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Sunday, October 1, 2006


BY FOCUSING on illegal immigration, the debate over immigration "reform" in the last few months has been excessively one-dimensional.

The only idea that Congress has been able to agree on has been to build a 700-border fence -- which even proponents argue is just the first step toward fixing a broken system.

Virtually ignored has been reform of outdated policies regulating the flow of nearly 1 million legal permanent residents each year, with little regard to the economic and strategic needs of the United States.

The report of the Independent Task Force on Immigration and America's Future issued two weeks ago offers a wide-ranging blueprint for reform of all parts of our immigration system. For that reason, it deserves close attention. (For the full report, go to www.migrationpolicy.org.)

Convened by the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research institute in Washington D.C., the task force was co-chaired by Spencer Abraham, a former Republican senator and President Bush's first energy secretary, and Lee Hamilton, president of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a former Democratic congressman from Indiana.

The report shows compellingly how our system of legal immigration is completely out of whack with the future labor needs of the U.S. economy.

Each year, the United States issues visas -- in the form of green cards -- to an average of 980,000 legal permanent residents, almost all on the basis of a family relationships. By law, a mere 140,000 green cards can be issued for employment purposes -- nearly half of which go to family members of immigrants who come here to work.

If family members are excluded from the tally, a ridiculously low 8 percent -- or 77,259 -- of permanent-resident visas go to immigrants for employment purposes. Only 5,000 visas are available for low-skilled workers.

That goes a long way toward explaining why 12 million illegal immigrants -- most of whom were drawn here by the lure of employment -- have had to sneak into the United States rather than enter through the front door.

The out-of-balance distribution of "family" and "economic" visas ignores the aging of the U.S. population, and that new workers will have to come from somewhere to drive the U.S. economy in the coming decades. Between 1980 and 2000, the native-born population of the United States ages 25 to 54, who make up the bulk of the U.S. workforce, grew by 26.7 million. But over the next 20 years, the same population will not grow at all.

"There is a very competitive world out there in which the United States has to have more talent to be successful," Abraham said in an interview. "We have a lot of talent at home, but we need to add to that talent by bringing in people from other countries as well."

The United States does grant another half-million "temporary" work visas to skilled high-tech and other workers. These workers were supposed to meet seasonal or transitory needs of a particular employer, and return to their home countries when their visa expires.

But the numbers of temporary visas available to U.S. employers don't come close to matching their needs. The demand for H-1B visas in Silicon Valley, for example, has been so high that the annual quota of 65,000 is typically exhausted even before the fiscal year begins.

Another major flaw is that most people on temporary visas end up staying here permanently. In effect, temporary visas have become a way to meet the needs of employers seeking permanent, skilled workers.

The number of permanent-resident visas issued also bears little relationship to the number of immigrants who settle here each year. If you add the 500,000 new illegal immigrants who settle in the U.S. annually to an estimated 324,000 workers on "temporary" visas who end up staying here and the 980,000 who receive green cards, a more realistic estimate of immigration is an astonishing 1.8 million annually.

To match what is happening on the ground, the Abrahams-Hamilton task force recommends increasing the number of permanent visas to 1.5 million each year. Half of those would be employment-related visas.

To deal with "temporary" visas that are in effect permanent ones, the task force suggests creating a new category called "provisional" visas, which would fall somewhere between temporary and permanent visas. These visas would allow someone to come here for 3 years, and possibly six years, then be in a position to apply for permanent residence.

Another innovative idea is to award up to 50,000 "strategic growth visas" that would allow employers to easily import top scientists and other skilled workers needed to make advances in strategically important areas, such as biomedical research or energy independence.

To regulate the entire system, a Standing Commission on Immigration and Labor Markets would be appointed by Congress and the president. The commission would make recommendations to Congress every two years for adjusting immigration levels based on sound analysis of labor-market trends and other data.

The commission would be an antidote to the current patchwork system based on decisions Congress makes every 10 years or so based more on political considerations than on the needs of the economy.

When the visa system was reformed in 1965, it was based on proposals put forward by President John F. Kennedy when he was still a Massachusetts U.S. senator. Kennedy envisaged providing far more employment-based visas than we currently have.

Kennedy was assassinated before his plan could be adopted by Congress. When President Lyndon Johnson signed it into law, political compromises had produced a bill excessively skewed toward "family reunification."

The concept of "family reunification" is deeply rooted in the American ethos. But it is time to embrace President Kennedy's vision and create a system that establishes a far more reasonable balance between family-based and employment-based migration.