Professor: Immigration debate boils down to 'who are you rooting for?'

Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Chris Casey

By the numbers
Following are some numbers presented by George Borjas, professor of economics at Harvard University:

The United States from 2000-07 admitted 8.1 million legal immigrants.
The numbers include:
• Family preference/immediate relatives of U.S. citizens: 5.2 million
• Employee-based immigrants: 1.2 million
• Refugees and asylees: 908,000
• Diversity visas: 365,000.
For the roughly 50,000 diversity visas offered in the U.S. annually, there were about 9 million applicants.
Estimated number of illegal immigrants in the U.S.
• January 2000: 8.5 million
• January 2005: 10.5 million
• January 2007: 11.8 million.
Of those, about 2.8 million live in California and 1.7 million live in Texas; 7 million (59 percent) come from Mexico.At its core, immigration policy is about redistribution of wealth.

So the current U.S. policy of freely admitting immigrants isn’t likely to change when the power players — employers — continue to gain the most under the system.

That was the central message George Borjas, a professor of economics at Harvard University, delivered to an audience of about 700 Monday afternoon at the University of Northern Colorado.

He said he doubts wholesale policy changes will occur unless prompted by a significant national security event.

For the past four decades, the U.S. has legally admitted most immigrants annually based on family preferences. In other words, if a current U.S. citizen has a foreign-born relative wanting to emigrate, that relative is given highest preference of being admitted onto U.S. soil. When compared with other nations worldwide, the U.S. ranks roughly in the middle in the percentage of residents who aren’t native born.

Some countries, such as Canada, have strict point systems used to determine whether each immigrant meets the nation’s criteria — based on age, education level, occupation and other factors — for admission.

But Borjas said the United States currently has one question: “Do they have family in the United States?â€