http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_4_i ... olicy.html

Steven Malanga

Not amnesty or guest workers, but newcomers who would strengthen us

We Americans are having the wrong immigration debate, couched in the wrong terms. Those who oppose open borders, and especially unlimited flows of low-skilled workers from Mexico, are accused of being anti-immigration. Anyone who doubts that it’s good for America to have an amnesty for illegal immigrants and a “guest worker” program that will produce even more low-wage, low-skilled immigration is quickly branded a modern-day nativist and Know-Nothing.

But it’s possible to oppose all those things and still support healthy levels of immigration. The right debate should be about what kind of immigrants America should be admitting. It should ask how immigration can best benefit our economy and citizens. Countries with booming economies, countries that are, like the United States, immigrant magnets—Australia and Ireland, for instance—have set their immigration priorities in precisely this way, creating much more rational systems than ours. Managed as part of our broader economic policy, immigration can provide America with badly needed skills, boost productivity, and raise our living standard.

But we’ll never get to an immigration system that serves our national interest until we stop debating the issue in terms set down 50 years ago...