Our immigration policy puts us at a disadvantageThis winter, George Mason economist Tyler Cowen published The Great Stagnation, an ebook arguing that the United States has exhausted all its easy sources of growth. We have, Cowen says, no more low-hanging fruit: no more cheap frontier land to farm, no more places to build new interstates, no rural homes to electrify, no more girls to send to school and then add to the workforce. From now on, Cowen says, growth will be slower, and transformative innovations like toilets and telephones will be rarer.
Cowen is alarmingly convincing, and The Great Stagnation received a round of queasy applause from the chattering classes"â?including from this publication. But maybe there remains one last shiny, fat apple hanging right in front of our faces, one last endeavor that would bring us fast, costless, and easy growth. It is immigration reform. The United States can grow faster by stealing the rest of the world's smart people.
Today, the Obama White House is reaffirming its pledge to do just that. In the past year, the government has ramped up enforcement checks and deportations, in the hope of winning Republican support for a comprehensive immigration-reform bill. (The logic is this: If the government appears to be serious about keeping undocumented immigrants out, then Republicans will give them leeway to manage those already here.) In the past few weeks, President Obama has held meetings with business leaders and advocacy groups to raise awareness of the issue. Today, he is giving a banner speech in El Paso, Texas, pushing Congress to consider reform legislation as soon as possible.
The low-hanging fruit of immigration is not simply an open-door policy, but rather letting in"â?or, really, rolling out the red carpet for"â?highly skilled and educated workers and entrepreneurs. Back in 1999, Berkeley scholar AnnaLee Saxenian published one of the first comprehensive studies of the economic contributions of highly skilled immigrants, such as computer programmers, in California. Her paper found that foreign-born entrepreneurs were at the helm of a full quarter of Silicon Valley start-ups founded between 1980 and 1998"â?start-ups like, say, Google. In 1998 alone, those companies created $17 billion in sales and accounted for 58,000 jobs.
Since then, the contributions of highly skilled immigrants"â?let's call them super-immigrants"â?have only grown. A comprehensive study published by the Kauffman Foundation found that 25.3 percent of engineering and technology start-ups opened between 1995 and 2005 had a foreign-born founder. In California, the proportion was 39 percent. Immigrant-founded companies across the country produced $52 billion in sales and employed 450,000 workers.
The pro-super-immigrant data abounds. According to the Hamilton Project, immigrants are 30 percent more likely to start a business than U.S.-born citizens. Immigrants with college degrees are three times as likely to file patents as the domestically born. And all that entrepreneurial gusto really adds up. Economist Jennifer Hunt of McGill estimates that the contributions of immigrants with college degrees increased the U.S.'s GDP per capita by between 1.4 and 2.4 percent in the 1990s.
Despite these success stories, the United States still discourages foreign-born entrepreneurs. The H1-B visa program allows employers to bring in highly skilled workers but grants only 85,000 new temporary visas per year. Many recipients need to leave the country when their contracts end, giving them no incentive to put down roots and start businesses. The student visa program also allows in tens of thousands of the most talented, driven students from overseas, only to push most of them out again once their education is finished.
There are paths to permanent residency for many highly skilled immigrants and their families. But here too the United States has far too tight restrictions. The country does not cap the number of "family-based" green cards, available to relatives of U.S. residents. But it does cap the number of "employment-based" green cards"â?the ones often needed by entrepreneurial super-immigrants"â?at 140,000 per year. Wait times get very, very long. The think tank Third Way estimates that a tech entrepreneur from India looking to stay in the United States and found a business needs to wait until 2020 to get the OK to do so. There are about 1 million highly skilled immigrants waiting in limbo for green cards. Increasingly often, they just give up and go home, taking their know-how and business ideas with them, a phenomenon known as the "reverse brain drain."
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