The American Spectator

The Nation's Pulse

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The impact of this intertwining of numerical limitations and visa processing is periodically felt, for example, in January 2005, when application cutoff dates of January 2005 were placed on the employment third preference category for nationals of China, India, and the Philippines, and most recently on 2 July 2007, when the State Department updated its previous Visa Bulletin for July and announced that all employment categories had become unavailable for the rest of the fiscal year. [The filing period was subsequently extended a month.]

br> But the most important limitation remains the statutory quota. With 1.2 million people waiting for 120,000 visas, in effect, observe the researchers, "we already had mortgaged almost nine years' worth of employment visas." More competent management would be good for all concerned, but would primarily reshuffle the line's starting point.

In short, get rid of the backlog and 120,000 people get visas sometime during the year. "The others would experience visa number wait," explain the researchers.

Only an increase in employment-based visas will solve the problem. The report also suggests "letting some of the time spent waiting for a visa number or for visa processing count toward naturalization -- such a precedent exists in refugee procedures, and it could be a way of saying to visa applicants that the long wait has not been in vain." Best, however, would be to simply reduce the wait time.

THE ISSUE OF ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION raises numerous concerns: the large-scale flow of unskilled laborers, who violate the law in coming, are less likely to assimilate, and are more likely end up as a financial burden. None of these concerns apply to the sort of people who now apply, and wait, for employment visas.

Increasing the number of visas available for professional and entrepreneurial foreigners would make good sense on its own terms, reinforcing what the researchers call America's "ability to push the frontier of knowledge and its application." These immigrants are an unalloyed blessing for the United States and should be welcomed.

Expanding the number of employment-based visas also would mute the attacks on critics of illegal immigration. A sovereign nation should control its own borders. The best way to do so is to make distinctions, encouraging beneficial labor flows while regulating overall immigration. How much to hike the number of employment-based visas is an obvious matter of debate. But the quota should be increased.

Robert Litan of the Kauffman Foundation concludes: "Given that the U.S. comparative advantage in the global economy is in creating knowledge and applying it to business, it behooves the country to consider how we might adjust policies to reduce the immigration backlog, encourage innovative foreign minds to remain in the country, and entice new innovators to come."

Unfortunately, the U.S. can no longer treat its global economic dominance as inevitable, an immutable fact of nature. With China and other nations, such as India, making significant economic strides, America should do more to attract to its shores the best and brightest from around the world. That means offering a home to more engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs from other nations.

topics:
Business, Law, Immigration