The Best Are Yet to Come

...If in 1965 Americans had been told that a new U.S...

...While John McCain and Barack Obama both supported last year’s immigration bill, agreeing on amnesty and border security, they were pointedly at odds over whether U.S...

...Skills mattered less than sheer ability to work...

...he asked in a speech on the Senate fl oor...

...You can bring in immigrants who are already educated and trained as much as possible, or if you want to, you can bring them in and train and educate them here...

...Sahil Mahtani is a reporter-researcher at the New Republic...

...Pierpaolo Barbieri is a senior at Harvard College...

...Now how do you want to get at this...

...BY SAHIL MAHTANI & PIERPAOLO BARBIERI Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan recently suggested that an increase in the influx of skilled immigrants would help arrest the steep decline in housing prices in the last two quarters...

...As to the charge of “radical social engineering,” it is diffi cult to understand what Obama means by it...

...A President Obama would likely toe the Democratic line on unskilled immigration and, working with a Democratic Congress, would easily stall reforms to fi x a broken immigration system...

...If Barack Obama is serious about making immigration a “top priority,” as he declared the other day, he should do it in a way that puts the country’s long-run competitiveness first...

...Britain made the move earlier this year, for the same reasons of national interest that were well expressed decades back by a speaker during the 1966 debate on the point system in the Canadian parliament: The trend of [economic] requirements is in the direction of higher levels of education and higher levels of skills...

...Obama’s preference for admitting both immediate and extended family members is every bit as much “social engineering” as any other set of priorities— except that he is the engineer and the ends chosen are his...

...employment has shifted from industry to services, and fewer than 10 percent of American workers are employed in manufacturing...

...The point system is not “radical” in the sense of being new or untested...

...Last year’s bill would have introduced a point system, under which possession of valuable skills would have weighed heavily in a visa applicant’s favor, overturning the strong bias of current law in favor of family members, including those beyond the immediate family...

...Under most plans being considered, immediate family members— that is, parents, siblings, and children—would still get a leg up, if not a free pass for entry...

...Raising the share of visas that go to educated immigrants is an idea that ought to be getting a hearing in the presidential campaign, all the more since it is one on which the candidates disagree...

...And he warned against a “radical experiment in social engineering...

...The situation these days is different...

...This at a time when Britain and the European Union are moving in precisely the opposite direction, joining Canada and Australia in using a point system weighted towards the admission of people with skills...

...As a matter of fact, our current arrangement is already radical...

...How many would have been turned back at Ellis Island...

...Obama’s point about family values is similarly misleading...

...citizens being turned away at the border is unreal...

...In other words it costs money...

...This is one instance where McCain is the candidate of change, applauding a point system designed to orient immigration toward national needs...

...But none of these objections bears much scrutiny...

...The people newly downgraded under a point system would be more distant relatives— and unless the United States is to admit everybody, lines have to be drawn somewhere...

...He cited Americans’ respect for family...

...Extending visas to foreigners who already have the requisite skills and degrees would contribute to a virtuous cycle of higher GDP and higher tax revenues, translating into a better quality of life for the average American...

...His nightmare scenario of parents or children of U.S...

...Canada and Australia have had such a system for 40 years and by all accounts have profi ted from it...

...Since skilled immigrants tend to form new households relatively rapidly, their arrival in growing numbers would quicken the sale of existing housing inventory and in doing so stabilize prices...

...And any immigration system is a form of “social engineering,” in that choosing whom to admit and whom to exclude will affect the shape of a society in the long run...

...Yet the results of that sweeping liberalization are now the starting point for any new reform...

...Obama offered several arguments in favor of the status quo...

...In particular, family immigration has a strong lobby in the large Latino community, which depends mostly on the Democratic party to push its agenda...

...He cited tradition: “How many of our forefathers would have measured up under this point system...

...it takes time and it requires capital...

...policy should continue to prioritize family reunifi cation above the admission of immigrants with economically desirable skills...

...But that means you must be prepared from a social and political point of view to do this...

...Whatever their rhetorical power, Obama’s invocation of “our forefathers” and his historical analogy to Ellis Island are both anachronistic and misleading...

...It sounds like something Alan Greenspan might have said, and it’s sound advice...

...Today, innovation and technological expertise are in high demand—and both require advanced-degree holders in numbers that exceed the output of U.S...

...higher education...

...Obama, by contrast, proposed an amendment adding a sunset provision that would have ended the point system after fi ve years...

...During the great immigration wave of the late 19th and early 20th century, manufacturing was at the cutting-edge of the American economy and demanded multitudes of unskilled workers...

...A skills-based system, he said, “does not refl ect how much Americans value the family ties that bind people to their brothers and sisters or to their parents...

...immigration law would spark the arrival of tens of millions of people from Asia, Africa, and South America with the effect of greatly altering our ethnic composition, there would certainly have been more opposition than there was to the immigration reform of that year—which ended country-of-origin quotas and instituted unlimited family-reunifi cation visas...