Don’t Turn Away Eager Americans

Not only are the tired, poor, wretched and huddled unwelcome in the United States these days, but Congress also is trying to keep out skilled workers and naturalized citizens’ adult children.

Legal immigrants could pay a high price for the national frustration over illegal immigration. The logic seems to be that if you can’t control people who are breaking the law, punish those who are obeying it.

The House Judiciary Committee has taken up HR2022, a huge bill by Texas Republican Lamar Smith that deals with both illegal and legal immigration. “As the (Clinton) administration and the bipartisan Commission on Immigration Reform also have concluded, both are broken and both should be fixed,” Smith said Tuesday.

Illegal immigration is broken. Nobody knows how to fix it.

There’s no way to persuade desperately poor people they wouldn’t be better off in America. Because it isn’t true. Smith wants to hire more Border Patrol agents and build more fences. That might slow the flow, but it’s an awfully long border.

Furthermore, the majority of illegal immigrants are legal visitors who overstay their visas. The only way to discourage them is to adopt a national identity card linked to a national registry that keeps track of everybody’s citizenship and immigration status. The bill doesn’t explain how to pay for establishing or maintaining such a vast brave-new-world data bank.

It’s frustrating. But why penalize people who are playing by the rules?

Legal immigration isn’t broken. Aside from the politics of nativism, there’s no logic behind the call for reducing legal immigration, which is indeed echoed by the administration and the Jordan commission on immigration reform, which called for a 24 percent cut.

Most legal immigrants quickly pay their own way, and end up making a contribution to our economic health. They learn English; their children often do better in school than their American-born classmates. They are eager Americans.

The system could be improved, of course.

I think it makes sense to end the immigration priority for siblings of citizens and legal residents, which would limit the chain effect and reduce the huge backlog of family applicants. About 2.6 million spouses, children, parents and siblings are on waiting lists; they can wait for decades for a visa.

I’d also like to hold sponsors of immigrants legally liable for providing support, so that elderly parents don’t simply go on SSI rolls. (The proposed welfare reform bills severely limit legal immigrants’ eligibility for public aid in any case.)

But the Smith bill is extreme, illogical and unfair.

The bill would cut legal immigration by 30 percent. Spouses of citizens or legal residents, and unmarried children under 21, would have first priority for visas; adult children of legal immigrants, as well as siblings, would be ineligible.

Surely the word “family” in “family reunification” should include children, even if they’re over 21.

Sponsors would have to earn twice the poverty level. That would make it difficult for working people to bring over family members, rebuilding their support network here.

Visas for skilled, educated workers also would be cut by nearly 30 percent, which has alarmed Silicon Valley employers who want access to the world’s best talent. Even if we decide that we want fewer unskilled immigrants, admitted because of their family status, why would we turn away skilled immigrants?

The Jordan commission also wanted to make it harder to hire skilled immigrants, apparently thinking that employers are passing up qualified Americans, who pose no cultural or communications challenges, in order to hire foreigners.

I don’t know when Americans forgot that Immigrants “R” Us, when we got so defensive, scared and small-minded. But I think we should wait to “fix” legal immigration until the national mood swings back to the center and we’re not so jittery about the economy. Congress could be on the verge of doing something really stupid.

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