![America’s Secret Growth Weapon: Why Immigration Really, Really Matters
Immigration is a big part of what distinguishes the U.S. from, say, the EU. Immigration makes us younger. That’s what you see from the graph above. Immigration makes us smarter. Half of all Silicon Valley start ups have a co-founder no more than one generation separated from an immigrant. Immigration makes us work. The U.S. fertility rate is below 2.1, so it’s immigration that pushes us above replacement level growth.
But don’t gloat. There are cracks our armor.
One in three U.S. immigrants today was born in Mexico, making it the “biggest wave of immigration in history from a single country to the United States,” according to the Pew Hispanic Center. But that wave hit a wall. Thanks to a weak U.S. economy, a growing Mexican economy, and a handful of other policies, net flow of Mexican immigrants to the U.S. has possibly reversed for the first time in several decades.
At the same time, “highly educated children of immigrants to the United States are uprooting themselves and moving to their ancestral countries,” the New York Times reported just two weeks ago. The factors aren’t all the same, but they rhyme. India is getting stronger relative to the United States, and, once again, public policy is getting in the way of immigration. We don’t block foreign-born students at the Texas border. We kick them out if they can’t marry, find a job, or snag one of a limited number of visas. In the race for human capital, this is a deliberate losing strategy.
There are reasonable arguments for using government laws and resources to limit immigration and protect jobs for American-born workers. But the broader picture is that the U.S. is failing to recognize a free and automatic virtue of being America: People want to move here and work in exchange for money.
Read more. [Image: Reuters]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m2zzwlcySc1qcokc4o1_1280.jpg)
America’s Secret Growth Weapon: Why Immigration Really, Really Matters
Immigration is a big part of what distinguishes the U.S. from, say, the EU. Immigration makes us younger. That’s what you see from the graph above. Immigration makes us smarter. Half of all Silicon Valley start ups have a co-founder no more than one generation separated from an immigrant. Immigration makes us work. The U.S. fertility rate is below 2.1, so it’s immigration that pushes us above replacement level growth.
But don’t gloat. There are cracks our armor.
One in three U.S. immigrants today was born in Mexico, making it the “biggest wave of immigration in history from a single country to the United States,” according to the Pew Hispanic Center. But that wave hit a wall. Thanks to a weak U.S. economy, a growing Mexican economy, and a handful of other policies, net flow of Mexican immigrants to the U.S. has possibly reversed for the first time in several decades.
At the same time, “highly educated children of immigrants to the United States are uprooting themselves and moving to their ancestral countries,” the New York Times reported just two weeks ago. The factors aren’t all the same, but they rhyme. India is getting stronger relative to the United States, and, once again, public policy is getting in the way of immigration. We don’t block foreign-born students at the Texas border. We kick them out if they can’t marry, find a job, or snag one of a limited number of visas. In the race for human capital, this is a deliberate losing strategy.
There are reasonable arguments for using government laws and resources to limit immigration and protect jobs for American-born workers. But the broader picture is that the U.S. is failing to recognize a free and automatic virtue of being America: People want to move here and work in exchange for money.
Read more. [Image: Reuters]
![A Familiar DREAM: Obama Grants Immunity to Young Illegal Immigrants
As many as 800,000 young immigrants could avoid deportation under a new policy President Barack Obama plans to announce Friday, granting work permits to those who entered the country illegally as children.
Read more at The Atlantic Wire. [Image: Reuters]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m5nym9ZAjZ1qcokc4o1_1280.jpg)
![Living the DREAM: Undocumented Youth Build Lives in America
When he reaches for his earliest memories, Nico Lopez recalls clenching his small fists around his seat belt buckle and straining to listen to the smiling flight attendant’s directions for take-off. As he watched Guatemala City disappear beneath him, he pulled his feet onto the seat, wrapped his arms around his knees, and quietly began to cry. It was 2001, and Nico was seven years old.
Now a tall, quietly confident young man with dark hair and green eyes, Nico will soon graduate with honors from a public high school in Stamford, Connecticut. Despite having grown up in a neighborhood where gunfire is likened to the doorbell ringing — you hear it all the time and don’t really think much of it — he is the leader of the student government, often the only non-white member of his AP classes, and, in his spare time, an English tutor for recent immigrants.
You know how the rest of the American dream story is supposed to go: Nico receives a merit-based scholarship to college and finds a job that helps him support his mother, who has worked as a housekeeper for the past 17 years. He gets married, has second-generation kids, and serves as a shining example of how any American can succeed if he tries hard enough.
Except Nico isn’t technically American. He overstayed his tourist visa as a seven-year-old and is now one of over 2 million immigrant youthwho entered the United States as minors and now live here illegally. Federal law prohibits Nico from going to college at a public university, while, somewhat counterintuitively, Connecticut state law gives Nico access to in-state tuition though not financial aid.
Read more. [Image: Connecticut Students for a DREAM]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m281duoiGT1qcokc4o1_1280.jpg)
