Demerits of a “merit-based” immigration system

Why have so many immigrants come?

statue of liberty museum
the new Statue of liberty museum
The regime seemed focused on having a “merit-based” immigration system. The proposed plan would increase “skills-based” immigration in the U.S. from 12% to 57%.

Yet in touting employment and skills over relatives and diversity, this approach is harsher than the countries such as Canada touted as shining examples. Canada has more immigrants in the economic stream, but it also brings in more family members, and more folks on humanitarian grounds.

Check out Freedom Is Why Immigrants Come to America in AIER. “They did not find a perfect paradise or immediate acceptance in the United States. Native-born Americans whose ancestors had arrived in the United States much earlier often looked down upon [them].”

The “them” could be the Irish, the Germans, the Jews. “So why have so many come? The reason is that in America, far more than in most other lands in the past and in many cases even now, the political is separated from the economic, the government from the marketplace.”

Richard M. Ebeling writes: “If we could go back in a time machine fifty years or a hundred years, the same kinds of work had to be done in the various corners of the marketplace, only we’d see different faces from different parts of the world, speaking different languages, and practicing some other faiths.

“Where are those who did these jobs in those earlier times? They and certainly their children and grandchildren moved up the socio-economic ladder to other professions, occupations and businesses, just like earlier generations of immigrants had done before them.”

I often watch those genealogy shows such as Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates. Almost invariably, he discovers the guests’ ancestors were people who came to the United States with nothing. They created something.

They became those shop owners. Or workers who learned English slowly, but their kids picked it up right away and helped their parents translate. Formerly enslaved people who, once freed, managed to own property and even served in government.

The regime policy is not the American dream. Meanwhile, New York State’s small towns have a welcoming attitude to refugees.

The new Statue of Liberty museum opened on May 16. “The 26,000-square-foot museum on Liberty Island… is the new home for the statue’s original torch and other artifacts that had previously been in a smaller museum space inside the statue’s pedestal, which is accessible only to the fraction of the more than 4 million annual visitors who manage to get limited-availability statue entry tickets.”

There’s a market for that “give me your tired” narrative.

And, a purely pragmatic consideration: the U.S. birth rate is dropping. The country isn’t “full”. Not only do we need more immigrants for economic reasons, we become a better people.

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