Immigration Book Excerpt: 'Lockout'
April 8, 2006 — -- As the debate over legislation for the 11 million illegal immigrants living in the United States continues to divide the Senate, Michele Wucker, a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute at The New School in New York City, explores what led to the dilemma in a new book, "Lockout: Why America Keeps Getting Immigration Wrong When Our Prosperity Depends on Getting It Right."
In "Lockout," Wucker points out some mistakes she believes led to the United States' predicament over immigration. She argues that closing the doors to immigrants -- despite globalization and terrorism fears -- could hurt America more than many people realize.
Below is an excerpt from "Lockout," which will be released May 8.
"Lockout: Why America Keeps Getting Immigration Wrong When Our Prosperity Depends on Getting It Right"
America's greatest economic asset is its ability to attract the world's ablest and most talented individuals to a system that can harness their abilities better than any other in the world. It is the combination of those individuals and the system that has made this country the world's engine of innovation and economic growth. "Innovation seems to me to be not only encouraged but driven by interchange, exchange acting like a sourdough starter when you bring a bunch of people together and give them the right environment, " Tracy Koon, Intel's director of corporate affairs, told me.
When the best and brightest come here -- whether they are the most educated or simply the hardest working of their homeland -- they can become a political and economic asset abroad as well. Immigrants' global connections boost Brand America, creating markets for American goods while spreading America's can-do attitude and democratic principles. One of our greatest challenges is to play these assets to their best advantage. Yet we also must address the downside of immigration in the context of global economic change. We have failed to protect the Americans who are most vulnerable to economic disruptions and to pressures that keep their wages down. Our immigration bureaucracy is a failure: it locks out many of the people upon whom our economy and prosperity depend, even as it does not do as good a job as it should of keeping out those who would harm us. Our immigration laws are a shifting labyrinth that has made it too hard for businesses to get the workers they need legally and created perverse incentives for unscrupulous employers to take advantage of the workers who remain in the shadows.
These are the issues that we must address in order to fix our immigration policies. Nothing less than our economic, social, and national security are at stake, including our global political and economic reach. What we need are pragmatic steps, not the emotion that has sent immigration policy seesawing wildly, to the benefit of none. Locking out the workers we need, as some propose, would hurt this country as well as the immigrants some seek to shut out.
America keeps getting immigration wrong because we only look at half of the story: we focus so hard on immigrants that we forget about our own role in shaping how people come here and how well they fit in. We get it wrong because we make policy based on emotion that blinds us to our own self-interest. We are intoxicated by lofty principles even when the policies we make in the name of patriotism and the American nation, taken to extremes, undermine the very principles they are supposed to defend. We exaggerate the differences between our immigrant ancestors and today's immigrants because it is a convenient mask for our own failings. We often wrongly blame immigration for being the cause of other problems -- social tensions, economic inequality, job losses, abuse of workers -- when in fact the tensions over immigration are merely the symptoms of those same problems…
What, then, does America need to do to get immigration right? We need to wrest back the debate over immigration from the extremists: both those who would slam our doors outright and reserve America for those of Anglo-Saxon heritage, on one side; and, on the other, from those who will not countenance attempts to bring immigration to moderate levels and who refuse to give any credit at all to the Anglo-Saxon cultural and political influences that enabled us to incorporate other cultures -- however imperfectly -- into one nation. We need to build on our strengths and come up with targeted solutions to shore up our weaknesses.