Because America’s borders are no longer open to all comers, if the United States wants to replicate its earlier success in attracting highly capable immigrants, it must now do so through the design of its immigration quotas. While most debates on immigration policy today concern the not unimportant question of what to do about the country’s 10 to 12 million illegal immigrants, a more fruitful policy discussion would focus on the politically less sensitive issue of which immigrants we should seek to admit in the future. In recent years the United States has admitted, on average, more than 1 million immigrants a year. Among legal immigrants, over 65 percent were sponsored by families, 15 percent were admitted as victims of persecution, and 14 percent were skilled workers sponsored by employers. The small remainder span a number of admission categories including 4 percent selected by lottery. While most family-sponsored and persecuted immigrants are hard-working and many have useful talents, the overwhelming majority are nevertheless poorly educated and unskilled.
That need not be the case, however, for future immigrants. The United States could, by restructuring its immigration admissions criteria, quickly realize an incremental human-capital bonanza. Even holding to current aggregate quota levels, by bending the immigrant admissions trajectory in favor of the hundreds of thousands of better-educated, skilled (and perhaps even English-speaking) immigrants, the United States would gain an instantaneous infusion of talent. This infusion would significantly enlarge the pool of intelligent, creative, and motivated workers to supply American firms on the technological and biomedical frontiers with new scientists, engineers, physicians, and nurses; schools and colleges with new teachers and scholars; the financial industry with new analysts and managers; and the dominant service economy with new supervisors, technicians, and troubleshooters. Some of these immigrants, following in the footsteps of Andrew Grove of Intel and Sergey Brin of Google, are bound to launch the exciting industries and technological breakthroughs of tomorrow.
Beyond dramatically upgrading America’s labor force today, an immigration policy focused on admitting more capable immigrants would reinforce a virtuous human-capital cycle for future generations. All the empirical evidence suggests that an influx of better-educated immigrants, raising their children in predominantly stable families and encouraging high achievement in school, would generate human-capital outcomes much greater than those currently characterizing American immigrant children. These children, in turn, as adults would provide rich human-capital nurturing grounds for subsequent generations. If the United States is ever to meet the educational achievement goals of No Child Left Behind, it must recognize that fully half of the “left behind” are the children of recent immigrants.
In the process of retooling immigration policy, we must not forget the importance of assimilation. As noted earlier, America’s overwhelmingly positive immigration history has depended on the fact the United States was able to, quite uniquely, assimilate wave after wave of its immigrants for centuries. Undeniably, the historical record shows periods when Americans exhibited hostility to certain immigrant groups and, at all times, many immigrants have clung to their native tongues and customs for at least a while. But true assimilation depends much more on immigrants’ acceptance of America’s values than their adoption of all facets of its contemporary culture, and on natives eventually welcoming them with generosity and tolerance. Both of these conditions clearly prevailed—until the 1960s. Since then, America’s assimilation ethos has fallen on hard times because of strong resistance—not from the native-born or even the immigrants themselves—but from America’s intellectual elite and its leading institutions, regrettably including urban public schools. Our long-standing national faith in the assimilation process must quickly be restored because, regardless of the mix of immigrants the United States admits, immigrants will be able to contribute fully as members of America’s smart society only if they are thoroughly assimilated.
The smart-society implications for American immigration policy going forward are crystal clear. Because immigrants at all times and in all places in the United States have invigorated the country economically and socially, the most rapid and certain way to build and regenerate American human capital is to admit more of them and, most critically, to admit them legally under sensible, strategic admissions criteria—and to do everything we can to encourage their rapid assimilation. How this can be done is the subject of chapter 8.
SUMMING UP
Thoughtful Americans are becoming increasingly alarmed by signs that the human capital of the United States is deteriorating, either in absolute terms or relative to our international rivals in the hypercompetitive global economy. And they are right to worry. We should worry that a growing share of young Americans are failing to receive the education they need to succeed—both economically and socially—in the demanding environment of the twenty-first century. We should worry that not enough Americans are working. We should worry that, unless we keep our place at the scientific frontier and invest enough in emerging technologies, we will lose out to the Asian Tigers, the European Union, and eventually China and other emerging economies. Finally, we should worry that someday soon, the flow of immigrants may dry up, and those who still want to come will be drawn increasingly from the bottom of the immigrant pool.
The most concrete manifestation of our human-capital worries can be seen in the bitter partisan debates in Congress and state capitals about growing income inequality, the scope of the American welfare state, and the size of federal and state deficits. What both sides (and the public at large) fail to understand is that all of these problems—and many others—are really caused by the ongoing erosion of Americans’ human capital. Most of the things the American left is exercised by these days—high unemployment, stagnant wages, rising poverty, homelessness, and diminished access to health care—result from human-capital deficiencies of the lower third of the population. At the same time, so do the concerns of the American right—the rising cost of welfare-state entitlements, subpar economic growth, alarming rates of out-of-wedlock child rearing (even among formerly middle-class whites), and idleness and criminality among the young.
Failing to appreciate the degree to which human-capital erosion is at the root of their complaints, both the left and the right look to implement unproductive policies. The income redistribution favored by the left and partial dismantling of the safety net favored by the right are both politically infeasible and economically counterproductive—and they do nothing to make Americans any smarter. Even the favorite nostrums of the political center, best characterized as attempts at social engineering, may be more politically palatable but are equally ineffective.
Americans do not have to choose between diverting a growing share of national resources to the welfare state (displacing other essential government spending and running up the deficit) or inhumanely letting many less fortunate Americans needlessly suffer. In this book, I argue for a third way. We can restore the status of the United States as the world’s smartest society by retooling all three legs of its once invincible human-capital tripod: reform American education, rebuild the American workplace, and welcome to America the world’s most capable immigrants.
The rest of this book is dedicated to thoroughly examining each leg of America’s human-capital tripod, identifying its strengths and weaknesses, and recommending strategic changes for national, state, and local governments to adopt in programs already entirely under their jurisdiction. All of my policy recommendations meet two criteria: they do not expand the scope of American government and they are not too costly relative to the benefits they promise to generate.