Letting In Some High-Skilled Immigrants

[Geee]

National Review:


We’ve been hearing a lot about immigration on the campaign trail, most of it based on outdated assumptions and echoing the arguments made when Congress was considering so-called comprehensive-immigration-reform bills in 2006 and 2007.

But up on Capitol Hill, there appears to be progress — bipartisan progress, even — toward changing our immigration laws to reflect current and emerging realities.

From Barack Obama, in campaign rather than governing mode these days, we hear denunciations of Republicans for killing proposals for legalizing illegal immigrants. This ignores the fact that Democrats didn’t move immigration bills when they had control of the House and a supermajority in the Senate. Speaker Nancy Pelosi thought global warming and health care were more important.


As for the Republican presidential candidates, most are calling for construction of an ever-higher border fence and opposing anything with a whiff of amnesty. They’re attacking Rick Perry because he opposes the fence in Texas — it’s hard to build one along a river — and backs in-state tuition for children of illegals in state colleges and universities.

Behind this rhetoric is the assumption that the tide of immigration, legal and illegal, is continuing at a record pace and that illegals are here to stay. But the evidence is that migration from Mexico has slowed to a trickle, and the Census Bureau tells us the number of illegals has declined.

Those trends are likely to continue. As former Mexican foreign minister Jorge Castañeda explains in his recent book, Mañana Forever: Mexico and the Mexicans, most Mexicans are now in the Walmart middle class or above. Mexican birth rates plummeted 20 years ago, which means fewer young people will be needing jobs — and with the U.S. economy struggling, they’re not likely to look for them here. Nor are legal immigrants as likely to bring extended-family members to the United States.(snip)