American Maggie

As college seniors across America celebrated university commencement last summer, many graduates were holding a very different kind of party. Students from around the world who followed their dream of coming to America for college threw an annual round of “deportation parties.” It is a rite of passage for undergraduates from countries like Malaysia, Poland and even Canada who are unable to find a legal way of remaining in the United States.  

Every year an estimated half-million low-skilled immigrants enter the U.S. illegally, but only as few as 65,000 H-1B visas are granted to allow highly qualified foreigners to stay and work here legally. These visas are not just a way for foreign professionals to work in America; they are often also the only chance they have of eventually becoming Americans. Employers have been begging Congress for years to raise the number of H-1Bs to meet demand: Bill Gates has made countless appeals to let in more IT experts. But the cap is not only too low, it is also filled on a first-come, first-served basis, and does not take into account the urgency with which particular jobs need to be filled. Undergraduates with engineering degrees, programmers from India and even supermodels from Russia are all lumped together, fighting for the same 65,000 slots. It’s a problem that Congress and the President do not address, since the public often thinks of skilled immigrants as taking away high-paying American jobs. As a gesture to the international community President Obama initially said he would raise the H1-B visa caps, but then quickly backtracked when the economic crisis hit. Yet whenever these immigrants are rejected, America loses some of its best and brightest, who leave this country and take their knowledge and talents to London, Dubai or Hong Kong.

 The most popular argument for easing restrictions on the legal immigration of highly skilled people is based on America’s economic self-interest. Highly skilled immigrants are a blessing to our economy: a highly qualified immigrant creates many more jobs than the one he takes, pays taxes in a higher income bracket, has a higher savings rate and is likely to buy a home. In a recent op-ed, Thomas Friedman quoted an Indian news editor on how immigrants could solve America’s crisis: “All you need to do is grant visas to two million Indians, Chinese and Koreans.” America is already paying to educate many of the foreigners who want to stay here, through financial aid programs and scholarships: it only makes sense to let them remain in order to get a return on the investments of alumni and donors. But the economic argument extends well beyond these short-term benefits: for over a century many of the most important scientific discoveries have been made by immigrants. A quarter of America’s Nobel laureates in chemistry are foreign-born Americans. One in every four patent applications in the U.S. is filed by a foreigner living in the U.S. On top of creating jobs, their discoveries contribute to America’s greatness and stature in the world. This country has a system that favors entrepreneurship and ambition like no other; if the best and brightest cannot come to America and take advantage of it, as they have throughout history, America, and even the world, could be losing the discoveries of next Einstein.

The second argument for increasing immigration for highly-skilled workers is based in American ideals, and usually only heard for low-skilled workers: that all those yearning to come to America to be free, work hard, succeed and uphold its values should somehow be able to make this their home. America claims that these notions are universal, and that as a result American identity is based on faith in these ideals and not on race, religion or background. A second-generation Chinese-American can feel as American as someone who can trace their lineage back to the Mayflower. But the universal character of these ideals also means that a foreigner can feel American too: if a foreigner believes in the American Dream, whether because of time spent here or the image America projects abroad, he or she can feel they too have a right to be an American, just as someone born here.

The problem is, there is no clear way for a foreigner to become a citizen based on willingness and faith in the American Dream. We gladly grant asylum to refugees and escapees of oppressive regimes who seek freedom in America, and some of the empathy towards low-skilled illegal immigrants comes from considering their struggles. What we value in these immigrants is their courage to defy and leave their homelands and their vision of America as the land of opportunity in which they can pursue their dreams. This group of people echo the image of “your tired, your poor, your hungry, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” inscribed on the Statue of Liberty. But looking to skilled immigrants, we don’t always have that same benevolent impulse; we don’t often see that just like our forefathers, many highly-skilled immigrants want to come to this country for more than just a job opportunity. And yet, they do: especially in today’s global economy, if someone has high qualifications and could get a job anywhere, yet still chooses to take on the immigration system in the hope of becoming an American, we know they are not just coming here for a job. Rather, they are attracted by something more – by personal connections to people and places, by America’s exceptionalism, by its greatness or by its ideals.

Unfortunately, you cannot show up at the border with just your brain and your ambition and try your luck anymore. Of course, America can’t simply open its borders to anyone who wants to come here, and it is inherently difficult to measure “Americanness”, or whether someone “deserves” to be a member of this country. Instead of tackling these issues, however, the immigration system chooses to rely on randomness. The State Department runs a “diversity lottery” which allows people to apply to stay in America based on their country of origin. However, since the lottery is about “diversity”, it only applies to countries that have disproportionately few immigrants in the United States: last year this list included such important world players as Monaco, Mauritius and the French Southern and Antarctic lands. At the bottom of the State Department website is a note in small grey italics listing the countries whose people have shown the highest willingness to emigrate to America, but which are banned from the process: people from countries like India, the UK and Colombia need not apply. These applicants from over-represented countries are not missing out on much, however: chances of winning the lottery are below 1 percent, with between 5 and 7 million people applying every year.

The alternatives are few: unless you have family in America or are willing to marry an American, the main avenue towards citizenship for an educated and qualified individual is to start by getting one of the 65,000 H-1B visas. The permit is meant only to allow foreigners to hold an American job, but those who apply are often after much more than work – they want an American life. Taking any job that will get them a visa is just the first step to getting there. Before the financial crisis, foreign students graduating from U.S. colleges would flock to Wall Street because the industry had the most experience and resources to tackle the visa process. Even if these students had no interest in becoming bankers, they took these jobs just to gain a toehold on the American Dream. And they had to hang on for dear life, because the law says it’s back to square one if you are fired. Today, they are going back to the countries they left: back to Pakistan, Bulgaria, Honduras. The system ends up failing everyone involved: immigrants who want to make America their home must take any job at any cost with no clear hope of citizenship. Employers just looking to fill a position for which an American worker could not be found have a big part of the 65,000 H-1B slots taken by would-be Americans with entirely different purposes in mind.

 There should surely be a way for highly educated and skilled foreigners to become Americans without being forced to marry an American or take jobs they do not want. There is a fair question of social justice around whether qualifications should play any role in the citizenship process at all: why should a Romanian with a Harvard degree in biology have a better chance of becoming an America than a Peruvian waitress? However, the current immigration system already distinguishes between highly skilled and low skilled immigrants. The easiest approach to the problem would be to develop the H-1B visa process to take aspirations towards citizenship into account. A different process could involve a number of criteria– from time spent in America for reasons like studying, to general knowledge about the country, to a pledge of allegiance, which is already taken into account in the final stages of the naturalization process. Unfortunately, very little is being done to explore these options, because highly skilled foreigners have no natural constituency to speak for them inside America: most illegal immigrants are affiliated with large, centralized communities that can put political pressure on Congress to change laws in their favour. A Korean with an undergraduate degree in math from Stanford, or a Canadian with an English degree from Yale does not have the same support. 

Most Americans know only those immigrants who managed to make it through the system, often through luck and loopholes. If asked, immigrants will sometimes reveal that a parent happened to have a U.S. passport, or that they married a friend to get an American spouse. We never see the thousands who were rejected or simply lost hope and went elsewhere. Yet every year the immigration rules remain unchanged, those college kids who came to follow their American dreams have their hopes and their faith in America dashed.

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Christine Nikol writes for American Maggie from London, UK where she works as a business consultant.  She has previously written for the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. and as an intern for the Paris office of Newsweek.  She has a Masters in English Literature from the University of Oxford and a B.A. in Government from Harvard College, where she was Editor in Chief of the Harvard French Review, an annual journal of transatlantic politics and culture.  She is originally from Poland and Canada and has also lived in France, Nepal, and Singapore, but America is by far her favorite.

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