The Smart Society. Peter D. Salins

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СКАЧАТЬ way to reduce the official unemployment rate. This leads them to promote “early retirement” and indiscriminate authorization of disability eligibility. On the pull side, fully capable workers who are laid off or discontented with their jobs are quick to jump at pension or disability stipends when these become too readily available. At the epicenter of these dynamics are federal entitlement programs and state and local public employee contracts. How these can be realistically restructured to let the American workplace take full advantage of our workers’ natural propensity to work—and to work hard—is the subject of chapter 7.

      Immigration Immigration has also been one of America’s most singular human-capital advantages; we have always admitted far more immigrants, and assimilated them more thoroughly, than any other country on earth. Now, after years of complacently tolerating immigration policies that are simultaneously incoherent, unfair, and unenforced, ordinary Americans are thoroughly confused about the issue, and their political leaders are having a hard time agreeing on sensible reforms.

      Most obviously, immigrants were needed in the nineteenth century to settle the United States’ expanding western frontier and operate its rapidly growing number of farms, factories, and shops. But regardless of the circumstances of the time, immigrants have built American human capital uninterruptedly from the first settlers to the present day, and at every level of the economy. Each year around the Fourth of July, The New York Times carries a full-page advertisement celebrating the contributions of eminent immigrants, past and present. The page is dense with iconic names from Joseph Pulitzer and Andrew Carnegie in the nineteenth century, Albert Einstein, Samuel Goldwyn, and Irving Berlin in the mid-twentieth, to Henry Kissinger and George Soros today. Throughout American history, immigrants were the indispensable Americans, building railroad, manufacturing, financial, and entertainment empires; making the world’s most notable breakthroughs in scientific research and technological inventions; and cementing the United States’ renown in music, the fine arts, and literature. Other immigrants entered politics and throughout American history have occupied every political office, at every level of government—federal, state, and local—except for the presidency.

      How well the nation benefits from immigration does depend, however, on the contours of national immigration policy. Until the 1920s, American immigration policy was essentially an open door to any and all who wished to come (with the occasional exception, such as the exclusion of the Chinese in the 1880s). At a time when most of Europe was quite poor, and when migrating meant leaving one’s native land forever, immigrants to the United States were most likely to be Europe’s—and, to a lesser extent, Asia’s—most talented and venturesome people. Further, coming to an America that had not yet instituted a social welfare safety net or labor protections, immigrants had to be extremely hardy and hard-working—highly valuable attributes in a rapidly industrializing society. In other words, America was attracting the world’s best and brightest without even trying.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ