Immigration is a contentious public policy issue these days. Republicans tend to support securing our borders, while Democrats tend to be more open to mass immigration. This may be due in part to the demographics of immigration. Immigrants tend to be poor, and poor people are more sympathetic to Democrat’s ‘share the wealth’ agenda. Successful people – those comfortable in their financial positions – don’t tend to uproot their lives to strike out in a new country. In his first term, President Trump reportedly wondered aloud why America tends to receive immigrants from [poor expletive deleted] countries rather than countries like Norway. Oddly enough, nearly one-third of Norway’s population immigrated to the United States between 1825 and 1925, peaking in the 1880s. They came because they were poor with few opportunities to change their situation. Norway no longer sends large numbers of immigrants to the U.S. because it is no longer a poor country.
Another type of immigrants are refugees. The overwhelming majority of refugee applicants are for economic reasons, rather than for political reasons. They are often poor and refugees receive generous public assistance that legal immigrants do not get. Legal immigrants must wait five years before they can qualify for public assistance programs. The U.S. has long held a policy of family reunification, believing families are more likely to be law abiding than single males. That means immigrants can often bring their whole extended family.
By way of contrast, another political theory on immigration emphasizes skills. That is, allow only the best and the brightest who have something the U.S. needs. Essentially that means changing Emma Lazarus’ inscription on the Statue of Liberty to read, “give us not your tired, none of your poor, and keep your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Nor the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send none of the homeless… Also, we don’t want sick people who could become a cost to taxpayers (and there is nothing wrong with denying entry to those). Send us your millionaires, your billionaires, your scientists, physicists and mathematicians, your engineers, and doctors…”
Speaking of doctors, the immigrants the U.S. needs more than almost any other is doctors. Yes, doctors. Thousands come to the United States to train, applying for residencies. Many foreign born, foreign trained medical school graduates are denied residencies (go unmatched) because residencies are competitive and limited. Of those that do match to a residency and complete one most hope to practice medicine in the United States. Even the most die-hard immigration opponents should not complain about doctors, who invested vast amounts of their own time, effort, and money into medical training, hoping to practice their skills here. This is especially true if they are willing to work in under served areas. The following is what Kaiser Family Foundation Health News had to say about it:
Hundreds of foreign doctors about to complete training in the U.S. will have to leave the country if the federal government doesn’t rapidly process their visa waiver applications, which have been languishing since the fall and winter, immigration attorneys say.
The waiver program, run by the Department of Health and Human Services, allows physicians who aren’t U.S. citizens to stay in the country while transitioning from the visa they used during their training to temporary worker status. In exchange, the doctors agree to work in underserved areas for at least three years.
Visa applications used to take one to three weeks to process for foreign-born medical residents, but hundreds of applications have been backlogged throughout the fall and winter. If forced to return home and then reapply, they (or their employers) will have to pay $100,000 for an H-1B visa. That is another immigration regulation that should be changed. Whereas it may be (arguably) reasonable to require Silicon Valley tech companies to pay to bring in workers they can hire locally at higher pay, physicians have already invested the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars in skills the U.S. desperately needs, especially in rural areas. The New York Times just reported that doctors from countries under a travel ban may be allowed to stay. Let’s hope they can process the visas in time.
Read more at KFF Health News: Delays in Visa Program Threaten Placement of Hundreds of Doctors in Underserved Areas