Visas for Scientists, with a Catch

NEW YORK TIMES (Editorial)

September 26, 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/27/opinion/visas-for-scientists-with-a-catch.html

It isn’t hard to find Republicans in Congress willing to support immigration generally, but rarer to hear them talk about actually allowing more foreigners to come here. When they do, you have to listen for the catch. Take Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, leader of the Republican immigration restrictionists, who recently offered a bill to provide 55,000 permanent-residency visas, or green cards, each year to immigrants with advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

These so-called STEM graduates are the immigrants everybody likes. Even Mitt Romney, a defender of Arizona-style deportation crackdowns, says he’d happily staple a green card to every advanced STEM diploma.

But the Smith bill was a cynical exercise. It supported one visa program by killing off another. It eliminated the diversity visa, which distributes 55,000 green cards by lottery to countries with low immigration rates. And it ruled that any unused STEM green cards could not be redistributed to ease backlogs in other visa categories — a common practice under current law.

In effect, Mr. Smith was willing to consider approving a few thousand STEM visas only as long as the net effect on immigration was zero, or less than zero. The bill was brought to a vote last week by a fast-track method and needed a two-thirds majority to pass; thankfully it didn’t.

The noxious thinking behind the bill, however, survives. It considers immigration a zero-sum game, and that America should allow in only a subset of educated elites.

Senator Charles Schumer and Representative Zoe Lofgren each have bills to increase STEM immigration while preserving the green-card lottery. That’s a fair approach, but better still would be a far broader deal that gives immigrants multiple legal paths into the country, is generous in reuniting families and legalizes millions of valuable workers who are already here. Building the kind of immigration system the American economy needs takes a lot more than cherry-picking workers for technology industries.