George Borjas of Harvard makes several recommendations for immigration policies. Read the entire linked article for full details. Winners and Losers. And what about legal immigration? The time has come to start talking about legal immigration more realistically. Despite what the Chamber of Commerce claims, legal immigration is not manna from heaven. As with all other social policies, legal immigration creates winners and losers, and any rational discussion of immigration policy must consider that tradeoff. The employers who gain, along with many willing co-conspirators in the media and academia, have effectively silenced debate by reframing the issue as a battle between white-hatted globalists who carry the banner of progress on the one side and the xenophobes and racists on the other. If nothing else, the widespread revolt against globalization makes it obvious that there are indeed losers, and the losers are tired of being lied to and being left behind. American workers had no voice in setting up a system that was bought and paid for by the economic interests that gain from increased immigration. It is time to change that balance of power—those who gain should bear part of the costs, and those who lose should receive some of the benefits. There are many ways of redistributing the gains—ranging from taxing those industries that most benefit from the hiring of immigrants to making employers pay tens of thousands of dollars for each H-1B visa granted. If nothing else, this would help employers internalize the cost of the policies that they have benefitted so much from, and lead to a much more rational discussion of how much and which type of immigration we should have.
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