Metadoxy: Linkdump: Immigration

The Wall Street Journal recommends some fiction for your library, which I have not read, but sounds interesting. (Cannot be excerpted, check out the article for very brief reviews)

The Economist says more legal immigration is low-hanging fruit.

At a time when America is concerned about excess housing supply and anxious to boost its innovative capacity it is madness that so many willing immigrants, including high-skilled workers, including those educated in America, find it difficult to impossible to gain permission to work in the country on a stable, long-term basis.

Annie Lowry agrees.

The pro-super-immigrant data abounds. According to the Hamilton Project, immigrants are 30 percent more likely to start a business than U.S.-born citizens. Immigrants with college degrees are three times as likely to file patents as the domestically born. And all that entrepreneurial gusto really adds up. Economist Jennifer Hunt of McGill estimates that the contributions of immigrants with college degrees increased the U.S.'s GDP per capita by between 1.4 and 2.4 percent in the 1990s.

Despite these success stories, the United States still discourages foreign-born entrepreneurs. The H1-B visa program allows employers to bring in highly skilled workers but grants only 85,000 new temporary visas per year. Many recipients need to leave the country when their contracts end, giving them no incentive to put down roots and start businesses. The student visa program also allows in tens of thousands of the most talented, driven students from overseas, only to push most of them out again once their education is finished.

Bryan Caplan directs us to Tino Sanandaji on the negative political effects of allowing more immigration.

Though ignored by proponents of the ethnic-diversity-and-redistribution, minorities also get to vote, and they vote overwhelmingly for the left. This effect is dominant when we are discussing free migration, because with open borders in a world where 700 million people have told Gallup they would like to migrate right now, sooner or later the immigrants will become the majority of voters and make the political preferences of the natives irrelevant.

And now, some cartoons from the Internet:*?*Yes, this is overkill on the pithy graphics. Yes, political cartoons oversimplify issues. I still think they're worth including.

Source: http://metadoxy.blogspot.com/2011/05/linkdump-immigration.html

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