The current United States legal immigration system whereby extended family members and relatives of naturalized U.S. citizens are able to readily enter the country is “really hard to justify as a rational immigration policy,” a Harvard University economist says.
In an interview with Talking Points Memo, economist George Borjas explained that the current legal immigration system — whereby the U.S. admits more than 1.5 million legal immigrants a year, mostly through family chain migration — could be easily done away with under Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Sen. David Perdue’s (R-GA) legal immigration-cutting RAISE Act legislation.
Borjas details:
The numbers issue, let me be totally blunt about this. There is no single economic study that predicts what the right number of immigrants should be. The political instability created by the high levels of immigration over the last twenty years suggests to me that we’ve gone beyond the line of what is best. That we are on the too much side, rather than on the too few side. 550,000 is the number that the Jordan commission came up with twenty years ago.
Not many people are proposing that we have completely open borders. That means that if you are in a reasonable span of the political spectrum, you are going to favor some kind of limit. So one question becomes how many, and the other question then becomes which type. Most of the cuts in Perdue Cotton bill come from cuts in the family preference system as it applies to extended families. You go to the United States, that spouse of yours comes, then the siblings come, and their spouses’ parents, and so on. That kind of branching out is really hard to justify as a rational immigration policy. The way to go from a million to half a million immigrants is by getting rid of all these extended family connections.