Washington's Finest Moment

For all the talk of incivility in the Nation's capital, the last week has restored my faith in the basic decency of the people who live there. Although the storm that hit Washington and the surrounding area June 29 has not received as much national attention as hurricanes, tornados, and other natural disasters usually do, the human toll has been high. In the Washington metro area alone, five people died in the storm and more than 20 have died subsequently from the heat, as hundreds of thousands suffered days without electrical power. But through it all, most people have behaved admirably.

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We Need More Highly Skilled Workers

 Can the federal government adequately predict exactly how many mathematicians, engineers, biochemists, and inventors the United States will need twenty years in the future? I doubt many of us would answer yes. Yet, federal immigration policy does exactly that in allotting work visas for highly skilled employees.       

Most of the debate over immigration has centered on low-skilled workers, especially the large population of illegal immigrants who have entered the country over the last two decades. But our legal immigration system is dysfunctional as well. The system primarily focuses on re-uniting foreign-born relatives with family members who are already here, paying little attention to what's good for our economy and what will benefit Americans by creating more jobs and wealth for all of us.       

Congress tried to fix the problem in 1990 when it established special visas for highly skilled workers and researchers, professors and others of outstanding abilities. But the law set the limit of visas available to 140,000 -- which included those for family members of those admitted. Worse, it applied the same absolute quotas on populous countries like China and India as it did on tiny countries like Luxembourg.       

Wait times to obtain employment visas for professionals from India and China can already be eight years or more. To be eligible for these visas, applicants must already have a job offer. How many employers are willing to extend an offer eight years down the road? Only government bureaucrats have the hubris to imagine they can predict future needs with such clarity.
       

And the problem is even worse for some categories of employment-based visas. Workers from India defined as professionals and skilled workers can face a 70-year wait! And Chinese workers in these categories face up to 20 years before obtaining a visa. The state department has already advised employers and applicants for visas that quotas for those with advanced degrees will run out in July.       

The problem is especially acute for foreign students graduating from American universities with degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), according to a new study by the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP).       

As the study points out, although some of these graduates can get extensions on their temporary visas to allow them to stay in the United States, many end up having to leave -- taking their highly valuable skills earned at American universities with them.       

Those who oppose increasing the number of visas available for the most highly-skilled immigrants argue that such workers take jobs that would otherwise go to Americans. But studies consistently find that foreign-born workers with advanced degrees from U.S. universities in the STEM fields actually create jobs for Americans.       

A study of employment data by the American Enterprise Institute found, for example, "An additional 100 foreign-born workers in STEM fields with advanced degrees from U.S. universities is associated with an additional 262 jobs among U.S. natives. While the effect is biggest for U.S.-educated immigrants working in STEM, immigrants with advanced degrees in general raised employment among U.S. natives during 2000-2007." The study also found that it didn't matter which field or where immigrants earned their advance degrees, their presence increased employment for American native workers, with 44 new jobs created for every 100 highly trained immigrants employed.
     

Limiting access to those immigrants most likely to contribute to the U.S. economy is foolhardy. There is bipartisan support for trying to fix the problem, but the approaches vary widely, including some that would simply re-allocate existing visas available to other categories of permanent resident applicants.      

The NFAP states the problem well: "Absent changes in the law by Congress, the long wait times for high skilled foreign nationals, including those educated in America, will continue. At a time when there is fierce competition around the world to hire highly skilled individuals, this threatens to deprive the country of talented individuals who will choose to develop innovations, make their careers and raise their families in other nations."       

But in an election year when sentiments on immigration run high, politicians may find it easier to do nothing.

White Privilege

The University of Minnesota–Duluth has launched a bizarre campaign to raise awareness of “white privilege.”  The accompanying video has to be seen to be believed.  This is white guilt on steroids:  You have to be living in a different world if you believe that people who happen to have white skin (and who may or may not have had an easy time of it in life) ought to feel apologetic to anyone who does not share that skin color (and who may or may not have had a hard time in life).  Oh, well.

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Racial Disparities in Incarceration Rates

Last week, at the invitation of Maryland’s state advisory committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the Center for Equal Opportunity submitted testimony for a hearing on the subject of “Racial Disparities in Incarceration Rates” in Maryland’s state prisons.  It is becoming common to assert that such disparities – that is, the fact that some racial groups are “disproportionately” represented among prison inmates – somehow prove that the criminal justice system must be racist.

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Silver Lining in Court Decisions

The U.S. Supreme Court handed down two decisions this week that cry out for Congressional action. In upholding the constitutionality of most aspects of President Obama's health care reform legislation and in reaffirming the federal government's role in immigration policy, the Court's decisions should be a call to action for Congress to pass new legislation on these two vital issues.

It's important to recognize that the decisions were narrowly tailored to deal only with constitutionality of the two laws at issue: the federal Affordable Care Act and Arizona's S.B. 1070. Neither decision spoke to the wisdom of existing policy in either area. In fact, both health care and immigration laws are in desperate need of major revisions.

The health care decision, announced Thursday, affirmed the constitutionality of the major provisions of the law. While striking down one provision having to do with Medicaid, the Court upheld the most controversial part of the law, which mandates that individuals buy health insurance or pay a penalty to the federal government.

Five of the justices, including Chief Justice Roberts and the other four conservatives on the Court, said that the Commerce Clause could not be read to allow the federal government to require individuals to buy health insurance -- the argument advanced by the Obama administration. However, Roberts voted to uphold the law's constitutionality based on his interpretation that the federal government's taxing authority permits it to penalize those who choose not to buy insurance -- thus ensuring a 5-4 victory that in effect preserves the means to finance universal health care as envisioned by the law. In essence, the chief justice said that Obamacare is a tax imposed on those who do not wish to purchase health care.

If conservatives are smart, they will use this point to hammer home to Americans that the Obama administration has imposed a hefty tax on every American who is not covered by health insurance and has probably raised premium costs for those who already have insurance by mandating policies to cover new services. In an election season when many, if not most, Americans are feeling an economic pinch, this could be a huge problem for the president. And especially so because the president has consistently maintained that his health care bill was not a tax, nor would it raise the costs of health care. Republicans in Congress should use the opportunity to offer bills to repeal this regressive tax.

The other important decision handed down this week had to do with the power of states to impose their own sets of rules and penalties with regard to illegal immigration. While many conservatives are upset that the Court struck down key provisions of Arizona's tough anti-illegal immigration law, SB 1070, they should be more angry at Congress for failing to pass legal immigration reform that would end up to 90 percent of illegal immigration by expanding legal immigration and temporary work visas. But instead of adhering to their basic understanding of free market principles when it comes to immigration policy, many conservatives have jumped on the bandwagon of intrusive big government to solve immigration problems.

There is no question that Americans have a right to be concerned about border security and the large number of illegal immigrants that are living in the United States. But the solution is not for states to try to impose their own versions of immigration law -- which are the exclusive provenance of the federal government -- but for Americans to push Congress to act on meaningful changes to our immigration laws. The answer to combatting illegal immigration is to base legal immigration laws on the country's economic needs and to make it flexible. The best policy would be to increase immigration when there is high employer demand and not enough domestic workers to fill the need, and decrease it when there supply exceeds demand.

Unfortunately, those on both sides who have dominated the debate in the last few years have been hostile to a free market approach. Liberals favor higher immigration under all circumstances, motivated in large part by their desire to enlarge their own constituency, which they believe will happen naturally if more immigrants from Latin American countries come.
Just as problematic, many conservatives who oppose expanding legal immigration have lost faith in the ability of the United States to assimilate new immigrants, despite overwhelming evidence that current immigrants -- including Latinos -- are assimilating at rates that are as high or higher than previous immigrants from Europe. Instead of adhering to basic conservative principles, these anti-immigration conservatives end up favoring bigger government to patrol our borders and increased regulations for everyone who wants to work in the U.S, including American citizens. We've tried these methods now for more than twenty years, and they haven't done the job.

The Supreme Court's ruling on immigration should motivate conservatives to demand genuine immigration reform at the federal level -- but most importantly, reform that preserves conservative principles on individual liberty and the free market.

When it comes to both decisions this week, conservatives need to follow their own advice: don't rely on the Courts to fix policies that have gone astray.

Big Lesson for Labor in Wisconsin Election

Gov. Scott Walker's victory in the Wisconsin recall election this week was no surprise to anyone but Big Labor. Unions were furious when Walker and the Republican-controlled legislature cut back their right to bargain on anything beyond wages. Democratic legislators fled the state for several weeks in 2011 in order to try to prevent a final vote from taking place. Demonstrators took over the state capitol, and when that didn't work, unions and left-leaning groups gathered signatures to force a recall vote.

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Racial preferences are bad for the body politic

With everyone waiting for the Supreme Court’s decision in the Obamacare case, I coauthored a piece in the Christian Science Monitor last week that explained why a case that will be decided next year also has important health implications – but, in its case, it’s the health of the country’s race relations that is at stake.  You can read the whole piece here, but here are some excerpts:

The U.S. Supreme Court will soon decide one of the most consequential cases in years – the challenge to the new federal health care law, often known as Obamacare.

But right behind it comes another blockbuster case.

Next term the Court will hear Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin. Health is still the issue – but this time, it’s the health of our multiracial society. Will the public sector – and public universities in particular – finally move beyond a fixation with race, and start treating all people as individuals, not color-coded statistics?

At UT-Austin, admissions directors favor the race-based spreadsheet approach. Race is a criterion in undergraduate admissions – with favoritism for African-Americans and Hispanics – in an effort to achieve a pre-determined mix, or “diversity.” Abigail Fisher, a white female, was denied admission, and she’s suing because she was not evaluated on an equal basis with applicants from other backgrounds.

The Court was correct to take this case. It needs to clarify, once and for all, whether the need for “diversity” justifies universities treating individuals differently because of their race.

When the Court last considered this issue, in a pair of University of Michigan cases in 2003, it struck down racial preferences in one case but narrowly upheld them in the other. In the latter, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor warned, “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary...”

So the Court was – rather oddly, to be sure – announcing only a temporary waiver of students’ right not to be discriminated against on the basis of skin color and what country their ancestors came from. Since a third of the time allowed for in Justice O’Connor’s projection has passed, it makes sense for the Court to revisit the matter.

Studies provide ample evidence that universities are not weaning themselves away from this discrimination. To the contrary: A study last fall of the University of Wisconsin by the Center for Equal Opportunity found the most pronounced undergraduate admissions discrimination the Center had ever seen. Recent studies show that law school discrimination at UW and elsewhere is severe, too. Studies of medical school admissions have reached the same conclusion.

At one time, affirmative action was designed to benefit African Americans recently subjected to Jim Crow, over whites who had been the segregated system’s beneficiaries. But now, more and more, it is Asians (our fastest growing ethnic group) who are discriminated against in favor of Latinos (our largest minority). At the University of Texas, for instance, in 2009, admitted Asians had an average SAT score 197 points higher than the average score for admitted Hispanics.
What’s the historical justification for that difference?

As for the “diversity” rationale, it is becoming more and more problematic to justify using race and ethnicity as a proxy for people’s perspectives and experiences – or to identify students from disadvantaged backgrounds. There are of course many white and Asian students who come from disadvantaged backgrounds, and many African Americans and Latinos who do not.

In fact, a frequently cited pro-racial preference book – The Shape of the River by William G. Bowen and Derek Bok – acknowledged that 86 percent of the African American students admitted to the schools it surveyed (selective colleges and universities using affirmative action) had “middle” or “high” socioeconomic status. Only 14 percent came from “low” socioeconomic backgrounds.

Even if there are some marginal educational benefits for students from greater “diversity,” they are few and thin compared to the substantial costs – costs, that is, from institutionalizing racial discrimination that must be borne by society as a whole, the universities, and the students themselves.
For example, empirical evidence has come to light that among the victims of admission preferences for blacks and Latinos are ... blacks and Latinos. That is, by mismatching students and institutions, students are set up for failure. A study by UCLA Law School Professor Richard Sander found there would be more African Americans in the legal profession if affirmative action weren’t routing students to schools that aren’t a good academic fit – and from which, too often, they don’t graduate.

The use of racial preferences is simply wrong, for a host of reasons, including: It is personally unfair; it can stigmatize the so-called beneficiaries in the eyes of their classmates, teachers, and themselves, as well as future employers, clients, and patients; it compromises the academic mission of the university; and it gets states and schools involved in unsavory activities like deciding which racial and ethnic minorities will be favored and how to establish group membership.

The face of America is changing, and it is untenable to be sorting Americans by skin color in a nation that is becoming more and more multiracial and multiethnic.

The justifications for such discrimination have grown weaker, and the costs more apparent. The Supreme Court should rule in favor of Abigail Fisher and tell universities that they must stop judging applicants by the color of their skin and their national origin: The nation’s long-term health demands it.

CEO Testifies on Racial Disparities in Incarceration Rates

Statement of CEO President Roger Clegg before the Maryland State Advisory Committee  to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights

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