D.C. Dispatch June 19, 2007

Writing a perfect immigration bill is impossible, but writing a better one than the Senate's is a piece of cake.

A Simpler, Better Immigration Plan

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Like the supine parrot of Monty Python fame, the Senate's immigration reform bill might be dead, or it might be resting. Has it joined the choir invisible, or is it pinin' for the fjords?

Anyway, it has troubles. One is that the 12 million or so illegal immigrants already in the United States pose a problem with no easy solutions, only difficult trade-offs. Liberals are right to say that bringing unauthorized aliens into the open would make them less vulnerable to exploitation and easier for law enforcement to track, but conservatives are also right to say that mass normalization might stimulate more unauthorized immigration and erode respect for the law. Where illegal migration is concerned, the country will have to make a political choice. Mine, for what it's worth, would be to legalize some but not all.

Another problem, though, was that the Senate bill was worse than it needed to be. On the legal side of the immigration equation, there are easy trade-ups to be had. In fact, even a National Journal columnist with no apparent qualifications could write a better bill.

And what might that look like? Glad you asked.

First, raise the number of legal immigrants by about 50 percent, to about 1.8 million a year. That meets the economy's demonstrated demand for workers.

Second, provide pathways to permanence. Bring in these 1.8 million people on temporary visas, say for three to five years, with the promise of permanent legal residency (a green card) if they stay out of trouble, pose no security risk, and work or get a college degree.

Third, don't micromanage who gets in. Allocate visas using a simple three-way formula that gives about equal weight to family, work, and education: 600,000 family visas for close relatives of citizens and green-card holders; 600,000 work visas for people who are sponsored by an employer and have less than a bachelor's degree; 600,000 education visas for people who hold a bachelor's degree or higher, with first call going to those who also have employer sponsorships or family ties.

There is no chance, at the moment, that this plan will be adopted. But there is some chance that making the case for it might help clarify what the country should be shopping for in an immigration reform measure.

The most basic decision any immigration bill needs to make is this: How many immigrants does the country need and want? Bizarrely, this was the one question that the debate over the Senate bill did not seem to concern itself with. Even finding estimates for total immigration under the Senate reform proved dauntingly difficult until the Congressional Budget Office published some projections last week.

What CBO concluded was that the bill would increase immigration by about 170,000 a year through 2017. That modest increase would be temporary, however. Once the system had processed a backlog of visas, the law would admit no more bodies than come in at present.

According to the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, an average of 1.8 million new permanent immigrants came into the United States annually from 2002 to 2006. Of those, about half a million were illegal. Unemployment has been low through most of that period, and high-immigration states have thrived. What the numbers suggest, therefore, is that the economy needs at least half a million more workers than legal channels currently provide. Think of 1.8 million as the revealed demand for immigration. The Senate bill would not meet that demand—at least not legally.

What the bill would do is exchange less-skilled for more-skilled immigrants. Fair enough; improving the balance makes sense. Today's immigration stream is tilted lopsidedly toward less-skilled workers. Most legal immigrants come in because they are relatives of people who are here; these family-based immigrants have less education, on average, than native-born Americans, and they may or may not work after they arrive. Illegal immigrants generally do work, but they are predominantly low-skilled.

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Jonathan Rauch is an opinion columnist for National Journal. His most recent book is Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America. This column appears in National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C.