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La reforma inmigratoria, una posible solución al sistema en EU

La reforma inmigratoria está finalmente de vuelta en la agenda en Washington, D.C. Eso es algo para celebrar: un sistema que deja desprotegidos a 11 millones de personas mientras niega las oportunidades de empleo a trabajadores y empresas es claramente disfuncional.

Pero si bien es muy bueno que haya una posibilidad real de sacar de la clandestinidad a las personas que carecen de documentación adecuada, hasta ahora no hay ningún debate acerca de la reforma integral que Estados Unidos necesita realmente.

Consideremos lo absurdo del sistema actual; pensemos qué sucedería si cada estado de los Estados Unidos tratara de regular el flujo de personas como lo hace la federación. Los ciudadanos de Minnesota necesitarían visa para estudiar en Massachusetts.

Las compañías de internet en California podrían reclutar solo a un puñado de graduados de Colorado que deberán cubrir una serie de complicados requisitos. Si la mano de obra escaseara a causa de un auge en la explotación de petróleo y gas en Dakota del Norte, las leyes locales no permitirían que las personas ajenas al estado cubrieran esas necesidades legalmente. Y así sucesivamente.

Claramente, bajo tal sistema casi todos estarían peor. A las personas se les negaría la oportunidad de estudiar o trabajar en otros estados, de la misma manera en que se negaría a sus posibles compañeros de clase y colegas la oportunidad de enriquecer su pensamiento y su vida a través de la interacción con ellos.

Las universidades y negocios estarían privados del talento y por lo tanto tendrían menos posibilidades de crecer y crear empleos para los ciudadanos locales.

Todos los pequeños comercios en Dakota del Norte que podrían haber florecido para satisfacer las necesidades locales no podrían hacerlo. Las personas estarían viviendo y trabajando fuera de la ley.

En general, cada ciudadano sufriría por la falta de respeto a la ley, como ocurrió cuando la Prohibición socavó la ley y el orden más que el consumo de alcohol. Si retrocedemos un poco y pensamos en las consecuencias de que los estados limiten la movilidad de esta manera, quedará claro por qué el sistema de inmigración no funciona y el manipular un sistema intrínsecamente defectuoso no hará mucho por mejorar las cosas.

Desde un punto de vista económico y moral, lo mejor sería que todos pudiéramos movernos libremente, como sucedía en el siglo XIX, cuando Estados Unidos tenía fronteras más o menos accesibles. Eso puede parecer una fantasía peligrosa; sin embargo, la reciente experiencia en Europa indica lo contrario.

Ahora las personas pueden moverse libremente a través de los 27 estados miembros de la Unión Europea, desde Lituania hasta Leipzig, Londres y Lisboa. Lejos de causar que las sociedades europeas se derrumben, esta nueva movilidad ha logrado que la gente encuentre empleos más adecuados, ha dado vigor a las comunidades locales y un impulso a los nuevos negocios.

Entonces ¿por qué no hacer lo mismo entre Estados Unidos, Canadá y México? Por temor a que todos los mexicanos se muden a Estados Unidos, pero la experiencia en Europa indica otra cosa.

A lo largo de la Unión Europea, solo una pequeña fracción de los habitantes de los países más pobres se ha mudado a los más ricos para trabajar y la mayoría de ellos lo hace temporalmente. Además, como la diferencia de salarios en Estados Unidos y México es menor que la que hay entre Suecia y Rumania, ¿por qué tendrían que ser diferentes los resultados en América del Norte? De hecho, las personas que se mueven hacia el sur, hacia México, ahora superan en número a los que se mudan al norte, a Estados Unidos.

El permitir que las personas se muevan libremente no es políticamente posible por ahora; Estados Unidos aún podría mejorar su sistema de inmigración haciéndolo menos complicado, arbitrario y discriminador.

¿Por qué no reemplazar las diferentes clases de visas de trabajo, con sus arbitrarias limitaciones y criterios de elegibilidad terriblemente complicados, por un sistema más sencillo y más sensato como el de Suecia? Ahí, los comercios de todo tipo pueden contratar con visas renovables cada dos años a obreros de todas las capacidades, procedentes de todo el mundo, si no logran contratar personas locales adecuadas. Ese tipo de reformas favorables para los mercados serían más beneficiosas que la manipulación de los controles burocráticos.

El rígido sistema de inmigración de Estados Unidos necesita adaptarse a la nueva economía global en el que las personas se mueven cada vez más en todas direcciones, hacia el este y el oeste, hacia el sur y hacia el norte; donde quienes tienen la posibilidad de hacerlo se mueven repetidamente.

A menudo, las oportunidades se encuentran fuera de Estados Unidos; para los estadounidenses (y los africanos) que se dirigen a Shanghai para buscar la riqueza, el sueño chino es más seductor que el sueño americano.

Conforme Asia crece, los emprendedores que pudieron haber ido a Silicon Valley ahora se dirigen a Bangalore o a Beijing. Para competir en este nuevo mundo, el sistema de inmigración de Estados Unidos necesita ser mucho más flexible, enfocarse en facilitar la movilidad de las personas y hacer que la gente valiosa se sienta dispuesta a quedarse, en lugar de tratar de evitar que la gente entre.

How America can fix its immigration system

Immigration reform is finally back on the agenda in Washington, DC. That is something to celebrate: a system that traps 11 million people outside the protections of the law while denying businesses the workers they need to grow is clearly dysfunctional. But while it’s great that there is a real prospect of bringing people who lack proper documents out of the shadows, there is so far no debate about the root-and-branch reform America really needs.

To grasp the absurdity of the current system, consider what would happen if each U.S. state tried to regulate people flows in the way that the 50 states do collectively. Minnesotans would need a visa to study in Massachusetts. Internet companies in California could recruit only a handful of Coloradan graduates among those who met an elaborate set of bureaucratic criteria. If an oil-and-gas boom in North Dakota led to a shortage of all sorts of workers, local laws would prevent people from out of state from filling those needs legally. And so on.

Clearly, under such a system pretty much everyone would be worse off. The people denied opportunities to study or work across state lines, as well as their would-be classmates and colleagues whose thinking and lives would have been enriched by interacting with them. The universities and businesses deprived of talent and therefore less able to grow and create jobs for local people. All the small businesses in North Dakota that might have sprung up to satisfy local needs, but couldn’t. The people living and working outside the law. More generally, every citizen would suffer from the decline in respect for the rule of law, just as Prohibition did far more to undermine law and order than drinking booze ever has. If you step back a little and think through the consequences of each state restricting mobility in this way, it ought to be clearer why America’s immigration system doesn’t work – and why tinkering with an intrinsically flawed system will go only a little way toward making things better.

More from GPS: What America can learn from Britain

From an economic – and a moral – point of view, it would be best if everybody could move freely, as they could in the 19th century, when the United States had more or less open borders. That may seem like a dangerous fantasy, yet recent experience in Europe suggests otherwise. People can now move freely across the 27 member states of the European Union – from Lithuania to Leipzig and on to London and Lisbon. Far from causing European societies to collapse, this new mobility has better matched people to jobs, reinvigorated local communities and sparked dynamic new businesses.

So why not do the same in North America – between the United States, Canada and Mexico? Contrary to the fear that everyone in Mexico would move to the U.S. if they could, experience in Europe suggests otherwise. Across the EU, only a small fraction of the population from poorer countries has moved to richer ones – mostly temporarily, to work. And since the difference in income levels between the U.S. and Mexico is smaller than that between Sweden and Romania, why should things turn out differently in North America? In fact, people moving south to Mexico now outnumber those moving north to the United States.

Insofar as allowing people to move freely is not politically possible for now, America could still greatly improve its immigration system by making this less complicated, arbitrary and discriminatory. Why not replace all the different classes of work visas, with their arbitrary numerical limits and devilishly complicated eligibility criteria, with a simpler and more sensible system like Sweden has? There, businesses of all kinds can hire workers of all skill levels from around the world on two-year renewable visas if they can’t find suitable local recruits. Market-friendly reforms like that would do far more good than fiddling with bureaucratic controls.

America’s hidebound immigration system needs to adapt to a new global economy where people are increasingly on the move in all directions, east as well as west, south as well as north – and where those who have a choice often move repeatedly.

Often, opportunities now lie outside America; for Americans (and Africans) heading to Shanghai to try to strike it rich, the Chinese dream is more alluring than the American one. As Asia rises, entrepreneurs who might have gone to Silicon Valley are heading for Bangalore or Beijing. To compete in this new world, America’s immigration system needs to be much more flexible, focusing on making it easy for people to come and go and attractive for valued people to stay, rather than trying to keep people out.

Why America needs immigrants

It is no longer acceptable to discriminate against people on the basis of a whole range of characteristics that they happen to be born with, notably their gender, their race and their sexuality. So why is it still deemed acceptable to discriminate against people on the basis of where they happen to have been born?

The world is anything but flat: the biggest determinant of your life chances is not how talented you are or how hard you work, it is where you were born and who your parents are. Anyone lucky enough to have been born in the United States who doubts this should try to imagine how different their life would have been if they had been born in Africa.

A hard-working entrepreneur born in a remote African village has far fewer opportunities to achieve his dreams than a lazy dimwit born in America. Even if the African seizes all her chances and the American none, the American is still likely to enjoy a more comfortable life. And the surest thing that African could do to transform her (and her family’s) life chances is to go and work in the U.S.

But only if governments allow her to. Unfortunately, we live in a system of global apartheid, where the rich and the educated can move about increasingly freely, while the poor are expected to stay put, like serfs tied to the land where they were born.

For the most part, people are oblivious to the injustice of this: it is seen as part of the natural order of things, like slavery once was. But insofar as people try to justify this unnatural and unjust state of affairs, they claim immigration controls are necessary to protect people in rich countries from their poorer brethren. Yet if one thinks a bit more carefully, one realizes that these objections don’t stand up.

One objection to allowing women into the workplace was that they would take jobs away from men. But in practice, women have not deprived men of work. Why? Because people don’t just take jobs, they also create them, when they spend their wages as well as in complementary lines of work. The same is true, of course, of immigrants.

Another objection is that immigrants will all end up on welfare – as if someone enterprising enough to uproot themselves to move to America will suddenly want to do nothing, even though they could earn more working. Indeed, when immigrants are working, they’re accused of stealing “our” jobs and when they’re out of work, they’re accused of scrounging from the state. They can’t win: they’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Such accusations tell us more about critics’ prejudices than about immigrants’ behavior.

There is also something unpleasant about the notion that governments can – and ought to – select only the seemingly best people to allow in to a country. It is nonsense that we can predict how someone will contribute to a country, let alone how their children will. Who would have guessed that the son of a Kenyan goatherd would end up as U.S. president?

Google, Yahoo!, eBay, Intel and many other companies were all co-founded by people born outside America who arrived not through some clever selection process, but as children. Nobody could have guessed, when he arrived in the United States as a child refugee from the Soviet Union, that Sergey Brin would go on to co-found Google. Had he been denied entry, America would never have realized the opportunity that had been missed. How many potential Sergey Brins do Europe and post-9/11 America turn away or scare off – and at what cost?

As Fareed Zakaria rightly remarked in his book “The Post-American World,”: “America has succeeded not because of the ingenuity of its government programs but because of the vigor of its society. It has thrived because it has kept itself open to the world – to goods and services, to ideas and inventions, and, above all to peoples and cultures.”