Immigration in an age of
Globalization Part 1:
America’s Immigrants: a twentieth
Century snapshot:
According to Daniels book, in the
decade ending in1990 7.3 million legal immigrants were counted. This huge number, and the US continue to
attract more immigrants even though the country is becoming almost full. The book talks about how our immigration
system is broken. Yesterday while I was doing some homework, a TV program by
Fareed Zakaria grabbed my attention. The episode main focus was about immigration
laws. It discussed other countries practices with immigration and compared them
with the US. Zakaria said that our immigration system is broken it does to many
of the wrong things and not enough things from the right ones. The episode talked about how that we are
lacking skilled workforce in engineering and mathematics. It is projected that
by 2018 the US is going to have 2.8 million jobs opening in science,
engineering, and math, and only 550,000 born American is there to fill them.
This is pretty shocking to hear. This reminded me with a story that happened to
one of my friends. This guy is a brilliant, he is doing is PhD in Stanford
university and his major is energy resource engineering. He resides in the States with a student visa.
He applied for different jobs and he got rejection letters from all of them.
All the employers said that it is very hard on them to hire international
students and that the immigration legislations have tightened. We are simply loosing the skill war with the
rest of the world!!
Canada and Australia, on the other
hand, have smart immigration policies that take in talented foreigners who have
the skills the countries needs. They
transferred themselves to immigrant’s society with a foreign born population
that is higher than the United States. What is surprising is that Australia has
over than quarter of its population foreign born. Fifteen years ago, Australia had a very
strict immigration laws, but it realized that in order to compete in this world
it has to compromise and allow more people to enter the country. According to
census data, 10.4 percent of the total population is foreign born. This percentage is 15 percentages lower than Australia.
The book emphasized on the educational level of those immigrants had around
25.8 percent of these immigrants is a college graduate as oppose to 25.6
percent for native born. An interesting study in 1995 looked at United States
residents with a Ph.D. whether it is from a US institution or elsewhere. The study found that 23 percent of the
science and engineering PhDs, and 12 of non-science and engineering Ph.Ds. were
granted from foreign schools. This shows
that immigrants are not heavy load on the country, but they are assets to our
country.
The United States should make some adjustments
to its immigration laws. It should attract skilled workers in order to compete
with the rest of the world. The United States is afraid of missing up their population
demography if they took that path, because Europeans aren’t the only smart people
on earth. There are other nations who have smart people such as China, India,
and the Middle East. In my opinion, I think that the color doesn’t matter, but
what matters is your loyalty and determination to succeed in the States.
Check out this video, it talks
about the immigration system in the states.
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