The Case Against Skilled Immigration

Reflection on The Hamilton Society Debate XI

The Hamilton Society threw a great debate on Saturday about whether the U.S. needs more skilled migration. 300 people in a church basement, formal dress, parliamentary proceedings, slinging arguments back and forth.

This was an incredibly fun event. It was raucous, it was heated. Someone got kicked out. People tried and failed to follow parliamentary procedure¹.

And it was also thought-provoking. Not all arguments put forth were legitimate, and not all were good. But as someone strongly in favor of more high-skilled immigration, I emerge from the evening with a better understanding of why someone would oppose it.

There were several opposing arguments that I think are worth taking very seriously². To put them in my own words:

1. Obvious problems with the H-1B taint skilled immigration overall. It’s been well-documented that outsourcing companies use the H-1B to essentially replace US workers. If implementation of current skilled visa pathways allows such abuse, then why would we think any future program would be better?

2. Skilled immigration does not exist in isolation, but is a piece of a larger, broken system. You may have heard: There are millions of undocumented immigrants in the US, and people are not happy about this. Emotionally and optically, skilled migration cannot be separated from larger debates on who comes into the country.

3. Immigration is about culture, not just about economics. What kinds of communities do we want to build? What is our shared vision of the future of our great nation? Just showing that immigrants drives GDP growth or firm success won’t cut it.

When I arrived at the event, I had planned to speak, making some points in favor of high-skilled immigration. I was politely told that my arguments weren’t very strong, and after observing the debate, I see why. My points were based on imagined objections to high-skilled migration, not the actual concerns people have.

Now as it happens, I think there are extremely good responses to all of these objections³. They were made with varying degrees of forcefulness by the pro-high-skill-immigration side of the debate.

But the value of debate is having these arguments surfaced and made in their full force before you. Coming face-to-face with the actual argument of the opponent, not the foe you have imagined. Thank you to the Hamilton Society for putting on this debate, and I look forward to attending participating in the next one.

1. Turns out that when your a couple drinks in, it’s hard to remember to refer to the speaker as “the gentleman” rather than “you”.

2. I don’t mention any serious economic arguments against skilled migration because to my memory, no such compelling arguments were raised.

3. In brief, to points 1-2: We should 100% fix the things that are broken. We need people to play by the rules. We should have immigration policies that obviously select for people who make US citizens better off.

To point 3: Amongst other things, we should select for skilled immigrants who will be more patriotic than native-born Americans. Luckily we already do.