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Ali Noorani. Photo by Joel Geertsma.

Ali Noorani is the director of the National Immigration Forum, an organization that highlights immigrants contributions to American society and seeks to reform immigration law. He was previously director of the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition. Nooranis recently published book There Goes the Neighborhood: How Communities Overcome Prejudice and Meet the Challenge of American Immigration draws on his efforts to engage a wide range of conversation partners on the issue.

Whats gone wrong in the debate over immigration?

For years the debate has been about policy or politics. But for the majority of Americans, immigration is about culture and values. At the National Immigration Forum, we find that peoples first questions about immigration are: Is my culture going to change? Are my values going to change? Is my neighborhood going to change? We have to understand the cultural debate.

What do you mean by cultural debate?

People struggle with this issue through the lens of their faith, or through their belief that this is a nation of laws, or through a belief in a free market. Faith, a legal framework, capitalismthese are elements of American culture and these elements need to be engaged. In this case, I think the church in particular has a crucial role to play.

What does it take to engage these subjects?

It is first of all a matter of understanding where people are coming from. You have to listen to the language and listen to the concerns. After that, you can develop a way to have the conversation. Ive learned how important the language of welcoming the stranger is in a faith context, and Ive also learned why people are committed to wanting to live in a nation of laws that are obeyed. I appreciate the tension that sometimes exists between these two commitments.

Does the conversation on values depend on Americans sharing the same culture or set of values?

I am not sure that we do share a common definition of what it means to be American, but I think the way we recapture that common definition and understanding is not through the political process. We cant depend on political parties to provide moral clarity. We need to work through churches, schools, the military, businesses. That is where people are either forced to or given the opportunity to get out of their bubbles.

Do churches help people get out of their bubbles?

I write in the book about how First Baptist Church in Spartanburg, South Carolina, is welcoming Syrian refugees regardless of their religious identity. Spartanburg is small-town South Carolina. I think we can find lots of examples where churches are creating these bridges. In fact, Im not sure there is a more important institution in America than the church in resolving these differences.

What is the role of clergy and religious leaders in this conversation?

Russell Moore of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, Archbishop Thomas Wenski, and other faith leaders have shown me that the job of faith leaders is not to speak to matters of policy but to speak to the values and the cultural framework underneath a policy. If we ask a pastor to speak to a policy detail, we are actually taking one of the most trusted players off the field. Pastors can educate their congregations, but on matters of values, not about a particular visa program.

Do you find yourself, as a result of these conversations, thinking about policy in a different way?

My policy framework isnt different. The goal is still a functioning immigration system with legalization and eventual citizenship for the undocumented. But I realize we have to do a much better job of communicating how that framework of reform maps onto values that people are expressing. If we want conservative voters in the Midwest to understand why immigration is a benefit to them, we need to understand what their fears and hopes are. Over time, you can have a conversation where you move to clarity about what you agree on and what you disagree on. Once you have established that level of trust, you can look for a common set of principles and ways to share those common principles with networks.

Can you give an example of how this works?

In 2010 Utah was slated to be the next place after Arizona where a show me your papers law for immigrants was going to go into effect. Conservative faith leaders, law enforcement officials, and business leaders came together to find an alternative route. They developed what came to be called the Utah Compact, consisting of principlesnot policiesrelated to family, security, and the free market, principles that resonated deeply with Utahans. These principles became the rallying point for the initial group of signatories that included the Catholic Church, the Republican attorney general, faith leaders from the Mormon community, and the Utah Chamber of Commerce. It quickly moved into the legislature. The Utah Compact stopped the show me your papers law in its tracks.

Legislators recognized that their constituents did not want a replica of the Arizona law. They wanted something that fit the culture and values of Utah. So we could move forward on immigration if we could bring the right people into the room and articulate the right principles.

What is the future of this strategy?

Since 2011, the forum has put a priority on engaging faith leaders, law enforcement officials, and business leaders. We stumbled on the phrase Bible, Badges, and Business, based on the idea that if you hold a Bible, wear a badge, or own a business, you want a common-sense solution to the immigration system. We now have a network of trusted leaders who look to the forum for how to move forward.

Coming out of the election, I wondered if the network would stick together. A large number of people in our network voted for Trump. While a few have questioned whether we really need comprehensive immigration reform after the election, 99 percent of the network has stuck together. This network is finding its voice. For example, the Evangelical Immigration Table sent the Trump administration a letter urging it to help the Iraqi Christian community, which is being threatened with deportation. That might not have happened right after the election. The law enforcement community is also trying to find its voice, as Congress is considering enforcement-only legislation that they dont fully support.

How far out is comprehensive immigration reform?

Far. But if there is one president who could help pass comprehensive immigration reform, it is Donald Trump. He has an incredible opportunity to fix this problem. I am not sure his base will allow him to do that, but maybe there will be an opportunity. For the president, its a question of political will.

Could you offer me a story that gives you hope?

In Spartanburg we recently held an event at the Hispanic Alliance. There were more than 80 people in the room, and they included not only the Hispanic community, but representatives of the Baptist community, the local sheriffs office, and the business community. They all wanted to advance a constructive dialogue on immigrants and immigration in South Carolina, one of the most conservative states in the country.

A version of this article appears in the August 16 print edition under the title Talking together about immigration.

More:
Why churches still matter for immigration reform - The Christian Century

In 2013, a group of tech heavyweights, led by Facebooks Mark Zuckerberg and including fellow oligarchs Eric Schmidt (Google) and Bill Gates (Microsoft), founded FWD.us, a lobbying and advocacy group that would go on to spend millions of dollars promoting comprehensive immigration reform. Of course, the founders had not anticipated the 2016 election of Donald Trump as president.

Neither had a bevy of pundits, some of whom, in the wake of Trumps victory, have attempted to recalibrate witness longtime immigration enthusiast Fareed Zakaria speaking about the need for Democrats to take less absolutist positions on immigration and to put more emphasis on admitting skilled workers. But more typical was the reaction of those such as the New York Times Bret Stephens, a house conservative. In a satirical column, Stephens touted the alleged superiority of immigrants to native-born Americans focusing, inter alia, on cherry-picked data showing their allegedly superior educational achievements and entrepreneurial skills.

FWD.us and Zuckerberg began by emphasizing skilled immigrants but then backed off as critics on the left accused them of elitism. The bigger problem were trying to address is ensuring the 11 million undocumented folks living in this country now and similar folks in the future are treated fairly, Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook.

But do we need comprehensive immigration reform to maintain our technological and entrepreneurial leadership? Will Americas technology and innovation base be devastated by President Trumps crackdown on illegal immigration, his attempts to reform legal immigration, and his temporary ban on admitting travelers from a small number of countries with governments known to be unstable or hostile to the U.S.? Data on immigrants in Silicon Valley suggest that the answer is no.

Stephens lambastes those who wish to enforce our immigration laws with respect to so-called DREAMers, who came to this country illegally as youths. But if past trends hold, those who will benefit from amnesty programs and comprehensive immigration reform are unlikely to be a significant share of our next generation of top-flight engineers and scientists.

Instead, the amnesty advocated by Stephens and Zuckerberg would disproportionately benefit the 28 percent of immigrants who have not finished high school (the figure for the native-born is 8 percent). These include the foreign-born house cleaners and taxi drivers who are already half of the work force in those sectors.

Unsurprisingly, the current approach to amnesty has had a catastrophic effect on the employment prospects of young American-born citizens whose formal education stopped at or before graduation from high school. Their employment rate fell from 66 percent in 2000 to 53 percent in 2015, as low-skilled immigration to the U.S. soared.

The typical technology company saw little benefit from these immigrants. The data show that the most successful technology companies are disproportionately founded by native-born Americans and that the immigrants who do found top tech companies tend to have arrived already highly skilled and educated. They are seldom undocumented, refugees, or members of any of the other immigrant categories prioritized by the Left.

Consider the children of these highly skilled and educated immigrants. The National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP), which promotes increased immigration, looked at the 2016 Intel Science Talent Search and found that, of the 40 finalists, 33 had immigrant parents. Of those 33, all but three had parents who were at some point living in the U.S. on H-1B visas, temporary cards reserved primarily for workers with skills in high demand in the technology industry. On the surface, this seems to be a huge endorsement of increased immigration, which is how NFAP frames it.

But these highly skilled immigrants are wildly unrepresentative of U.S. immigrants as a whole. Of the 40 finalists, 25 had parents from India and China. Three were of mixed U.S.immigrant parentage (and were therefore eligible for citizenship). If we did nothing more than include the children of U.S. citizens and of Chinese and Indian holders of H-1B visas, we would have covered more than 90 percent of U.S. prize winners. It appears that none arrived illegally.

Even that, however, overstates the significance of employer-based H-1Bs. Of the nine eventual award winners who were children of immigrants, only one appears to have parents who came to the U.S. directly for employment. The others graduated from U.S. universities, usually with advanced degrees. All but one were from India, which at the time of their entry contributed only 2 percent of the annual immigration to the United States.

The Trump administration has floated commonsense proposals for H-1B reform. Currently under review by the Departments of State, Labor, and Homeland Security, they would raise standards that a tech immigrant would have to meet, and they would restrict his ability to take lower-end jobs.

* * *

The false claim that the United States must embrace comprehensive immigration reform to maintain its leading role in science is a simple continuation of the rhetoric we heard in the presidential campaign. Last year, The Hill breathlessly announced (and liberals relentlessly retweeted) that all six Americans who had just been named Nobel laureates in the sciences and economics were immigrants. But of these six immigrants, five came from Great Britain, one from Finland. Together, those countries currently contribute less than 2 percent of U.S. immigrants annually. Moreover, all of the six came to the U.S. as accomplished academics whom America would have welcomed regardless of their national origin.

How about when budding students who are the children of accomplished immigrants grow up to be scientists and engineers? Immigrants undoubtedly play a vital role in Silicon Valley, four in ten of whose residents are now foreign-born. But what is striking about the Valleys most successful companies is not how many were founded by immigrants, but how few.

Of the twelve U.S.-based Internet companies that are among the worlds 25 largest in sales, none had a primary founder who immigrated to the U.S. as an adult. Only two had a primary co-founder who was an immigrant. Both of those men immigrated to the U.S. as young children and teamed up with a U.S.-born co-founder. They were not trained abroad but rather were educated in the American system. The father of Google co-founder Sergey Brin was a successful mathematician in the former Soviet Union despite having to endure anti-Semitic discrimination. Ebay founder Pierre Omidayar, the only foreign-born person to start one of the Silicon Valley whales solo, immigrated as a child from France, where his parents were distinguished academics. Such highly skilled immigrant parents were welcomed to the United States legally.

The record is similar when we look at the next generation of Facebooks and Googles. Of the twelve technology companies valued at $5 billion or more in private markets according to CB Insights, only three had a primary co-founder who was an immigrant: Palantirs Peter Thiel, whose father was a chemical engineer, came to the U.S. from Germany as a baby and founded the company with American-born co-founders. Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and Tesla, immigrated from Canada to the University of Pennsylvania. Stripe was founded by two brothers from Ireland who attended Harvard and MIT. All would have been let in under any reasonable policy of merit-based immigration.

In 2016 the National Foundation for American Policy looked at private companies valued at $1 billion or more. Here, the demographics of founders and co-founders who were immigrants sharply diverged from those of Americas immigrants overall. Of 87 companies, 44 had at least one immigrant co-founder, for a total of 61 individuals. Thirty-seven of them were from just four countries: India, Israel, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Eleven were from elsewhere in Western Europe, which currently accounts for less than 10 percent of overall immigration to the United States. In this sample, too, the immigrants who can be seen as leaders in the U.S. technology revolution do not resemble the broader immigrant population in terms of their educational background or country of origin. We are perfectly capable of finding and attracting these immigrants without giving up on borders or otherwise allowing mass immigration.

The H-1B system itself needs reform. In theory, H-1B visas are supposed to bring in workers with skills that Americans dont have. In practice, the system is rife with abuse. CBS News recently reported that San Francisco State University fired all of its IT workers and replaced them with cheaper workers from abroad. It did so with the help of a regulation issued late in Obamas second term. In 2016, more than 180,000 H-1B visas were issued. That number is up from 135,000 just four years earlier.

Whatever the current problems with H-1B visas, however, many recipients are skilled workers we should want to welcome. Yet talk to folks in the Valley and you will hear about mediocre H-1B holders hired simply for their low cost. Several reforms, suggested by Trump and others, would dramatically increase the minimum H-1B salary to make sure we were importing only the best and brightest workers. Such reforms would allow the U.S. to continue to attract the most highly skilled immigrants from around the world while admitting fewer technology workers than it does today, to the benefit of American workers who would take jobs for which immigrant labor is not truly needed.

The data show that enforcing our immigration laws and dramatically reducing the admission of unskilled and low-skilled immigrants, including refugees (many of whom are not truly fleeing violence but rather seeking economic opportunity), would not reduce our competitiveness. We do not need millions of nurses, gardeners, and restaurant workers coming to the U.S. to displace millions of Americans of all ethnic backgrounds and disproportionately co-ethnics of the new arrivals who are fully capable of doing these jobs. (Yes, the native-born may command higher wages, but when did it become a core conservative value that we dont want working-class Americans of all backgrounds to be able to earn a better living through hard work?)

* * *

Highly skilled immigrants will continue to be a key part of Silicon Valley for the foreseeable future. And that is as it should be. But by and large they are identifiable by their academic or professional accomplishments before they set foot in the U.S. Even in Silicon Valley, we could substantially reduce the level of immigration with little effect on competitiveness. A great deal of benefit would accrue to American engineers and computer scientists of all ethnicities and income levels.

If Silicon Valley is dedicated to making sure America continues to recruit the worlds best and brightest workers, it will find a willing partner in the current administration. If the Valley continues to assume, against all empirical evidence, that high levels of unskilled immigration and cheap tech sweatshop workers are essential to maintain U.S. competitiveness, no one should be surprised if the Trump administration turns a cold shoulder.

Meanwhile, FWD.us continues to advocate amnesty. With America facing so many serious challenges, were not content to nibble around the edges, reads the FWD.us website. We push for policies that overhaul entrenched systems and benefit large numbers of people. Its an admirable goal. But the best way to reach it is to build an immigration system that attracts the most professionally qualified immigrants, gives them the greatest possible opportunity to succeed, and does so in a way that benefits all Americans.

And that also means considering immigration in more than just economic terms. Since 2000, Santa Clara and San Mateo counties the heart of Silicon Valley have lost more than 300,000 residents (primarily citizens) and added far more than that number of immigrants. No doubt the Valley has birthed tremendous companies during that time and made the Zuckerbergs of the world very rich, but at what cost to the average American who lived here 20 years ago? If an outcome in which almost one out of seven residents is desperate enough to leave the area in less than 20 years is defined as success, one shudders to think what failure might look like.

-- Jeremy Carl is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. This piece appeared in the July 31, 2017, issue of National Review.

Go here to read the rest:
Silicon Valley's Foolish Amnesty Push - National Review

Sacramento Bee

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Meet the law professor who's been on the frontlines of the Trump immigration battles - Sacramento Bee

Washington Times

Group Continues To Push Immigration Reform KJZZ Recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program, have gotten some mixed messages over the past several months. On one hand, then-candidate Trump promised to end the program, but last month, the administration announced it ... Convincing Trump on DACAThe Republican Standard all 12 news articles »

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Group Continues To Push Immigration Reform - KJZZ

Published Jul 31, 2017 at 12:01 am (Updated Jul 31, 2017 at 12:01 pm)

New home affairs minister Walton Brown has pledged a truly inclusive consultation period before introducing immigration reform.

Mr Brown said the Immigration Reform Working Group is tasked with producing a report based on the principles that Bermudians come first, while the business sector is treated in a friendly manner that encourages growth. The group will report by the end of October.

That will be followed by a three-month consultation period involving the public, the Opposition and stakeholder groups, before policy and legislation changes are finally proposed.

Brown said in a statement: We want to give the public a fair amount of time to consider the principles put forward by the working group as well as other issues related to immigration reform inclusive of the work-permit policy.

The question of immigration reform has been a challenging one, with many distinct groups affected by it. Our intention is to create a truly inclusive and collaborative approach to get the best fit for Bermuda. I look forward to an engaged public on this matter.

In the statement, Mr Brown announced that he is no longer a member of the working group and has called on the remaining members to take a principles first approach.

All laws should be developed or based on sound principles, he said. That is why the creation of such principles must come before any amendments to legislation are made or even put forward.

The principles I want to see embraced when it comes to immigration reform are ones rooted in a sense of justice for all parties within the context of Bermudians coming first while also maintaining a framework that will foster continued growth in the business sector, using a friendly and accommodating approach.

The group, formed in April last year following public anger over the One Bermuda Alliance governments pathways to status proposal, had been tasked with proposing amendments to the Bermuda Immigration and Protection Act 1956.

In a letter to the groups members this week, Mr Brown stated the terms of reference for the group would be to continue work on their survey to obtain sound statistics on mixed-status families.

The members are also tasked with recommending the principles of new policies in relation to mixed status families along with, if applicable, additional categories of Permanent Resident certificates or Bermudian status.

I would like to publicly thank the Immigration Reform Working Group for their participation over the past year, Mr Brown added. The group has worked really well together. Their input has been and continues to be invaluable.

The work to this point will certainly go a long way in accomplishing the reform of the Immigration Act.

This article was amended to reflect that Mr Brown advised the Immigration Reform Working Group to obtain sound statistics on mixed-status families, not mixed-race families as previously incorrectly reported

Link:
Brown to consult on immigration reform - Royal Gazette