By Patrick McGeehan and Kirk Semple
via nytimes.com

Affluent foreigners are rushing to take advantage of a federal immigration program that offers them the chance to obtain a green card in return for investing in construction projects in the United States. With credit tight, the program has unexpectedly turned into a mainstay for the financing of these projects in New York, California, Texas and other states.

The number of foreign applicants, each of whom must invest at least $500,000 in a project, has nearly quadrupled in the last two years, to more than 3,800 in the 2011 fiscal year, officials said. Demand has grown so fast that the Obama administration, which is championing the program, is seeking to streamline the application process.

Still, some critics of the program have described it as an improper use of the immigration system to spur economic development — a cash-for-visas scheme. And an examination of the program by The New York Times suggests that in New York, developers and state officials are stretching the rules to qualify projects for this foreign financing.

These developers are often relying on gerrymandering techniques to create development zones that are supposedly in areas of high unemployment — and thus eligible for special concessions — but actually are in prosperous ones, according to federal and state records.

One of the more prominent projects is a 34-story glass tower in Manhattan that is to cost $750 million, one-fifth of which is to come from foreign investors seeking green cards. Called the International Gem Tower, it is rising near Fifth Avenue in the diamond district of Manhattan, one of the wealthiest areas in the country.

Yet through the selective use of census statistics, state officials have classified the area as one plagued by high unemployment, the federal and state records show. As a result, the developer has increased the project’s chances of attracting foreigners who will accept little, if any, return on their investment in the project if it means they can secure American visas for their families.

A senior federal immigration official, Alejandro Mayorkas, acknowledged in an interview on Friday that the program might need more scrutiny. Mr. Mayorkas and other federal officials said they were concerned that some of the maps that New York and other states were approving might not adhere to the spirit and intent of the regulations.

The Times’s review of the program in New York indicates that several other major projects are also based on questionable maps.

For example, the Battery Maritime Building, at the foot of Manhattan near Wall Street, has been classified as being located in an area that needs help attracting jobs. That designation is the result of a development zone whose outlines resemble a gerrymandered political district, project documents show.

The zone snakes up through the Lower East Side, skirting the wealthy enclaves of Battery Park City and TriBeCa, and then jumps across the East River to annex the Farragut Houses project in Vinegar Hill, Brooklyn.

In fact, the small census tract that contains the Farragut Houses has become a go-to area for developers seeking to use the visa program: its unemployed residents have been counted toward three projects already.

The giant Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, which abuts well-heeled brownstone neighborhoods, has also qualified for the special concessions using a gerrymandered high-unemployment district: the crescent-shaped zone swings more than two miles to the northeast to include poor sections of Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant. A local blogger and critic of Atlantic Yards, Norman Oder, has referred to the map as “the Bed-Stuy Boomerang.”

Since 2008, developers have raised or have planned to raise close to $1 billion on these projects in New York City, according to federal and state records. Almost all of that money would come in increments of $500,000 — much of it from residents of China — and pour into wealthy areas.

In interviews, New York State economic-development officials praised the program but were reluctant to accept responsibility for administering it. Indeed, some state officials who certified projects for the program acknowledged that they did not know what was being built. They said they were following guidance from federal regulators.

“This program serves as a valuable tool to support job-creating projects that will put areas of high unemployment on a continued path to economic recovery and growth,” said Austin Shafran, a spokesman for Empire State Development, the state agency that oversees the program in New York.

Urged on by federal and state officials, investors in faraway places like Shanghai and Seoul along with American developers have been flocking to the program, which was created by Congress during the recession of 1990.

Under the program, known as EB-5, investors receive a visa that provides residency for two years and can be converted into a permanent green card if the holders can show the investment produced at least 10 jobs, even if the project has not been completed.

With the surge in EB-5 projects, many lawyers and consultants, in the United States and overseas, are getting involved. In China alone, more than 500 agents are jockeying to connect wealthy Chinese people to American developers, experts said.

Investors throng EB-5 conferences. Many, successful in their own countries, said they wanted to secure American residency for their children. But the competition has given rise to unsavory practices, EB-5 lawyers and consultants said, like agents who falsely promise guaranteed returns.

The minimum investment in the program was set at $1 million and has not changed in more than 20 years. But if the project is in a rural area or a place where the unemployment rate is 50 percent above the national average, the threshold for investing is $500,000, not $1 million.

By creating development zones that are ruled eligible for $500,000 investments, urban developers are at an advantage in luring contributions.

The zone drawn up for the Gem Tower consists of two census tracts in Midtown Manhattan. According to census figures, the tract that contains the project had an unemployment rate of zero for the last five years.

But the State Labor Department calculated that there were enough unemployed people in an adjoining census tract — one that includes Times Square — to justify calling the small zone an area of high unemployment.

Lela Goren, director general of Extell New York Regional Center, which is helping to raise the EB-5 investments for the Gem Tower, said she could not explain how the tower’s zone qualified as needy. “It qualifies, whatever the numbers, and it got approved,” Ms. Goren said.

The consultants arranging the EB-5 financing for the Battery Maritime and Atlantic Yards projects declined to comment.

Officials in other states expressed dismay over how New York developers were using the program. They said New York was unfairly siphoning off investments from less-developed areas.

“A lot of projects are in areas that are head-scratchers,” said James Candido, an official with Vermont’s Department of Economic Development.

Other states have sometimes not allowed such questionable development zones. California told a developer to relocate a manufacturing plant for a surgical-products company from a more prosperous part of San Jose to a poorer one, said Brook J. Taylor, a spokesman for the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development in California.

Federal regulators said states determined whether projects were located in areas of “greatest need.”

“The question is, are the state authorities adhering to the spirit of the law?” said Mr. Mayorkas, the federal immigration official who is the director of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. “Where is the project being developed, and where are the jobs being created? Are the people from the areas of high unemployment being employed? Because that’s really the purpose. If they’re not being hired from those areas, then the question is justified.”

Mr. Mayorkas, whose staff has been scrambling to keep up with the boom in the program, said in the interview on Friday that he was concerned about allegations of gerrymandering.

If some project designations were not achieving “legislative intent,” he said, “then I think that is something that we need to consider as the laws are reviewed.”

By A.G. SULZBERGER, NYTimes
ULYSSES, Kan. — Change can be unsettling in a small town. But not long ago in this quiet farming community, with its familiar skyline of grain elevators and church steeples, the owner of a new restaurant decided to acknowledge the community’s diversity by adding some less traditional items to her menu. Cheeseburgers. French fries. Chicken-fried steak.

“American food,” the restaurant owner, Luz Gonzalez, calls it. And she signaled her move by giving her Mexican restaurant a distinctly American name: “The Down-Town Restaurant.”

Such fare was all but extinct in a place where longtime residents joke — often with a barely disguised tone of frustration — that the dining options are Mexican, Mexican or Mexican. After the last white-owned restaurant serving American favorites closed this year, it fell to one of the recent Hispanic arrivals to keep the burgers-and-fries legacy alive. Ms. Gonzalez even enlisted the help of neighbors to teach her to cook more exotic dishes — like potato salad.

For generations, the story of the small rural town of the Great Plains, including the dusty tabletop landscape of western Kansas, has been one of exodus — of businesses closing, classrooms shrinking and, year after year, communities withering as fewer people arrive than leave and as fewer are born than are buried. That flight continues, but another demographic trend has breathed new life into the region.

Hispanics are arriving in numbers large enough to offset or even exceed the decline in the white population in many places. In the process, these new residents are reopening shuttered storefronts with Mexican groceries, filling the schools with children whose first language is Spanish and, for now at least, extending the lives of communities that seemed to be staggering toward the grave.

That demographic shift, seen in the findings of the 2010 census, has not been uniformly welcomed in places where steadiness and tradition are seen as central charms of rural life. Some longtime residents of Ulysses, where the population of 6,161 is now about half Hispanic, grumble over the cultural differences and say they feel like strangers in their hometown. But the alternative, community leaders warn, is unacceptable.

“We’re either going to change or we’re going to die,” said Thadd Kistler, a lifelong resident who recently stepped down as mayor. “This is Ulysses now, this is the United States now, this immigration is happening and the communities that are extending a hand are going to survive.”

After years in which mostly white communities throughout the region used gimmicks to lure new residents with limited success, like offering free land or lengthy tax abatements, many are wondering if this unexpected multicultural mix offers one vision of what the future of the rural Great Plains may look like.

“The face of small towns is changing dramatically as a result,” said Robert Wuthnow, a Kansas-born Princeton professor who studied the Hispanic influx for his book “Remaking the Heartland: Middle America since the 1950s.” “The question is: Is this going to save these small towns?”

There has long been a strong Hispanic presence throughout the region, which is rich with difficult work in meatpacking plants and on farms, feedlots and oil fields. But over the last decade, as their population in the rural Great Plains spiked by 54 percent — a figure comparable to gains in metro areas in the region — Hispanic residents have pushed from hubs like nearby Dodge City, Garden City and Liberal into ever smaller communities, buying property on the cheap, enticed, many say, by the opportunity to live quiet lives in communities more similar to those in which they were raised.

In the sparsely populated western half of Kansas, every county but one experienced a decline in the non-Hispanic white population, two-thirds of them by more than 10 percent.

At the same time, a vast majority experienced double-digit growth in Hispanic population, more than offsetting the declines in seven counties and many smaller cities and towns. Those places with the highest percentage of Hispanic residents tend to have the lowest average ages, the highest birth rates and the most stable school populations.

“These towns, I don’t know what they would do without Mexicans,” said Oscar Rivera, a Honduran immigrant who lives in a community of a few hundred people and travels through rural parts of western Kansas selling prepaid phone cards used to call overseas. “It would be like ghost towns.”

One such town is Bazine, about two hours from here and little even by the standards of its neighbors. The decaying strip of downtown stores was abandoned long ago, and empty houses dotted the surrounding streets. A few years back, the high school closed and the building was sold on eBay. There was talk about shutting the elementary school as well.

“The decline was happening,” said Patricia Showalter, the mayor, standing inside the little post office she runs. “And then the Hispanic people came.”

For the first time in more than a half century, the population grew in the latest census, inching up to 334 as the Hispanic population jumped to 86 from 4. Now every house in town is occupied. A new church, La Luz del Mundo, just opened. Though there are no new businesses on Main Street, some entrepreneurial newcomers sell homemade tamales door to door.

And, most importantly to those who had watched the town become ever older, the school enrollment is growing.

In neighboring Ransom, which is almost entirely white, the student population has declined to 34 from 62 in the last eight years. Meanwhile, in Bazine, the numbers have increased to 46, up from 35. The average age in Ransom is 15 years older than in Bazine.

In Ulysses, which grew a modest 3 percent over the last decade, much appears unchanged by the years. Livelihoods are still tied to the earth, where people grow wheat and corn in the dusty soil, drill for the generous deposits of oil and gas beneath the surface and feed cows inside muddy pens that line the roads. Churches — there are more than a dozen — still play an important role, and the pace is still slower than what one usually experiences in a bigger city.

But the influx of Hispanics, a majority of whom were born in Mexico, has left an unmistakable impact.

Rachel Gallegos remembers that as a young girl she was the only Hispanic student in her class and her parents’ Mexican restaurant was the first Hispanic business in town. Now, Hispanics make up two-thirds of the school population and own bakeries, clothing stores, car dealerships and computer repair shops, some catering to Hispanics and others simply filling vacant niches.

And when children become adults, a time when residents have historically headed to bigger communities seeking opportunity, her family was becoming rooted in the community — Ms. Gallegos said that of her nine siblings and their two dozen children, all but a couple remained.

Ginger Anthony, director of the Historic Adobe Museum, which chronicles the history of the onetime frontier town, discussed the changes with dismay, pausing repeatedly to reiterate that she did not want her criticism to seem “politically incorrect.” She is so unnerved, particularly by illegal immigrants, that she recently started locking her door — saying that the police-beat column in the local paper disproportionately features Spanish surnames.

“This wave of new people coming into the Midwest, it’s not always a good thing,” she said, as a co-worker nodded in agreement. “If you talk to the average working person, a lot of them are sort of fed up. Our town isn’t what it was.”

But Hispanic residents here say they have been mostly well received, even if the non-Hispanics sometimes keep their distance. There are exceptions, like when students at a neighboring high school showed up to a basketball game in sombreros and tossed tortillas onto the court.

Jose Olivas, a longtime community developer with Mexican American Ministries, said that it took years of pressure to hire Hispanic employees at schools and at some businesses. Now employers are taking Spanish lessons, and expressing preference for bilingual job applicants.

“For a while you had to be careful,” Mr. Olivas said. “But they’ve really changed their attitudes.”

Mr. Kistler, the former mayor, agreed that there were culture clashes, but said they were slowly dissipating.

“At first every community, including Ulysses, was very unwelcoming, but a lot of that was because we wanted to hold on so tight to what we were,” he said. “In the last five years, we’ve really seen that they’re here, they’re staying, they’re part of the community. We’ve kind of gotten used to each other.”

Part of that has been dictated by demographics.

At the hospital in town, exactly half of the 102 babies born last year were Hispanic. And in a telling sign of the future of the community, 13 babies were listed as having one white and one Hispanic parent.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 15, 2011

Because of an editing error, an article on Monday about the growing Hispanic population in small rural towns throughout the Great Plains misstated, in some editions, the population for one of the towns, Ulysses, Kan. In the 2010 Census, the population was 6,161, not 6,933. And also because of an editing error, the article referred incorrectly in some editions to the decline in the non-Hispanic white population in western Kansas. It declined in all counties but one (Ellis County) — not in all counties.

Hundreds of thousands of people immigrate every year, with some countries seeing higher rates than others. To compare and to gain a better sense of the number of people moving around, Carlo Zapponi created peoplemovin.

Each side is a super long stacked bar that represents international migration in 2010, and countries are in alphabetical order. Click on the left to see emigration from the selected country or click on the right to see where people have immigrated from.

I’m kind of struggling with the line lengths because the bars are so long. You’re looking at migration — people moving from point A to point B — but a long line doesn’t mean anything. The color scheme, which I think represents migration rates, is also not clear. So take it for what it is. It’s still interesting to click around.

via FlowingData.com

Source: Brookings Institution

Highly skilled temporary and permanent immigrants in the United States now outnumber lower-skilled ones, marking a dramatic shift in the foreign-born workforce that could have profound political and economic implications in the national debate over immigration. This shift in America’s immigration population, based on census data, is summarized in a report released Thursday by the Brookings Institution. It found that 30 percent of the country’s working-age immigrants, regardless of legal status, have at least a bachelor’s degree, while 28 percent lack a high school diploma.

The shift had been in the works for the past three decades, a period that has seen a dramatic increase in the population born outside the United States. But in 2007 the percentage of highly skilled workers overtook that of lower-skilled workers. The trend reflects a fundamental change in the structure and demands of the U.S. economy, which in the past decades transformed from an economy driven by manufacturing to one driven by information and technology. The report also offers a new perspective on the national immigration discourse, which tends to fixate on low-skilled, and often illegal, workers.

“Too often the immigration debate is driven by images on television of people jumping over fences,” said Benjamin Johnson, executive director of the American Immigration Council, an immigrant advocacy organization. “The debate has been stuck in the idea that it’s all about illegal and low-skilled workers.” Steven Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies, an organization that advocates for tighter immigration restrictions, said the report raises other concerns. “It seems, based on this and other studies, that we’ve got an oversupply of highly skilled workers coming into this country,” he said, adding that the study’s findings were not surprising. “New college graduates are faring very poorly on the labor market, and what the report is telling us is that we’re bringing in a high number of workers to compete with them.”

The study based its findings on the 2009 American Community Survey, administered by the Census Bureau, as well as data from the bureau’s Current Population Survey that date from 1980. As the number of working-age immigrants in the United States has swelled, from 14.6 million in 1994 to 29.7 million in 2010, the numbers of highly skilled and lower-skilled immigrants have risen, but the highly skilled sector has risen faster, according to the report. Among the causes are the recent rise in the number of international students and of temporary H-1B visas, for which a bachelor’s degree is usually required, the report said. The shift accelerated in the past decade, with nearly a third of working-age new arrivals in the 2000s coming with college degrees, the report said.

The report found that immigrants’ skill levels varied in different geographic locations, with coastal cities and established “gateway” metropolitan areas attracting more highly skilled immigrants, while areas near the U.S.-Mexico border draw more low-skilled immigrants.

Workers from Mexico and Central America tend to be lower skilled, while India, China and the Philippines send many more highly skilled workers than lower-skilled one, said Audrey Singer, a senior fellow at Brookings who co-wrote the study. With its universities, international agencies, hospitals and technology companies, the Washington metropolitan area is one of the top magnets for educated immigrants, with 189 highly skilled immigrant workers for every 100 lower-skilled ones, according to the study.

“D.C.’s pretty diverse in terms of skills they’re bringing in and where they’re coming from,” Singer said.

Other high concentrations of college-educated immigrants include San Jose and Seattle. The study also found that half of highly skilled immigrants in the United States are working in jobs for which they are overqualified. “Education credentials and language are big hurdles,” said Matthew Hall, a University of Illinois sociology professor who co-wrote the report.

Many immigrants find their degrees and certifications from abroad are not recognized here. Luma Ghalib, 42, trained as a doctor in her native Iraq and then went to New Zealand for more training. When she moved to the United States a decade ago, she had to start from scratch. “When you come here, you know it’s not going to be easy,” she said, adding that she spent several years redoing her basic medical training and retaking exams in the United States before specializing in endocrinology.

The Fredericksburg resident said she has no regrets about the five additional years of study that allowed her to live and work as a doctor here. “It’s a fair country, unlike a lot of countries,” she said. “If you’re a hardworking person, you get to where you need to be going.”

Some employers may say they prefer immigrants to native-born workers. When Samir Kumar needs to hire employees for his Northern Virginia-based IT business, he often looks overseas. Not only do workers from India and Ukraine have the required training, but their expectations are lower, he said. “They actually don’t demand a very high amount of salary, and the expectations are kind of grounded and they don’t jump around so much” between companies, said the 39-year-old Ashburn resident, an immigrant from India. U.S.-born technology and business analysts are hard to find and hard to retain, he said, while immigrants with the same skills and education “are much easier to manage.”
via The Washington Post
By Tara Bahrampour, June 8

via the Economist
Sep 17th 2010, 14:51 by A.S. | NEW YORK

THE combination of a slow news cycle and an interminable recession has produced lots of commentary about whether America’s days of glory are over. There exists concern that becoming more service oriented and not making things will lead to America’s decline, a phenomenon sometimes known as British disease. According to David Brooks:

If you look at America from this perspective, you do see something akin to the “British disease.” After decades of affluence, the U.S. has drifted away from the hardheaded practical mentality that built the nation’s wealth in the first place. The shift is evident at all levels of society. First, the elites. America’s brightest minds have been abandoning industry and technical enterprise in favor of more prestigious but less productive fields like law, finance, consulting and nonprofit activism.

Many of America’s best and brightest now work on Wall Street, and that seems to suggest we’re on the same path Britain took last century. But is that really so terrible? Britain is not the world’s largest economy, but it’s no schlub either. Living standards there have risen considerably in the last century. If you crave a cautionary economic tale, look at the divergent paths of America and Argentina, which a century ago had very similar economies. Did the British government really do wrong by not subsidising manufacturing and creating incentives for employment in a favoured industry? Not necessarily; the labour force did not have a comparative advantage in manufacturing. It is easy to romanticise Germany, which did manage to keep a strong manufacturing base and a dynamic service industry. But it also suffers from deep structural problems like chronically high unemployment, even in good times. Britain’s saving grace was its ability to embrace global markets and adapt its labour force (albeit sometimes painfully) to the demands of its domestic and global market.

If America wants to maintain its prosperity, it must spend less time idealising the past and focus on what made it successful: hard work and innovation. Though Thomas Friedman frets Americans have lost their way (referring to Robert Samuelson):

There is a lot to Samuelson’s point — and it is a microcosm of a larger problem we have not faced honestly as we have dug out of this recession: We had a values breakdown — a national epidemic of get-rich-quickism and something-for-nothingism. Wall Street may have been dealing the dope, but our lawmakers encouraged it. And far too many of us were happy to buy the dot-com and subprime crack for quick prosperity highs.

I don’t buy that Americans have suddenly become seduced by easy money and that they must reassess their values. It’s human nature to crave more goods/leisure in exchange for less work. The difference now is that access to these things came too easily, and falsely.

But perhaps there is a certain hunger for hard-won success lacking in the American psyche. If so I have a suggestion: import it by encouraging more immigration.

Instead, immigration is being discouraged—even that of skilled individuals. In 2004 the number of H1-B visas available each year decreased from 195,000 to 65,000 (with an additional 20,000 for advanced degree holders). More recently, the cost of obtaining this visa increased about $2,000. The H1-B is the work visa which is typically the way skilled immigrants move toward American citizenship. Economist Jennifer Hunt found that immigrants who come on H1-Bs and student visas (which then become H1-Bs when they start work), tend to be more innovative and more likely to commercialise their innovations than natives. We’ve seen evidence that successful start-ups are the key to sustainable job creation, so why in heaven’s name are we making it hard at all for the very people can create jobs to come here to work?

It’s tempting to limit immigration when we face high unemployment. Politicians often suffer from the false belief that the number of jobs is fixed so that if we keep more labourers out there will be more for natives. My recent OECD working paper finds the opposite is true. Immigrants, of all kinds, are more likely to be entrepreneurs than natives. In many ways they’re job creators instead of takers.

Foreign PhDs in Silicon Valley (50% of firm founders there are foreign born) are not the only immigrants who provide value. Even low-skill immigrants who start small businesses that stay small are important to the American economy. They provide low cost services and access to more goods. There are also second-order effects, for example someone who provides child or elder care cheaply provide an invaluable service. This allows natives to works outside of their home.

America’s economic success was built on the hard work and ingenuity the chattering class is worried it has now lost. But so much of that hunger historically came from immigrants, of all skills and backgrounds. They laid the foundation for America’s economic success. America could use them now more than ever.

September 01, 2010 —
Darrell M. West, Vice President and Director, Governance Studies, Brookings Institute

The United States is shockingly irrational in the way it handles immigration. Unlike other nations that strategically use immigration to pursue national goals, we lurch from concerns about border security to illegal immigrants to drugs and crime without considering our long-term political and economic priorities.

One of the chief sources of irrationality is the myths that have arisen about immigrants and immigration policy. Befitting a subject that is politically charged, here’s where ordinary Americans and policymakers often get it wrong:

Myth No. 1 —

Illegal immigrants don’t pay taxes. They actually pay a variety of taxes. Because many undocumented workers hold jobs, a large number pay income, Social Security and Medicare taxes, as well as sales taxes when they purchase items in stores and property taxes when they rent or own homes. One study found that they pay $162 billion annually in federal, state and local taxes. Another project found that the average immigrant paid $1,800 more in taxes than government benefits received.

Myth No. 2 —

The United States rarely deports illegal immigrants. In fact, the government deports 350,000 people annually. Since 1999, more than 2.2 million people have been deported from the United States, including visitors who overstayed their visas, lied on immigration forms, or committed serious crimes. State and federal officials regularly check the immigrant status of those who are arrested or serving time in prison.

Myth No. 3 —

Economics and business drive U.S. immigration policy. Two-thirds of the 1 million official visas awarded each year are based on family unification. Conversely, only 15% of visas each year are awarded for employment purposes. Other nations devote a far higher percentage of visas to economic or employment-related reasons. Canada, for example, grants more than half of its visas for employment-related reasons.

Myth No. 4 —

The United States makes a special effort to attract scientists, engineers and technological experts. Right now, we set aside only 65,000 of America’s nearly 1 million visas each year for high-skilled workers. This is well below the 195,000 high-skilled visas that the U.S. allowed from 1999 to 2004. One study found that 25% of all the technology and engineering businesses launched in the USA from 1995 to 2005 had a foreign-born founder. In Silicon Valley, that number was 52.4%.

Myth No. 5 —

The courts treat immigrants fairly. In immigration court deportation proceedings, those who have a lawyer win their cases 46% of the time, compared with 16% for those without a lawyer. Because these are civil courts, defendants have no Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination and no guarantee of legal representation.

Myth No. 6—

Americans oppose allowing illegal immigrants to stay in the United States and become citizens. Polling data suggest there is public support for a “path to citizenship” for illegal immigrants currently in the country, subject to certain conditions. Results from a Pew Research Center survey show that 63% favor a “path to citizenship” if illegal immigrants pass a background check, pay fines and have a job.

Myth No. 7 —

News stories about immigration are balanced. Studies of mainstream print and broadcast coverage in recent years have found, for instance, that news outlets are twice as likely to focus on the costs rather than benefits of immigration.

Given the importance of immigration to our economic growth, security and national identity, we need a new narrative. We should think about finding the next Albert Einstein, Sergey Brin, or Andrew Grove, future innovators who can start businesses and create high-paying jobs. An immigration policy based on an “Einstein Principle” would increase our odds for economic prosperity and enhance job creation and innovation.