Over Christmas, Elon Musk and his tech allies started a yeasty intra-MAGA debate over recruiting top immigrant talent to the United States and the role of the so-called H1B visa program.

Musk is right that we should want to get exceptionally gifted people into the country, and the immigration hawks are right that the H1B program, which awards temporary visas to skilled immigrants, is scammy and poorly designed.

This was a fascinating ideological and factional fight, but it was also over a relatively small-scale program that awards 85,000 visas a year. Left almost entirely unaddressed was the vast archipelago of the rest of our scandalously stupid immigration system.

We give out about 1.1 million green cards a year, and only a slice are awarded on the basis of skills or employment prospects — about 16 percent.

So here we are, the wealthiest, most dynamic, freest country in the world, one that people nearly everywhere are desperate to come to, and rather than creating a system that allows us to take in the immigrants who are most likely to become net economic contributors to the country, we rely on family connections and sheer randomness instead.

It is gigantic missed opportunity, if not an act of self-sabotage.

Pew Research noted in a study a few years ago that only 36 percent of immigrants in the United States had college degrees, about the middle of the pack of other advanced, high-immigration countries. The top spots were occupied by Canada and Australia, with 65 percent and 63 percent respectively.

It’s not an accident that those two countries have merit-based systems. Canada went from 13% of immigrants having a college degree in 1971 shortly after it adopted its system, to 44% in 1981 and climbed from there. (Progressive heartthrob Justin Trudeau — the Canadian prime minister, at least for a little while longer — foolishly rejected this traditional approach as he opened the floodgates, but that’s a story for another day.)

The question of educational attainment is so important because it is predictive of how well someone will do economically in the United States. The research of Daniel Di Martino of the Manhattan Institute shows that the average new college-educated immigrant will reduce the budget deficit by more than $300,000 over his or her lifetime, while the average new immigrant without a college degree will be a net fiscal burden.

Rather than taking account of this, we overwhelming admit immigrants based on family relationships with someone who is already here. (Mass illegal immigration, unsurprisingly, makes the picture worse. Roughly 70 percent of illegal immigrants have no education beyond high school, and about 60 percent of households headed by an illegal immigrant use a welfare program, according to the Center for Immigration Studies.)

It is appropriate that our system gives some consideration to family ties. Certainly, spouses and minor children should get preference. If we scotched other family categories, though, that would free up hundreds of thousands of visas that could — assuming we want to keep the overall level of immigration the same — be awarded based on indicators of success from educational attainment to English proficiency.

The so-called diversity lottery should also be on the chopping block. The program grants 50,000 green cards a year to immigrants selected by chance from millions of applicants from counties not already sending large numbers of immigrants. They aren’t admitted on merit, humanitarian need or connection to the United States. We might as well drop green cards from helicopters over foreign countries.

The recent Elon Musk-occasioned discussion of H1Bs aside, the abiding failure of our immigration debate is that too many people take the status quo for granted. They act as if the Statue of Liberty and Emma Lazarus make any rational reconsideration of legal immigration out of bounds. The truth is that who we admit and why are important questions of national policy and should be determined based on the national interest, not sentimentality or inertia.

© 2024 by King Features Syndicate