by Marco Rubio
Our immigration system, designed primarily to reunite families, is an outdated relic of the last century. This system worked for much of the twentieth century, when we had no shortage of low-skill, middle-income jobs and the government safety net was still fairly limited. But today we have low to nonexistent growth, a shortage of good jobs and a massive web of needs-based programs.
No nation on earth is more generous when it comes to immigration than America. Each year about one million people permanently immigrate here legally. But when people hear that we have over twelve million people here illegally, they feel as if we are being taken advantage of. They see how hard it is to find and keep a steady and well-paying job, and they worry that more people will mean more competition for already scarce work. That’s not nativism. That’s human nature.
It does not have to be this way. We can have an America in which a thriving middle class coexists with continued, orderly, legal immigration.
We must begin by reigniting economic growth and opportunity in this nation. When our economy is growing and thriving, employment isn’t a zero-sum game. A new American’s gain does not have to be an existing American’s loss. If that were true, every time we hand out a high school or college diploma to one person we should hand an unemployment check to someone else. In fact, the opposite is true.
That’s why, just as in all the other conservative reforms discussed in this book, having an immigration system that works for our country begins with economic growth. Indeed, instead of being an impediment to equal opportunity and widely shared prosperity, the right immigration system is a critical component of economic growth. One study by former Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin found that if we modernized our immigration system from a family-based one to one focused on merit and productivity, we could grow the economy by almost a full percentage point in the near term and raise per capita growth by over $1,500.
Our current system is damaging our economy. Each year our colleges and universities graduate foreign students who are among the best and the brightest in the whole world. Instead of putting them to work here, innovating products and creating jobs, we send them back to China and India to compete against us. This makes no sense. If one of our college graduates is a world-class basketball player, there is little doubt he will wind up staying to play in the NBA. But if he or she is a world-class scientist, we make them leave!
Making our legal immigration system a merit-based system that encourages innovators will have broad benefits for our economy. Studies show, for example, that 40 percent of American Fortune 500 firms were started by immigrants. What’s more, roughly half of the most successful start-ups in Silicon Valley were started by people who weren’t born in this country. And since 2000—despite the restrictions we have on merit-based immigration—over a third of the American Nobel Prize winners in chemistry, medicine and physics have been immigrants. This kind of scientific and entrepreneurial activity generates jobs across the income spectrum—from corner-suite executives to construction workers and IT engineers. Just the kind of jobs that help Americans rise to the middle class and beyond.
Transitioning to a merit-based, high-skilled immigration system would also help immigrants assimilate more quickly and easily into American economic and civil life. As reform conservative authors Yuval Levin and Reihan Salam have written, a merit-based system—in conjunction with formal civic education requirements, such as a test on American history and government before being granted a green card—would have the effect of allowing immigrants to integrate more successfully into American communities and reduce the isolation and poverty of many of today’s immigrant communities.
The benefits of a merit-based legal immigration system are widely (although not universally) accepted in America. So why, then, has nothing been done about it? The reason is our illegal immigration problem. We will never have the votes needed in Congress to modernize any part of our immigration system until the issue of illegal immigration is adequately dealt with first.
A significant percentage of Americans simply don’t trust either party in Washington to address other aspects of immigration reform before illegal immigration has been brought under control, and for good reason. The immigration reform law of 1986 legalized more than three million people who were here illegally, but the enforcement measures were never fully implemented. For years President Obama, his allies in Congress and many immigration reform supporters have told us that the border was “as secure as ever.” This fallacy was dramatically exposed when portions of our southern border were essentially overrun in the early part of 2014. Then there are the numerous examples of President Obama simply ignoring, suspending, rewriting and violating the law through executive action. All of these things have left many to conclude that, no matter what enforcement mechanisms are written into law, this administration will simply ignore them. The result is a stalemate on an issue of critical importance.
So what is the way forward? First, we must make the argument that reform is needed at all. I have heard some argue that all we need to do is enforce the laws we have already. But that is not accurate. On the enforcement side, we need additional investment in electronic monitoring and personnel. Building more fencing alone will not be enough to address illegal crossings. We also need to give employers a reliable way to check the legal status of the people they hire. We need to invest in an entry and exit tracking system to prevent visa overstays. All of this would require reform.
How do we achieve this reform, given the current stalemate? We must begin by acknowledging that, considering our recent experience with massive pieces of legislation, achieving comprehensive reform of anything in a single bill is simply not realistic. Having tried that approach, I know this to be true firsthand. The fear that such massive pieces of legislation include some clever loophole or unintended consequence makes it even harder to achieve. The only way we are going to be able to break this impasse and make progress on this issue is in a sequential and piecemeal way, with a series of bills that build upon one another until ultimately we have put in place the kind of immigration system our nation needs.
The first step must be enforcement measures that are effective and verifiable. Such measures would include securing the most vulnerable and most trafficked sectors of the southern border, mandatory E-Verify and the full implementation of an entry-exit tracking system.
The second step is to modernize our legal immigration system toward a merit-based one. That would mean reassigning existing visas away from family-based immigration and toward work- and skill-based immigration, passing reforms for high-tech visas, as well as creating a limited guest worker program for seasonal workers in the agricultural sector to reduce the incentive for these workers to come here illegally in the future.
Once both of these reforms have been passed, then I believe the conditions will be in place to address the most politically sensitive aspect of immigration reform: what to do with more than twelve million people currently here illegally.
On the one hand, calls to grant amnesty to twelve million people are unrealistic and quite frankly irresponsible. On the other hand, not a single opponent of the Senate bill I helped author proposed that we try to round up and deport twelve million human beings. So how do we deal with this dilemma? I believe that if the enforcement measures are in place, there exists a path forward that would obtain a significant majority in Congress and the support of a majority of Americans across the political spectrum. It consists of three parts.
First, those here illegally must come forward and be registered. If they have committed serious crimes or have not been here long enough, they will have to leave. With the new E-Verify system in place, they are going to find it difficult to find a job in any case.
Second, those who qualify would be allowed to apply for a temporary nonimmigrant visa. To obtain it they will have to pay an application fee and a fine, undergo a background check and learn English. Once they
receive this work permit, they would be allowed to work legally and travel. To keep it, they will have to pay taxes. They would not qualify for government programs like Obamacare, welfare or food stamps. And if they commit a crime while in this status, they would lose their permit.
Third and finally, those who qualify for a nonimmigrant visa will have to remain in this status for at least a decade. After that, they would be allowed to apply for permanent residency if they so choose. Many who qualify for this status will choose to remain in it indefinitely. But those who choose to seek permanent residency would have to do it the way anyone else would, not through any special pathway.
This three-step plan is not only the best way to reform our immigration system, it is, in my opinion, the only approach that has any chance of success. An overwhelming majority of Americans in both parties would support this sort of incremental approach. Of course, there will be detractors. Some will continue to call for less immigration and more deportations. On the left, some will continue to demand an all-at-once-or-nothing-at-all approach.
Just like saving Medicare and Social Security, immigration reform is a powerful political issue. Some on the right know it needs to be done, but they want someone else to do it. Some on the left have concluded that having the issue is more politically valuable than solving the problem. Groups on both sides use it to raise money.
In the end, immigration reform is fundamentally about reforming government and restoring the American people’s faith in the ability of their government to do basic things right. I don’t believe this challenge will be fully met until we have new leaders in Washington who support both the rule of law and the job-creating potential of the free market. Until then, the best way to rebuild trust and reform our broken immigration system is through incremental steps both to fix our immigration system and to realize the full potential of our country.
Why? Because the American Dream is not small. It’s not about entitlement. It’s about opportunity. It is not about parceling out prosperity to the few. It is about a striving, growing prosperity for anyone willing to work hard and to dream. Conservatives have always been the keeper of this flame. We have always been the believers in a growing, striving America. It is a tragedy that today we find ourselves being portrayed as pessimists about America’s potential rather than the optimists we have always been. We will miss a great opportunity to reclaim the true meaning of our movement—and, much more important, to restore the true potential of our country—if we fail to act.
All of these reforms are important in their own right, but each is like a single brushstroke. Only when they are combined together do we see what they create: a picture of a growing, striving, thriving America in the twenty-first century.
Imagine the opportunities that will open up for the American people when economic growth creates jobs, lifts wages and restores hope. Imagine the country we can create: A private sector liberated from excessive regulation. Start-ups free to compete on a level playing field with established businesses. An economy reinvigorated by technological innovation and trillions of dollars of new investment. New markets for American products and ideas. Secured Internet freedom and abundant wireless spectrum to boost innovation. The American economy will take off at a historic rate, creating hundreds of thousands of high-paying jobs.
This is the exciting opportunity before us. This is the unavoidable challenge that awaits. We no longer have the luxury of wasting time on the failed promises of big government or the divisive rhetoric of class warfare. The world around us is changing quickly, and we have waited for far too long to change with it.
Chapter Three
EQUAL OPPORTUNITY, EQUAL DIGNITY, EQUAL WORK
The war on poverty turned fifty last year in the midst of a changed debate over income and justice in America. When President Lyndon Johnson launched the war in 1964, the issue was the plight of the poor. For many of Johnson’s ideological descendants today, the issue is very different. Income inequality—the growing gap between the very rich and the rest of us—is sucking up lots of political oxygen these days. The subtext of this debate—and very often the text—is how the rich can be brought down to somehow make our society more equal. What’s lost is any discussion of the question that animated President Johnson: How can the poor be lifted up to make our society more prosperous for all?
Down in Plant City, Florida, Christine Miller is focused on other, more practical questions—like making people use her parking spaces. She runs an emergency food bank that served almost twenty-three thousand people last year. Most of her “clients,” as she calls them, are genuinely needy and genuinely appreciative. But there are some who are of a more entitled mind-set. They like to drive up in front of the warehouse and demand their food. So Christine and her staff have had to institute a “park first” policy. It’s a small part of their attempt to do more for their clients than just hand out food—and that begins with showing respect for her and her staff.
Christine has been at the Tampa-area food bank for three years, so she has seen a lot. She grows quiet when she talks about a man and his adult daughter who came in when she first started working there. As soon as she saw them, Christine knew something was very wrong. The woman looked dazed and there was stress—and real fear—in the man’s face. When his daughter went out to the car to retrieve her purse, it all came spilling out. Just days before, the daughter’s husband had shot himself in front of his wife and children. Desperate and in shock, the woman had brought her kids to live with her father. Now they needed help just to put food on the table. So Christine did what she could: She gave them a box with enough food to feed the family for the next four or five days.
The experience haunts Christine because she knew the family needed more—in that case, grief counseling, at a minimum. Most people who come to the food bank need more. Some of their needs are simpler than others. Many don’t know that they can ask their bank for forgiveness if they bounce a check, for instance, or that there are alternatives to the exorbitant fees charged by check cashing businesses. One of Christine’s first projects at the food bank was to bring in a financial literacy program called Money Smart. For people at or below the poverty level, the program teaches financial basics like maintaining a checking account, the importance of saving and how to repair and/or preserve your credit. The program has made a difference, Christine says, especially for those she struggles most with how to help: the people who genuinely want to lift themselves and their families. One woman who went to her first Money Smart class—a grandmother who had to take in her three teenage grandchildren when their parents were both incarcerated—is now a regular volunteer at the food bank. It is a small victory, but one Christine will take.
Officially, the United Food Bank of Plant City exists to provide emergency rations to people who have signed up for food stamps but aren’t yet receiving them. But Christine and her staff always make sure their clients are also signed up for all the other government assistance they are eligible for. In this way, the Plant City food bank exists as a bridge between destitution and the vast bureaucracy of federal programs for the poor.
The war on poverty has resulted in a tangled web of at least ninety-two often overlapping, often duplicative federal programs, including seventeen separate food aid programs, twenty different housing programs and twenty-four programs dedicated to job training.1 In fifty-one years of metaphorical war, some $15 trillion has been spent on these programs, $799 billion in 2012 alone.2
Despite all this, Christine and her staff see only deepening need in eastern Hillsborough County. Their clients are single moms and grandmothers, the newly out of prison and a lot of returning veterans. More and more, she says, the people walking in her doors are the formerly middle class. She and her staff have had to learn that just because someone pulls up in a nice car or lists an address in one of the nicer neighborhoods around Plant City, it doesn’t mean they’re not in trouble. It can take two years for the bank to foreclose on a
home, and in the meantime the occupants could be flat broke. And selling their car isn’t an option—chances are it’s their lifeline to job interviews and plain old survival. Not to mention that replacing it with trashed credit is next to impossible.
Some former donors have even showed up, now as clients. “When you see them and you hear their stories—‘My husband is out of work, I just found out my daughter’s pregnant and I don’t know what to do . . .’” Christine’s voice trails off. “They don’t even know where to go for help because they’ve never needed it before.”
Christine is on the front lines of what President Johnson called not just a war but an “unconditional war” on poverty. When he made that declaration, 17.3 percent of Americans were poor. Today, the rate is almost unchanged at 15 percent. When you factor in higher costs for things like health care and transportation, the number of men, women and children living in poverty comes to forty-nine million—that’s one in six of all Americans.3
Some argue that the war on poverty has been “won,” citing as proof the vast government bureaucracy that has been built to wage it. This assistance has helped many people, and that is no small thing. But our efforts remain incomplete because it has also created a system in which millions of Americans live cushioned but not buoyed by government assistance. Government has succeeded in trapping far too many into poverty as a way of life, and it has not done nearly enough to help Americans escape poverty. A tragic 70 percent of children born into poverty today will never make it to the middle class.4 The uncomfortable truth is that there are now a number of other countries with as much or more opportunity than ours for the poor and middle class. More people in Canada, for instance, go on to surpass the income of their parents than in the United States.5 Fifty-one years later, there is no other word for this than failure.
