Many parts of U.S. immigration policy reward failure. This is usually not recognized.
Whether the failure is in the labor market, the investment market, or the marriage market, bits and pieces of our immigration system are there to shore up those who cannot make the grade.
The more-migration people, needless to say, avoid thinking about this truth.
Let me be specific.
In labor markets, if the employer's wage-and-benefits offer is not robust enough to get the workers he wants in the U.S., that employer can turn to an alphabet soup of nonimmigrant worker programs that will give him the workers he wants, generally at below-market wage levels.
There's the J-1 program for universities and, as my colleague Jerry Kammer points out, for summertime jobs. There's the H-1B program for the high tech types, H-2A for growers looking for hand-harvest workers, Q-1 for Disney, and R-1 for lesser churches (the major denominations do not need the program.) And so on. That's where various kinds of failing employers get the workers they want, while ignoring available resident workers.
In the investment market, as we have pointed out in several blogs, if no Stateside investor will put money into your casino or real estate scheme, you can, despite your failure in the domestic market, always go overseas with the EB-5 program for immigrant investors. The aliens will put up half a million each without too much hope for a profit if they can get green cards for themselves and their family as a result of the investment.
USCIS, of course, does not worry if the project itself is a failure.
Finally, and this truth here is never spoken, if an American, usually an American male, cannot find a mate in this huge country, he can use the immigration system to obtain a spouse. He can go to a poverty-stricken country where even seedy American males are more attractive to some local women than what is available at home. Then he can make use of the K-1 visa; it is designed to bring fiancé(e)s of U.S. citizens to America for marriage purposes.
USCIS has only recently begun to demand a little proof of one of its own requirements – think of this – that the couple has actually laid eyes on each other on at least one occasion in the last two years. See item number 3 in this Immigration Daily article:
3. Be reminded that a K-1 petition now requires evidence to demonstrate that the couple has met within the preceding two years such as passport stamps, dated photographs, airline tickets, etc. The Vermont Service Center says that a statement alone will not be acceptable proof of meeting.
These realistic observations about the way the immigration system often rewards failure should be sprinkled in with – to use Speaker Gingrich's words – all the "pious baloney" so often served up by Establishmentarians on the subject of immigration.