Brookings Report Calls for More Skilled Immigration, Less Nepotism

The Brookings Institution released a report calling for more skilled immigration without lifting the overall (too high) level of legal immigration from around 1 million annually. The report calls for eliminating the extended family preference that has enabled chain migration for over a generation. The report also calls for a "trigger" of effective employer verification before any amnesty. But the larger flaw with the report is despite acknowledging that high-skilled immigration is more desirable than low-skilled, there is no attempt to determine what overall level of immigration would be beneficial, skilled or not. More commentary by Dan Stein in the full entry.

Comment from Dan Stein - This is just a restatement of what has been proposed by numerous "commissions" over the years, and it completely ignores the political reality of the way this issue is debated in Congress. Employer sanctions are already the law, and I am just wondering what this panel's proposal would add to such sanctions. This is the same sort of reasoning that gave us the disastrous Immigration Act of 1990 - nominally designed to increase the skills-family ratio but in fact raising both while increasing avenues for fraud and abuse.