As American as Baseball - and Immigration

I wrote this last October during the World Series. As Baseball season starts again, and the immigration debate heats up, I am re-posting it. I hope we can have a rational, not a racial, debate on this extremely important topic for the country.

"“Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history."
Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted - winner, Pulitzer Prize in history, 1952

As we start the World Series tonight, I am damn proud we will have names like Contreras, Guillen, Iguchi, Pettitte, Pierzynski in the limelight - the best and fastest from everywhere. Yet, I sense a growing anti-immigration mood in the country. From Lou Dobbs to Rush Limbaugh, the focus is on how we are being "run over".

We have had many waves of immigration in the last couple of centuries. Every wave was treated with suspicion. What would this country be without our Irish or Italians? At first, we spat at them and called them Paddy and Dago. Today, we celebrate St. Patrick's day with enough gusto to embarrass the native Irish. From DiMaggio to Marino, some of our best athletes (and foods and so much more) are Italian in origin.  Look at how well more recent Asian immigrants have done - Japanese, Indian and others.

To hear the critics say it, you can just walk in to this country. It takes the average legal immigrant almost a decade before he or she can qualify to vote and carry a US passport. The INS is one of the most inefficient of the federal agencies. We put our immigrants through a fairly shameful process - it's our version of "hazing" the newcomers. As for the illegal aliens from Mexico or Haiti,  we have seen many of them die crossing across one of the worst deserts in the world or the turbulent seas in a leaky boat after having paid their guides ("coyotes") their life savings. And they come here because American farmers, restaurants and others  need them. It's easy to say let's build up the Mexican economy - there is a thriving maquiladora economy already across the border. Some jobs have to be done locally.

Another common comment is "the whole world wants to move here". I am not so sure. Unlike previous waves, it has become so much easier for people to travel back and forth that we are ending up with more transient labor. My father-in-law used to talk about his family moving back from LA to Ireland in the 1920s. It took his family a month to make that trip. Today, they could fly non-stop in 10 hours. The transience is showing in Ireland today. As it booms,  the country which sent immigrants all over the world is pulling them back.  Same with India. Bush's idea of "guest workers" is the right one for labor from south of the border.   

I am not calling for wide open borders, but with the growing negative mood we may go the other way. Here's what we need to be careful about. China produces 8 times as many graduate engineers as the US does, India produces 5 times as many.  I was pleased to see the report from the National Academy of Sciences emphasize the need to keep encouraging foreign students and qualified immigrants. John Doerr, the legendary Kleiner Perkins VC has commented that we should be "stapling a green card to the diploma" of advanced science and engineering degrees earned by foreign students.

Emma Lazarus' stirring words in The New Colossus at the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty welcomed immigrants over the last century and made America richer and stronger than the "old world". As the world gets "flat" and we become more of the old world, we need to make sure our bigots do not make our country too unwelcoming.