02 February 2013, 11:33 AM IST
US immigration reforms could attract more skilled workers into the country. What should India do?
Washington DC, home to so much hot air for the most part, is now filled with immi-grunts. Talk of immigration reform has returned, front and centre, at the start of President Obama's second term. There's no telling how far the exertions will go before they lose steam or huff through with cutbacks and compromises. President Obama has tried to get things moving before and failed.
Right at the top, we should note that Obama is the US-born son of a Kenyan who did not eventually emigrate. Barack Hussein Obama Sr studied in the US for five years (1959-1964 ) during which time he married American Stanley Ann Durham, who bore him a son of the same name, before he returned to Kenya to work as an economist after divorcing her. He made a solitary month-long return trip to the US in 1971 to see his 10-year-old son, who would go on to become president. Obama Sr died in a car accident in 1982. How much does all this colour President Obama's views on immigration?
America is a country of immigrants, built by immigrants. Of course, Native Americans, spuriously called American Indians (some semi-literate desis still use the politically incorrect and racist term 'Red Indians' ), will have something to say about this. As someone observed, there are about 12 million illegal immigrants in the US, but if you ask a Native American, that number is more like 300 million. America is one of the finest countries anyone ever stole, an immigrant comedian once noted. Racist descendants of white settlers who have been in the US for a few generations, if not a few centuries, can't get their heads around the fact that they are just early, early immigrants.
The primary reason people emigrate to America remains economic opportunity, or lack of it in their home country. Some sceptics now question the basis for this, pointing to the current economic slowdown. But the lines in front of American embassies and consulates worldwide suggest the urge to emigrate is still strong. Reports of people leaving the US in droves are also bogus. Workers go where there are better economic prospects balanced with quality of life.
With the downturn, some immigrant professionals headed back to India and China. With an uptick, many returned. This circular movement will become routine once immigration reform makes the process easier. If guest workers know they can get in and leave and return easily, the craze will ease.
In some ways, the current reform proposals are hard-headed and cold-hearted, aimed at restoring and preserving America's economic primacy. None of that gooey "give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free" sentiment expressed in the inscription on the Statue of Liberty. For too long, immigration debate has centred on regulating family reunification - allowing kith and kin of those who have become American citizens to join them regardless of what they bring to the table in terms of skill and talent. For the first time, it looks like there will be emphasis on work force and skill-based immigration.
America needs workers, from skilled professionals to garden variety farm workers, nurses, and teachers. For all the bally-hoo over outsourcing, the US has realised that if it does not hold on to those who graduate from its universities, or attract the best minds from across the world which it has done for so many decades, it will lose its knowledge leadership. The plea by the likes of Bill Gates and Vivek Wadhwa, an Indian-American entrepreneur-scholar, that any foreigner who earns a PhD should simply get a green card stapled to his degree, has been heard.
This is great for America, which will continue to be enriched by its immigrants, especially if they are a skilled, high-earning, tax-paying lot. They will bankroll the country's ageing population by refilling the coffers for social security and Medicare. But what of countries that are deprived, if not impoverished, by their departure after they spent money subsidising their education?
Take the case of US, India, and the medical profession. More than 1, 00, 000 Indian physicians have emigrated to the West (mainly US, UK, and Canada) in the past decade. This has bumped up the US count to 27 doctors per 10, 000 while beating the number in India down to six doctors per 10, 000. Facilitating easier immigration for skilled workers will worsen such ratios for India and many developing countries which spend precious money educating and training these physicians.
The flip side is those who emigrate often serve as a bridge between the two countries, remit knowhow and moolah, and constitute the "Indiaspora" that is considered an asset. Should India stop such emigration, now that the US has signaled it is going to suck up even more skilled professionals? The health ministry has tried this spottily and periodically in the case of medical professionals. But it hasn't worked, and it doesn't seem particularly fair. Why constrict just medical professionals? Why not others? A better approach would be to make staying back in India more attractive, but that requires a complete makeover of national policies and priorities.
"A simple way to take measure of a country, " the former British prime minister Tony Blair once said, "is to look at how many want in . . . and how many want out. " By that token, much of the world still wants in on America. Imagine, this is a country that already takes in more than one million legal residents every year. Another million-plus slip in illegally. So there's close to a one per cent bump in population every year of foreign-born people wanting to be New Americans. No other country comes anywhere close to the American melting pot.
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