Despite the rhetoric we are being forced to listen to regarding the need for skilled immigrants with professional degrees being more important than unskilled immigrants, this dichotomy between highly skilled and unskilled immigrants is a false one. For one thing, the children of “unskilled” immigrants often turn out to develop some formidable skills themselves. Take Sergei Brin, for example, who arrived in America at age six as a refugee from the Soviet Union. He went on to co-found Google. Abraham Rosenthal came to America from Canada as a boy and became the editor of the New York Times. Max Frankel came to America from Germany at age 10; he, too became the editor of The New York Times. Andras Istvan Grof came to America from Hungary at age 20 and supported himself through City College in New York in part by working as a summer bus-boy at a New Hampshire resort hotel; he went on, as Andrew Grove, to co-found and lead the microchip-maker Intel. Ira Stoll wrote additionally, and I quote: Israel Isidore Beilin [aka Irving Berlin] was born in what is now Belarus and arrived in America when he was about five years old. No Ph.D., no master’s degree, no bachelor’s degree. Under the proposed “merit-based points” system for education [endorsed by Democrats and Republicans on the same payroll], he would have been a zero. But with just about nothing by way of formal education, Irving Berlin wrote a series of canonical American songs, including “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” “Blue Skies,” “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” “White Christmas,” and “God Bless America.” Got that? If the “highly skilled” immigration rules, taken to their logical extension, had been in place, the song wouldn’t have been “God Bless America,” but “God Bless Belarus.” Or, given that there wasn’t much to praise about Belarus if one was a poor young Jew, as Beilin/Berlin was, the song probably would never have been written at all, and Beilin/Berlin would have died in a pogrom, the Holocaust, or some Stalin-imposed starvation. The next time some well-intentioned politician from either party starts palavering about high-skilled immigration, you might ask what plan they have for people who want to come here but who appear to not have many skills. If the politician doesn’t appear to understand, you could break into a rendition of “God Bless America.” It ends, “God bless America, My home sweet home.”
Posted on: Wed, 17 Jul 2013 23:47:11 +0000
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015