Should our efforts to bring in highly skilled immigrants rely on a random visa lottery and help companies deliberately replace native tech workers with cheaper foreign labor? That is an honest-to-God question raised by Donald Trump's new “Buy American and Hire American” executive order, which calls out the bizarre feature of our immigration policy known as the H-1B visa.
Let me start this diatribe by stipulating there are numerous benefits to high-skill immigration in general, especially relative to the low-skill immigration we've disproportionately seen in recent decades. As I spelled out in February using data from the census and elsewhere, better-educated immigrants earn more money, are more likely to speak English, are less likely to have children out of wedlock, and are more likely to share important American values such as a belief in free speech. But the H-1B program does far less than it could to harness these benefits and harms middle-class American workers in the process.
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