Competing for Skills: U.S. Immigration Policy since 1990

MMIGRATION policies are the mix of international, national, and local rules and programs that aim to facilitate the admission and integration of some foreigners and prevent the entry and stay of others.This article examines U.S. policies on legal immigration, with particular focus on the admission of highly skilled migrants.The United States is a nation of immigrants.Americans share a common experience: they or their forebears left another country to begin anew in the United States.Historically through the turn of the twentieth century, immigrant newcomers came in waves that reinforced the national origin of their forebears, and the government minimally regulated numbers or skills.That changed with legislation in the 1920s that introduced restrictions based on national origins, followed by slow post-World War II policy liberalization and the genesis of today's admission policies in the 1960s.Now policymakers debate the merits of admitting immigrants primarily for their family ties, which essentially reinforces national origin, compared with an emphasis on immigrants' skills.Immigration to the United States has been of such volume and diversity that there is an intrinsic acceptance, at times reluctantly, of the role immigrants from diverse places play in constructing the "American."Certainly, Canadians see themselves as a land of immigration, but the British and French enterprises in Canada displace immigration as the founding myth of the "Canadian" (Hawkins 1988:34).These national differences have contributed to different historical justifications for similar, exclusionary, admission policies.In either case, early U.S. and Canadian immigration or admission policies from the turn-of-the-century were explicitly linked to immigrant or integration policy.Exclusionary policies and restrictions on the number of immigrants were devised to address integration concerns.Significant changes ensued in the two decades following the Second World War.