Partnership for a New American Economy

Silver City Sun-News
July 1, 2012

The recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court has the potential to open the door to misguided and expensive state-based immigration proposals, and may increase the possibility of one-upmanship we have already seen in Arizona, Alabama, South Carolina, and several other states who are vying for the title of least friendly to undocumented immigrants.

But this doesn't have to be the case. Pragmatic and responsible state-based immigration reforms can make a difference for economies and prosperity while also spurring a much-needed federal overhaul of our nation's outdated immigration laws.

Experience shows that local control of immigration reform can and often is a good thing, allowing cities and states to attract the workers and talent they need to power industry and innovation right here in America. Our neighbor to the north, Canada, allows each of its regions to designate workers based on the needs of local economies — needs that might include filling a nursing shortage, finding tech industry entrepreneurs, or recruiting experienced agricultural workers to pick valuable crops that must be harvested by hand.

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MetroWest Daily News
July 1, 2012

In a recent speech to Latino leaders, Mitt Romney said: “If you get an advanced degree, we want you to stay here. So I’d staple a green card to the diploma of someone who gets an advanced degree in America.” A year ago, Barack Obama said he was all for “encouraging foreign students to stay in the U.S. and contribute to our economy by stapling a green card to the diplomas” of those with advanced degrees in STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and math).

That’s not a misprint. The two presidential candidates used virtually the same language and weren’t advertising an office supply company. Though they quarrel about everything else, they agree on reforming the current immigration system to make it easier for talented foreign-born students to stay in this country and give us the benefit of their energy, ideas and investment.

At a time of sluggish job growth and persistent unemployment, here is one policy change that could clearly make a difference. Yet it does not happen. That is silly, stupid, self-defeating — perhaps the best example of how the legislative system places political game-playing ahead of the national interest.

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Bloomberg BusinessWeek
July 1, 2012

Each year the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office awards about 200,000 patents to inventors. Last year a Stanford student built a camera that lets users change what’s in focus after snapping a shot; Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers invented a tiny, foldable car; and a patent was awarded for devising a metal that is as strong as steel but can be molded like plastic.

Which is why policy makers should flag a recent study that found more than three-quarters of patents from America’s top ten patent-producing universities, including MIT, Stanford, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, were the result of breakthroughs by immigrants. Those universities produced 1,466 patents—a fraction of the total awarded—but many were in such cutting-edge fields as information technology and molecular biology.

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Dayton Daily News
July 1, 2012

In the last 20 years in Ohio, the number of immigrant workers has more than doubled and the number of immigrant small business owners increased by more than 60 percent, according to a new report.

But an analysis by the Dayton Daily News found the pace of growth of these groups in Ohio was slower than in most states, and immigrants still account for only a fairly modest share of the state’s workforce and small-business owners.

Policy experts said Ohio’s economy could benefit from more foreign-born people moving here because they are much more likely than native-born residents to start businesses, and immigrant-owned establishments employ about one in seven people who work for small businesses.

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The Durham News
June 30, 2012

Local and national university presidents sent a letter to President Barack Obama and congressional leaders Tuesday, calling for an easier path to permanent resident status for foreign students.

The letter, signed by more than 100 university leaders from across the country, comes in conjunction with a report released by the bipartisan group Partnership for a New American Economy, which details the importance of immigrant ingenuity to the economy.

Among its findings, the report, titled “Patent Pending: How Immigrants are Reinventing the American Economy,” found that out of the 1,500 patents awarded to the top 10 patent-producing universities in the United States, more than three-quarters had at least one foreign inventor. Additionally, these inventors represented 88 countries.

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New York Times
June 30, 2012

Immigrants are known as entrepreneurial people, for obvious reasons: those with the ambition and energy to uproot themselves and build new lives in a distant land are well equipped to build businesses and the economy, too. That is the common wisdom, anyway, which a new study from the Fiscal Policy Institute strikingly confirms. The study, based on census data, looks at owners of small businesses across the country and paints a broad and detailed picture of immigrant entrepreneurship.

The study found that there were 900,000 immigrants among small-business owners in the United States, about 18 percent of the total. This percentage is higher than the immigrant share of the overall population, which is 13 percent, and the immigrant share of the labor force, at 16 percent. Small businesses in which half or more of the owners were immigrants employed 4.7 million people in 2007, the latest year for which data were available, generating $776 billion in receipts. They accounted for 30 percent of the growth in small businesses — those with fewer than 100 employees — between 1990 and 2010.

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India West
June 29, 2012

Skilled foreign nationals have seen no improvement in their prospects of obtaining Green Cards and wait times will likely increase in employment-based immigration categories, according to a report by the Arlington, Va.-based National Foundation for American Policy, a policy research group.

An October 2011 study found wait times for skilled immigrants, in particular those from India and China, could last five to eight years, or even decades in some cases, Forbes magazine reported.

The State Department said wait times could be imposed on individuals from countries other than India and China in the employment-based second preference (EB-2) category, for persons of “exceptional ability” and “advanced degree” holders, with the employment-based first preference (EB-1) category (outstanding researchers and professors, immigrants of extraordinary ability) also possibly becoming backlogged.

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WRAL
June 29, 2012

More than 100 university presidents nationwide have asked President Barack Obama and Congress for legislation that would allow foreign-born students to remain in the U.S. after graduation.

Duke University President Richard Brodhead, who signed the appeal along with University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Chancellor Holden Thorp and North Carolina State University Chancellor Randy Woodson, said many of the nearly 2,000 foreign graduate students at Duke are engaged in cutting-edge research that could benefit the U.S. economy.

"It's just a paradox that we should prepare these people who have these gifts who want to stay here and work and then send them somewhere else," Brodhead said Friday, noting thousands of foreign students return to their native countries after graduating in the U.S. because their visas expire.

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phillyBurbs
June 29, 2012

In a recent speech to Latino leaders, Mitt Romney said: “If you get an advanced degree, we want you to stay here. So I’d staple a green card to the diploma of someone who gets an advanced degree in America.”

A year ago, Barack Obama said he was all for “encouraging foreign students to stay in the U.S. and contribute to our economy by stapling a green card to the diplomas” of those with advanced degrees in STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and math).

That’s not a misprint. The two presidential candidates used virtually the same language and weren’t advertising an office supply company. Although they quarrel about everything else, they agree on reforming the current immigration system to make it easier for talented foreign-born students to stay in this country and give us the benefit of their energy, ideas and investment.

Click here to read the full story.

City Watch
June 28, 2012

President Obama’s recent “do it myself” immigration reform plan, predictably dissed by conservatives and nativists, reveals just how clueless the nation’s leaders are about demographics. Monday’s Supreme Court ruling on Arizona’s immigration crackdown also broke down along predictable lines, with both parties claiming ideological victories. Yet the heated debates are missing the reality of immigration and its role in America’s future. In reality America needs more immigrants, but with a somewhat different mix.

Rather than an issue of “values” or political sentiment, we need to look at immigration as a matter of arbitrage, a process by which rapidly aging countries bid for the skills and energies of newcomers to keep their economies afloat.

Nowhere is this immigration arbitrage clearer than in the world’s most rapidly aging region, Europe.

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