Category: Uncategorized

The Dream And Promise Act Sends a Strong Message to Legal International Students: You’re a Sucker

The House passed HR 6 yesterday, the Dream And Promise Act.  It gives DACA and other undocumented immigrants a conditional permanent residence, and the conditional part can be removed once certain requirements are met.

Democrats are celebrating it as a great achievement.  Republicans are condemning it as amnesty. It probably doesn’t have a chance in Hell of passing the Senate.  But whenever this sort of bill is debated, both sides always miss a critical point: Just how unfair it is to people here legally.

What bothers me about this bill is that it’s terribly unfair to international students here on student visas.  It gives a student who was brought here illegally a better deal than one who came here legally.

The bill allows anyone who came here before they were 18 and has been here at least four years to have conditional residency.  An international student often comes here at 17 and is here for over four years, but they get no such treatment. I don’t understand why someone here illegally for four years gets a better deal than someone here legally.  Sure, many DACA students have been here for over a decade, maybe most of their lives. But there are also plenty of legal international students who’ve been here over a decade while earning multiple degrees.

The conditional green card alone is unequal treatment.  Any green card is a work authorization. It allows a DACA student to work their way through college.  An international student can normally only get work through the school, frequently a part-time, minimum wage job.  So DACA students have special treatment before they even start school. They can get a job that actually allows them to afford school, while international students (unless they’re from wealthy families) often must hustle to make ends meet.

Once the DACA student completes two years of school, they can apply for normal permanent residence.  A normal international student can finish a bachelor’s or master’s or even a doctorate degree, but still must apply for a work visa to stay.  If they can’t get one within a year, they must go home.

I had many friends in college who struggled to finish college and struggled to find work, vying for a limited number of H1B visas.  They were from all over, from every continent. Some were from wealth, others grew up poor. All had degrees and many had graduate degrees.  All had more than met the requirements of this bill, except that their presence here was legal. All fought desperately to stay and had to jump through numerous hoops to get It.  They wanted to stay and become Americans just as badly as any dreamer. Some have, after years of struggle, paperwork, and legal expense.

This bill would give an easy route to someone who hasn’t even finished college, but only if they came here illegally.  Legal international students get the shaft. It offends me that people like my friends from abroad, people who would more than fulfill the requirements of this bill (except that they broke no laws) are ignored by both parties in the immigration debate.

Understand, I’m fine with certain parts of this bill, like granting a green card to undocumented immigrants who served in the armed forces.  And I’m fine with working something out for the DACA students. I’m willing to accept that their illegal entry was their parents’ fault, not theirs.  But this means they are foreign students, and should be treated no differently from any other foreign student.

Either undocumented students should be treated as international students, or international students should be given conditional permanent resident status.  The constitution requires that similarly situated individuals be given equal protection. If we ignore the illegal entry of the DACA students, then these two groups are similarly situated.  If this bill refuses to treat them the same, it is unjust.

Trade Deficits Aren’t as Big a Deal as You Think They Are

Trump keeps bragging about how he’s reducing trade deficits.  He’s been claiming that China eats our lunch. This is evidence that he doesn’t understand how economics work.

Now the budget deficit is a problem.  It means we’re going deeper into debt, drawing ever closer to bankruptcy.  The trade deficit just means we buy more from China than they buy from us. But it doesn’t mean we’re getting screwed.  Strictly speaking, increasing imports makes GDP decline. But depending on what we do with what we buy, the overall effect could cause GDP to grow,

Here’s an example: One thing we buy from China is smartphones.  They’ve been manufacturing them for years. And I’m not talking about Huawei.  I mean iPhones and Androids and so forth. So every time one gets shipped here, the trade deficit grows.  Doesn’t this reduce GDP? Doesn’t this take American jobs? Nope, it does this opposite.

What would happen if they were made here?  They would cost more. And what happens when things cost more?  People buy fewer of them. Some estimates say iPhones would cost over $2,000.  Right now, they’re maybe half of that.  Or less, for some models.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that smartphones have driven eCommerce way up.  And that drives American jobs. Maybe we don’t produce the smart phones, but over 20% of the Android app developers are here.  Those are obviously good paying jobs.  It’s just one example. Proliferation of smartphones has affected almost every industry.  It would be easier to list the industries that haven’t been affected. It would be a very short list.

If people had fewer phones, then this impact would be lessened.  We might have more manufacturing jobs, but fewer coding jobs, fewer eCommerce jobs, even fewer delivery jobs.  Whatever gains we got from more manufacturing jobs would be drowned out by the loss of others. Whatever negative impact those imports had on GDP would be drowned out by by the decline in every industry that is impacted by eCommerce.

So we need to stop acting like trade deficits are a problem.  Buying more from someone than they buy from you doesn’t mean you’re getting screwed.  I buy more from my grocery store than they buy from me. My employer buys my labor from me, but I don’t buy a damn thing from them.  Despite this, we all seem to be doing fine. And as long as buying stuff from China is allowing us to use those goods to make our economy grow faster, the United States isn’t getting screwed either.