Political fights over detained immigrant children and the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program have dominated the immigration debate for the past few months. Yet the White House’s recent revocation of the Obama administration’s “entrepreneur parole” rule, which allowed immigrant business-owners a conditional stay in the U.S., may say more about the depth of America’s immigration problem.
The flaws in the parole rule start with its language. The Obama White House described the provision as an example of “merit-based immigration,” or an “entrepreneur’s visa.” But parole is not a visa, and it certainly doesn’t help immigrants become new Americans.
In fact, “parole” in the rule has the same meaning as in criminal law. When a convict is paroled, he can leave prison—but his sentence hasn’t been completed. He’s neither pardoned nor exonerated. Rather, the convict remains a criminal and will be hauled in for the slightest infraction. Treating immigrant business owners like criminals isn’t exactly a reward for doing well in America.
The policy was well-intended: A foreigner who invents a better mousetrap should be encouraged to stay. Congress previously attempted to attract immigrants who directly employ workers in 1990 with the EB-5 visa program, which provides green cards to investors. But the program later created a scandal when it was expanded to allow pooled investments as a way to buy green cards.
Entrepreneur parole was structured even more poorly. Nearly 140,000 immigrants each year attain employment-based green cards, and most of them are sponsored by employers. But entrepreneurs aren’t employees. To create jobs, they need to raise money and make their businesses work.
The Obama administration granted immigrant entrepreneurs permission to remain in the U.S. that could be revoked at any time. If the business hit a glitch, a paroled immigrant could be deported while his intellectual property remained with investors. Had the U.S. treated Alexander Graham Bell like this, he’d have invented the telephone in Canada. When the Small Business Association held a discussion on entrepreneur parole in 2016, entrepreneurs and investors alike panned the idea.
Instead of parole, entrepreneurs should get the same status as other sanctioned immigrants: a green card. It doesn’t matter how job-creating foreigners get their green cards. Intel founder Andy Grove and Google founder Sergey Brin, for example, both came to the U.S. as refugees.
Marriage is the most common way to get a green card. But work authorization for the spouses of H-1B visa holders is another Obama-administration initiative that President Trump overturned. When married people get employment-based green cards, their often highly skilled spouses should as well.
During the 2016 presidential campaign Mr. Trump condemned immigration as the source of Americans’ economic troubles. But his analysis gets things backward. Rather than compound America’s problems, immigrants resolve them by creating jobs, the way the founders of Intel and Google did.
Yet immigrant workers can affect the job market negatively—when bad policies prevent them from becoming free agents in the workforce. Programs like entrepreneur parole and guest-worker visas like the H-1Bs create backlogs that indenture workers for decades, forcing them into poorly compensated temporary work arrangements.
Employers like the leverage they have over employees who are guest workers and illegal residents. Many defenders of immigration are satisfied simply that these immigrants are able to remain in the country, while immigration restrictionists are happy as long as the new arrivals don’t earn full legal status. The inequity created by this tenuous class of immigrants is the source of the nativism on which Mr. Trump capitalized.
Immigrants generally don’t possess an unfair advantage over those who were born in the U.S., because well-regulated immigration doesn’t dilute the workforce. Instead it renews the country and the economy, helping make America the richest and most innovative nation in history.
The answer to America’s immigration problems should be more green cards, faster. The U.S. can’t build liberty and prosperity for all on more people with fewer rights.
Mr. Donnelly was communications director of the bipartisan U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform (1994-97).
Appeared in the June 12, 2018, print edition.