Rigid immigration policy hurts U.S.

By Edward Alden

As California knows better than any state in the country, getting immigration policy right boils down to a simple proposition: Let the good people in and keep the bad ones out. We want the scientists at Stanford, the software engineers at Google, and the thousands of men and women who staff the hotels and restaurants and do the hard work that makes California's farms into the nation's breadbasket. We don't want the Salvadoran street gangs in Los Angeles or the al Qaeda terrorists who lived quietly in San Diego before carrying out the Sept. 11 atrocities.

But since 9/11 and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, we have been focused mostly on keeping out those we don't want, and that single-mindedness has come at a high cost. For all the threats that openness can bring, it is the lifeblood of this country's economy and a pillar of our reputation in the world, and restoring a balance will be one of the critical challenges facing the new Obama administration.

In my book, "The Closing of the American Border," I tell many stories of good people who got caught by Washington's post-9/11 effort to secure the borders against terrorists. Faiz Bhora, a young Pakistani, had trained as a doctor in the United States for a decade and was hired by UCLA as a pediatric cardiothoracic surgeon to perform the most delicate and life-threatening operations on children. But when he returned home in 2002 to renew his visa to work in the United States, he was kept out of the country for almost a year as a result of an ill-considered Bush administration response that resulted in lengthy security checks on nearly everyone coming to the United States from Muslim countries.

Dia Elnaiem, a Sudanese scientist, had come with his wife and children to UC Davis to do cutting-edge research on leishmaniasis, an insidious and often fatal tropical disease caused by the bite of a tiny sand fly. At the urging of his supervisor, he attended an academic conference in Brazil. But when he tried to return, he was told that as a Sudanese, he must wait for a security background check, even though he had already been approved just months before to come to the United States. He spent six months in Brazil, while his family struggled in Davis and his precious samples of sand flies died in his lab. His research was set back at least two years.

There are dozens of similar tales, which received far more attention abroad than they have here, and they sent a message to many of the world's most talented people that the United States was no longer a welcoming country. Foreign student enrollment dropped after 9/11, while Britain, Germany, Canada and Australia all rushed to prosper from our mistakes and saw double-digit increases. The numbers are now recovering, in part because of the weaker dollar, but we suddenly face competition for the world's best students after decades in which the United States was the only real choice for those with the most talent and ambition.

U.S. companies also found that they could not get visas promptly for overseas employees or bring in potential foreign buyers of their products. They have complained to Washington, but some have quietly moved operations abroad to countries that do not impose such restrictions. Microsoft last year announced that it would outsource its new software development facility to Vancouver, British Columbia, because it could not hire the foreign talent it needs in the United States.

The Sept. 11 legacy has also distorted our immigration priorities in other ways. The Department of Homeland Security is supposed to be protecting us against another terrorist attack; instead, it is pouring most of its resources into routine immigration enforcement aimed at the millions of illegal migrants who have come to the United States seeking a toehold on a better life. The department claims that such measures will help to keep out terrorists and criminals - thus justifying the lengthy detentions and harsh treatment of illegal immigrants that would otherwise be seen as unconscionable - but almost every expert on the subject disagrees.

The measures that have worked since 9/11 have been targeted - watch lists, fingerprints, intelligence on incoming passengers and other schemes designed to find the terrorist and criminal needles in the vast haystack of law-abiding travelers.

The outgoing Bush administration deserves praise for its progress with such targeted initiatives. We are better at keeping bad people out, and in the short run we are safer because of it. But unless we extend a new welcome to those we want by making it easier for them to come to the United States, we will continue needlessly to weaken our economy and diminish our standing in the world. That is too high a price to pay.

Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is the author of "The Closing of the American Border: Terrorism, Immigration and Security Since 9/11."