Radio JFP to Discuss Immigration Campaign Rhetoric

By Donna Ladd Friday, November 2, 2007 10:36 a.m. CDT

Tune in today at noon on WLEZ-FM, 103.7 (streaming live at http://www.wlezfm.com) to hear Todd Stauffer and Donna Ladd talk about the use of anti-immigration rhetoric by both Republicans and Democrats in their campaigns. We will start a discussion about the myths and realities of illegal immigration. Also joining us to talk about the rights of the disabled in at election polls will be Andi Agnew, who is also the JFP music editor.

Update: Podcast posted at JFP on WLEZ.

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I know: funny, huh? Todd does a million voices and impressions. I can't tell you how he keeps me in stitches on road trips with his long narratives involving several different characters. ;-) BTW, this is from a piece by Richard Florida, "Creative Class War," addressing some of the issues about the economic benefits of immigration and tolerance: Better than any other country in recent years, America has developed new technologies and ideas that spawn new industries and modernize old ones, from the Internet to big-box stores to innovative product designs. And these have proved the principal force behind the U.S. economy's creation of more than 20 million jobs in the creative sector during the 1990s, even as it continued to shed manufacturing, agricultural, and other jobs. We came up with these new technologies and ideas largely because we were able to energize and attract the best and the brightest, not just from our country but also from around the world. Talented, educated immigrants and smart, ambitious young Americans congregated, during the 1980s and 1990s, in and around a dozen U.S. city-regions. These areas became hothouses of innovation, the modern-day equivalents of Renaissance city-states, where scientists, artists, designers, engineers, financiers, marketers, and sundry entrepreneurs fed off each other's knowledge, energy, and capital to make new products, new services, and whole new industries: cutting-edge entertainment in southern California, new financial instruments in New York, computer products in northern California and Austin, satellites and telecommunications in Washington, D.C., software and innovative retail in Seattle, biotechnology in Boston. The economic benefits of these advances soon spread to much of the rest of the country, as Ohio-born MBAs in Raleigh-Durham built credit-card call centers in Iowa, and Indian computer whizzes in Chicago devised inventory software that brought new profitability to car factories in Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. But now the rest of the world has taken notice of our success and is trying to copy it. The present surge of outsourcing is the first step--or if you will, the first pincer of the claw. The more routinizable aspects of what we consider brainwork--writing computer code, analyzing X-rays--are being lured away by countries like India and Romania, which have lower labor costs and educated workforces large enough to do the job. Though alarming and disruptive, such outsourcing might be manageable if we could substitute a new tier of jobs derived from the new technologies and ideas coming out of our creative centers. But so far in this economic recovery, that hasn't happened. What should really alarm us is that our capacity to so adapt is being eroded by a different kind of competition--the other pincer of the claw--as cities in other developed countries transform themselves into magnets for higher value-added industries. Cities from Sydney to Brussels to Dublin to Vancouver are fast becoming creative-class centers to rival Boston, Seattle, and Austin. They're doing it through a variety of means--from government-subsidized labs to partnerships between top local universities and industry. Most of all, they're luring foreign creative talent, including our own. The result is that the sort of high-end, high-margin creative industries that used to be the United States' province and a crucial source of our prosperity have begun to move overseas. The most advanced cell phones are being made in Salo, Finland, not Chicago. The world's leading airplanes are being designed and built in Toulouse and Hamburg, not Seattle. As other nations become more attractive to mobile immigrant talent, America is becoming less so. A recent study by the National Science Board found that the U.S. government issued 74,000 visas for immigrants to work in science and technology in 2002, down from 166,000 in 2001--an astonishing drop of 55 percent. This is matched by similar, though smaller-scale, declines in other categories of talented immigrants, from finance experts to entertainers. Part of this contraction is derived from what we hope are short-term security concerns--as federal agencies have restricted visas from certain countries after September 11. More disturbingly, we find indications that fewer educated foreigners are choosing to come to the United States. For instance, most of the decline in science and technology immigrants in the National Science Board study was due to a drop in applications. Why would talented foreigners avoid us? In part, because other countries are simply doing a better, more aggressive job of recruiting them. The technology bust also plays a role. There are fewer jobs for computer engineers, and even top foreign scientists who might still have their pick of great cutting-edge research positions are less likely than they were a few years ago to make millions through tech-industry partnerships. But having talked to hundreds of talented professionals in a half dozen countries over the past year, I'm convinced that the biggest reason has to do with the changed political and policy landscape in Washington. In the 1990s, the federal government focused on expanding America's human capital and interconnectedness to the world--crafting international trade agreements, investing in cutting edge R&D, subsidizing higher education and public access to the Internet, and encouraging immigration. But in the last three years, the government's attention and resources have shifted to older sectors of the economy, with tariff protection and subsidies to extractive industries. Meanwhile, Washington has stunned scientists across the world with its disregard for consensus scientific views when those views conflict with the interests of favored sectors (as has been the case with the issue of global climate change). Most of all, in the wake of 9/11, Washington has inspired the fury of the world, especially of its educated classes, with its my-way-or-the-highway foreign policy. In effect, for the first time in our history, we're saying to highly mobile and very finicky global talent, "You don't belong here." Be sure to read the full piece.

DonnaLadd

Nov 2 2007

Toward the end of that piece: Eventually, supply met demand thanks to two great migrations: first, a wave of foreign immigrants, following a loosening of immigration laws in the late 1960s. By the 1980s, more than six million immigrants settled in the United States, the greatest number in half a century. In the 1990s, 12 million more arrived. Most were unskilled and found work in factories, restaurants, and construction. But many came with good schooling and went into our universities and leading industries. Today, 11 percent of foreign-born adults in the United States have a graduate or professional degree, compared to only 9 percent of natives. Most of these educated immigrants originally congregated in a handful of big vibrant cities such as New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, but many have since moved to smaller hotspots like Tucson, Chapel Hill, and Colorado Springs. Without these immigrants, our high-tech economy would be unthinkable. Intel, Sun Microsystems, Google: All were founded or co-founded by immigrants from places like Russia, India, and Hungary. Nearly a third of all businesses founded in Silicon Valley during the 1990s were started by Chinese- or Indian-born entrepreneurs, according to the detailed statistical research of Annalee Saxenian of the University of California at Berkeley. And thousands upon thousands more constitute the technical core of our high-tech economy. [...] It is a sad irony: America's creative economy sparked a demographic shift and a political polarization that now threaten to choke that economy off. What America desperately needs now is political leadership savvy enough to bridge that gap. To his credit, President Bush has made the Republican Party much more immigrant-friendly. But his talk about diversity seems almost entirely pitched to win the working-class Hispanic vote; he seems uninterested, to say the least, in changing other policies that are driving away the high-end immigrants and generally undermining the creative economy. To his credit, Howard Dean has tried to speak to his party of the need to put forth policies that appeal to citizens in both blue and red parts of the country. But as he showed with remarks about reaching out to guys with rebel flags on their pickups, he seems, to say the least, not to have found the language to do so. The challenge for the GOP, if it wants to avoid running the economy into the ground, is to stop sneering at the elites, the better to win votes in their base, and to start paying attention to economic policies that might lift all boats. The challenge for Democrats, if they want to win, is to find ways of reaching out to the rest of the country, to convince at least some of its many regions that policies which operate to the interests of the creative class are in their interests as well.

DonnaLadd

Nov 2 2007

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