Steve Clements and Micheal Lind explore the immigration controversy surrounding foreign students in our colleges and universities and professionals moving here to work. It's not a simple matter, but it helps to remember that Einstein was an immigrant and came to this company in the '30s and '40s along with a gaggle of geniuses who enriched our nation both intellectually and financially to an unbelievable degree.

Congress at the moment seems to favor low-skill, low-wage immigrants and to disfavor the more intelligent and skilled ones, on the grounds that the high-level ones tend to displace Americans who would otherwise be holding those high-level tech jobs. There is some truth in the latter accusation, as has been discussed previously here and here. Smart, highly trained people, however, create wealth. We ultimately gain and their foresaken homelands ultimately lose. It seems that other nations have learned this lesson and our leaders have forgotten it:

While the United States perversely tries to corner the market in uneducated hotel maids and tomato harvesters, other industrial democracies are reshaping their immigration policies to invite the skilled immigrants that we turn away. Britain is following Australia and Canada in adopting a points system that gives higher scores to skilled immigrants with advanced education and proficiency in English. British, Canadian, German and even French universities are overflowing in undergraduate and graduate enrollment as they absorb the foreign talent that America is repelling.

The number of outstanding persons in a multitude of fields who have come to this land is simply staggering. To name some of the 20th Century's greatest merely scratches the surface: Einstein, Stravinsky, Von Neuman, Fermi, Strauss, Arendt, Tillich, Heifetz, Toscanini, Nabokov .... the list is endless.

Even now, the Mississippi Symphony would be almost fatally crippled without its Polish, Russian, Lithuanian, Moldavian, Chinese, and Japanese musicians who have helped it become an orchestra of which the city and state can be proud.

Talented, intelligent people give to society far more than they take. Congress should be mindful of this when it formulates our nation's immigration policies.