WSJ-The Immigrants America Needs

Limit asylum claims, reduce welfare and open the door to highly skilled foreign nationals.


 ET

My wife’s grandmother, Soon Nam Char, was a picture bride. Orphaned in Korea when the Japanese killed her stiff-necked parents, she came to America in the early 20th century as part of an arranged marriage. My wife’s grandfather, who had come to Hawaii from Korea as a contract laborer, picked Soon Nam’s picture out of a book and signed a contract committing to work in the sugarcane fields in Hawaii for 13 months to pay her passage. Soon Nam arrived in a strange country, whose language she didn’t speak, to marry a man she had never met.

Ruth Cymber was my chief of staff when I served in the House and Senate. She was born in a relocation camp in Germany after World War II and came to America with her parents, who were Holocaust survivors. The immigration agent suggested that her family change her first name from Ruchla to Ruth and drop the “knopf” from their last name, Cymberknopf. They did.

Immigration has always been a tough issue for me because my life and the life of the nation have been and continue to be enriched by immigrants.

When the Senate was debating the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, I felt obligated to point out that if I were in Mexico with my two little sons and they were hungry, you would have to kill me to stop me from coming across the U.S. border. Still, I was committed to dealing with illegal immigration and the 3.2 million illegal migrants in the country at the time. The problem was that I couldn’t see how the legislation could fail to expand illegal immigration—which it did. By granting amnesty to illegal immigrants while failing to secure the border sufficiently, the legislation effectively erected a giant neon welcome sign across the southern border. By January 2007, the illegal-immigrant population had swelled to 11.8 million. The problem persists today: According to July 2024 Congressional Budget Office projections, from 2021 to 2026 the illegal-immigrant population in the U.S. will surge by 8.7 million more than it would have had pre-2020 trends continued.

The first step to ending the flood of illegal immigrants is to stop allowing people to come to the U.S. from anywhere and apply for asylum. The 1951 United Nations Convention on the Status of Refugees developed the principle of nonrefoulement, which dictated that refugees fleeing events that took place prior to 1951 may not be forced back to countries in which their lives or freedom were threatened. This agreement emerged in part out of Western nations’ collective guilt for failing to shelter Jews fleeing the Holocaust. Though the U.S. didn’t ratify the 1951 convention, it did ratify a subsequent 1967 protocol adopting an amended principle of nonrefoulement with no time constraints. The Refugee Act of 1980 codified that standard into national law.

But we live in a different world today, and the crisis on our border shows it. We must amend the Refugee Act of 1980 to require that, rather than applying for asylum at the border, refugees must apply at the American Embassy in their home country or in the country to which they have fled. This single action would stem the flood of asylum seekers who have overwhelmed our borders. It would also allow border-patrol agents to focus on protecting the border from non-asylum-seekers trying to enter illegally.

A second policy that cries out for reform is the Biden administration’s use of loopholes to grant special “legal status” to millions of illegal immigrants, undercutting the 1996 prohibition on welfare benefits for illegal aliens. According to a March 2023 report from the Federation for American Immigration Reform, the annual net costs of illegal immigration for American taxpayers exceed $150 billion.

With the average work-age household in the bottom 20% of income recipients receiving some $64,700 in government benefits annually (in 2022 dollars), the U.S. is in danger of perpetuating a welfare magnet so powerful that it will be hard to build a wall high enough to keep welfare-seekers out. We should deny all but temporary emergency welfare benefits to immigrants. We have room in the U.S. for people who come to work, but not for those who don’t want to work. Legal immigrants who work and pay Social Security and Medicare taxes qualify for those programs, but they should be ineligible for other means-tested programs. Their children born here would be citizens.

A vibrant program to attract the most ambitious and talented legal immigrants must also be a key element in any rational immigration reform. Hundreds of millions of people dream about coming to the U.S. They can’t all come. We should begin by reforming the H-1B visa program for highly skilled foreign workers by expanding the cap on the total number of visas, ending lottery selection and instituting a workable merit-based selection system. The world’s best and brightest want to come here, and we should welcome them.

From 2000 to 2023, 40% of Nobel Prizes won by Americans in chemistry, medicine and physics were won by immigrants. In 2023, that share was 67%. Forty-six percent of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children. Jonas Salk, a son of Russian immigrants, invented the polio vaccine. George Mitchell, a son of Greek immigrants, developed hydraulic fracturing.

Denying immigrants the ability to come to the U.S. illegally and ask for asylum is the foundation on which any workable immigration system must rest. A vibrant legal immigration policy based on opening the “Golden Door” to the world’s best and brightest would enrich America’s economy and culture and raise the nation’s living standards.

Mr. Gramm, a former chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.