Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies

necessary to adjust to an older population by increasing the retirement age and steps that make it easier for older people to keep working.

The idea that we can increase productivity by importing lots of people without a high school education from the third world is not even remotely to our advantage. Even if it did come to lowering the average age, it is certainly not going to increase productivity. It is counter-productive to have a worker who does not speak your language and has just finished the eighth grade. It is a silly idea promoted by large corporations that do not want to make large adjustments to deal with an older workforce.

HSNW: The profile of immigrants that you paint is very specific, do the arguments that you make also qualify for highly skilled workers from China or India, where a lot of college graduates are coming here to work or to obtain advanced degrees?

MK: There are a couple of things here, the pattern of immigration flow is inevitably going to be predominately low-skilled. There is just no way around it. Our actual immigration system mainly rewards family relationships rather than skills and education. There is no proposal or act anywhere that is proposing abolishing most family immigration and replacing it with highly skilled workers because the people making the skilled workers argument are allied with the supports of mass immigration. They are talking about letting in many more immigrants to also let in people with special skills.

And number two, some of the immigration programs we have are primarily used as a means to recruit cheap labor in the context of special skills. If we look at the average worker, the large majority of people are in the lower two categories for skills in the labor force. They are paid less because they are younger or on visas. The existing skilled immigration programs are just updated versions of indentured labor programs that brought in railway workers a hundred years ago, but now bring in computer workers.

There are parts of our immigration that really are admitting the top people on our planet in their field, but it depends on how high you set the bar. You can say “Anyone who gets a master’s degree in French poetry gets a green card,” but that is very different from “If you have a Nobel prize you can come over here.” There are not that