Richard Herman's Blog

Great Town Hall meeting last night in Cleveland. Thanks to all who attended.

A lot of fresh ideas on fixing immigration and leveraging new immigration policy to jumpstart the Rust Belt economy.

http://www.newsnet5.com/dpp/news/local_news/immigration-the-hot-topic-in-cleveland’s-tremont-neighborhood

Immigration the hot topic in Cleveland’s Tremont neighborhood

Local church hosts town hall discussion

By: Bob Fenner, WEWS, Channel 5

CLEVELAND – The hot button issue of immigration was the topic of discussion at Pilgrim United Church of Christ in Tremont on Thursday night.
The town hall meeting allowed residents to express opinions and engage in constructive dialogue on how immigration policies are impacting their lives.

Moderator and immigration attorney Richard Herman wanted people to know that “immigrant” is not a dirty word and that immigrants can contribute to this region’s revival.

“Immigrants are valuable to communities, communities like Cleveland. How can we reboot our economy in Cleveland, repopulate our inner-city, revitalize our neighborhoods and create a more prosperous environment for our citizens? One of the answers is welcoming immigrants,” said Herman.

Residents watched a comedy film entitled “A Day Without a Mexican” which raised the more serious issue of what to do about immigration in this country

As you know from our book, we favor high-skill immigration reform as an essential ingredient in any reform effort. Not only is it sensible, it’s an easy sell to a skeptical public.

Recently, The San Francisco Chronicle ran an op-ed piece of ours that laid out some of the arguement. A version of this column also ran in The Huffington Post and The Washington Times, proof, perhaps, that importing job creators is an idea that appeals to both the left and the right.

Welcome the job creators
Richard T. Herman,Robert L. Smith

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

With Arizona poised to impose the toughest immigration laws in the land, Latinos feeling targeted and civil rights groups promising lawsuits, President Obama says it is time to take another crack at comprehensive immigration reform.

No doubt many Americans are thinking, “Here we go again,” another angry debate over a divisive issue. Goodbye, public option; hello, amnesty?

But there lies a path to immigration reform that could both transform an outdated system and win public support. The seeds of the solution lie in the reform bill taking shape in the offices of Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

Their package of proposals includes a dash of high-skill immigration reform. More specifically, the plan would offer fast-track visas to immigrants with rare talent and ingenuity. The senators would extend a wider welcome to people most likely to enhance America’s competitiveness and create jobs.

Now that’s an idea a prickly public might not oppose.

Oh, their bill packs other far-reaching and surely controversial proposals. Like national ID cards. A mea culpa from immigrants who entered illegally. Harsher sanctions for employers who willingly hire them.

But the high-skill stuff is the game-changer. So powerful and sensible is high-skill immigration, it could well inspire its own reform bill.

To welcome high-skill immigrants is to promote a lucrative and little-known phenomenon. While the country was preoccupied with illegal immigrants, legal immigrants were building the New Economy.

The founders of Google, Intel, Yahoo, Sun Microsystems, AST Research, eBay and YouTube are all largely immigrants. New Americans are behind more than half of the high-tech companies in Silicon Valley and about a quarter of the biotech companies in New England.

In a global economy fueled by technology and innovation, high-skill immigrants have become America’s competitive edge.

Today’s immigrants are more likely than native-born Americans to earn an advanced degree, to invent something and to be awarded a U.S. patent.

According to research by the Kauffman Foundation, they are almost twice as likely to start their own business.

Despite the anti-immigrant attitudes of recent years and recent weeks, America remains the greatest nation on Earth, and the world’s best and brightest still want to come here. The problem is, they often cannot get in.

Every day, we bar and eject world-class talent – legal, high-skill immigrants – because we have not decided what to do about illegal immigrants.

Harvard University researcher Vivek Wadhwa warns of a reverse brain drain under way. For probably the first time in U.S. history, he argues, skilled immigrants are leaving America in large numbers, partly out of frustration with the U.S. immigration process, which often makes them wait years for a visa.

Schumer and Graham would open a new door. They propose offering an immigrant visa to any international student who graduates from a U.S. university with a master’s or doctoral degree in science, technology, engineering or mathematics.

“It makes no sense to educate the world’s future inventors and engineers, and then force them to leave when they are able to contribute to our economy,” the senators argue in a March essay in the Washington Post.

By stressing high-skill immigration reform, the senators are heading toward a winning formula. They move the debate away from fear and prejudice and toward jobs and opportunity.

More important, they remind us what immigrants bring to America, and why their talents may be needed now more than ever.

Richard T. Herman, an immigration attorney, and Robert L. Smith, demographics reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, are co-authors of “Immigrant, Inc.: Why Immigrant Entrepreneurs Are Driving the New Economy” (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/04/27/EDMB1D530N.DTL

This article appeared on page A – 10 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Anyone who has spent much time traversing America’s inner city neighborhoods knows the pattern. Where immigrants are absent, streets stretch long and empty and often forbidding. Dark storefronts and empty lots haunt blocks devoid of commerce. People walk in the street, heads down, avoiding trouble. No one really socializes because there’s no where to socialize.

Suddenly, you stumble upon a splash of color. Fruit spills out of bins in front of a green grocer. There’s a restaurant with an Open sign. Flowers bloom from a brave planter beside a sidewalk table. A small bakery sends out a hopeful aroma. Neighbors walk, talk and tarry outside of modest shops that host dentists, tax preparers and lawyers in offices upstairs.

Immigrants have arrived.

A new study by the Fiscal Policy Institute in NYC attests to the power of immigrants to revive urban neighborhoods and, in fact, to power metropolitan economies. Julia Preston wrote about it in the April 15, 2010 edition of The New York Times.

Her story outlines a powerful study that confirms what earlier researchers have revealed and that should inform the coming debate over immigration reform. Immigrants matter.

By analyzing census data for the nation’s 25 largest metro areas from 1990 to 2008, the center concluded that today’s immigrants are more talented, educated and innovative than the public perception, and that city’s that are getting immigrants are doing way better than cites that are not.

That’s partly because of the skill set of today’s immigrants.

“In 14 of the 25 largest metropolitan areas, including Boston, New York and San Francisco, more immigrants are employed in white-collar occupations than in lower-wage work like construction, manufacturing or cleaning,” Preston writes.

“The data belie a common perception in the nation’s hard-fought debate over immigration— articulated by lawmakers, pundits and advocates on all sides of the issue — that the surge in immigration in the last two decades has overwhelmed the United States with low-wage foreign laborers.

“Over all, the analysis showed, the 25 million immigrants who live in the country’s largest metropolitan areas (about two-thirds of all immigrants in the country) are nearly evenly distributed across the job and income spectrum.”

Preston quotes experts who believe this knowledge could help shape immigration reform, as Americans are generally more accepting of high-skill than low-skill immigrants. But it should also guide Rust Belt cites that hope to reverse decades of decline. Reinforcements, the study attests, can turn the tide.

“The analysis suggests…that the immigrants played a central role in the cycle of the economic growth of cities over the last two decades,” Preston writes. “Cities with thriving immigrant populations — with high-earning and lower-wage workers — tended to be those that prospered the most.”

One city that witnessed the transforming power of immigrants was Denver, where the economy doubled in size between 1990 and 2008. Preston quotes a local researcher who says that waves of new people acted as a catalyst. “They created demand for goods, services and housing that began a dynamic.”

Those immigrants also brought the kinds of skills and resources that propelled the city into the New Economy. As the Fiscal Policy Institute study makes clear, many other cities are rising thanks to a nourishing wave of talent and energy. And many are still missing the boat.