America’s Great Immigration System - The Wall Street Journal.

Well, well, here's a different take on the immigration issue for the United States. Neeraj Kaushal argues that not only is immigration good, but that the US has the best system in the world for integrating immigrants into society.
I'm reading this as I watch Newt Gingrich argue that illegals are a crisis for the US. Kaushal argues they are indispensable to the US and ought to have a special visa.
Don't discount! Read and give Kaushal a chance… (and to think it was the Chinese that shifted her window!…):
Excerpt below the fold.

"Many Eu­ropean coun­tries just im­port work­ers," Ms. Kaushal tells me [Tunku Varadarajan] in an in­ter­view at her of­fice. "They balk at mak­ing a long-term com­mit­ment to peo­ple. Amer­ica, by con­trast, of­fers im­mi­grants a va­ri­ety of le­gal ways in which to come to the coun­try and live per­ma-nently." The legacy of im­mi­gra­tion has given rise to "a dif­fer­ent ethos in Amer­ica. The coun­try wants peo­ple to come here and be part of the Amer­i­can story. Im­mi­gra­tion leads to cit­i­zen­ship."
She wasn't al­ways such an en­thu­si­ast, and what brought her around was a 2013 meet­ing with an of­fi­cial del­e­ga­tion from com­munist China, which she re­counts in her book, "Blam­ing Im­mi­grants: Na­tion­al­ism and the Economics of Global Move­ment." Imag­ine the scene: Two dozen Chi­nese of­fi­cials crowd around a slightly built and self-ef­fac­ing In­dian woman in a uni­ver­sity sem­i­nar room. They are ea­ger to learn how Amer­ica handles im­mi­gra­tion and, re­lat­edly, to find remedies for Chi­na's scarcity of tal­ent. The group grows vis­i­bly im­pa­tient as Ms. Kaushal starts to de­scribe some of the Amer­i­can sys­tem's flaws, such as the vast back­log in is­su­ing green cards—currently 5.5 mil­lion—and the glacial pace of pro­cess­ing asy­lum ap­plications.
Af­ter a few minutes, the group's leader in­ter­rupts "in an ex­as­per­ated voice and asks this: 'If you think there are so many prob­lems with the U.S. immigra­tion sys­tem, why is it that the U.S. is more success­ful than any other coun­try in at­tract­ing tal­ented for­eign workers?' " That forth­right Chi­nese ques­tion led her to re­con­sider her as­sump­tions and embark on the research that led to her book.
The Chi­nese were right, she says, to fo­cus on the strengths of Amer­i­ca's im­mi­gra­tion pol­icy. She points out that the U.S. "re­ceives a fifth of the world's new im­mi­grants every year, more than the next five im­mi­grant des­ti­na­tions put to­gether"—Germany, the U.K., Canada, France and Australia.
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America's Great Immigration System