Immigration, Border Rules Hurting Our Community, State [Washington]

(Bellingham Herald – Edward Alden and Margaret D. Stock)

A show of hands please. How many of you once drove the hour north to Vancouver on a whim every so often, but have given up doing so because of the hassles you’re almost certain to face in coming back home?

If so, you’re in good company. Border and immigration rules are supposed to keep out those not permitted into the country while welcoming the rest with a minimum of delay. Instead, U.S. policy has become fixated only on keeping the wrong people out, at a time when the rest of the world is also thinking about how to let the right people in. Washington state is among many places paying too high a price for that imbalance.

Start with Microsoft, which must attract the most talented information technology engineers in the world to stay on the cutting edge of innovation. Most Microsoft employees are Americans, but some are Chinese or Indians or Russians eager to work in the United States. Yet quota restrictions keep many of those out; others who are permitted to work here must often wait a decade or more before they can get green cards. In the interim, they live a second-class existence in which their spouses are not permitted to work, travel across borders is difficult, and switching jobs is usually impossible.

Those with choices, not surprisingly, are opting for other countries. Microsoft recently decided to open its new research facility in Vancouver rather than in Redmond because U.S. immigration rules had become too great a barrier. “The Canadian government is more welcoming of getting the best and the brightest from around the world than the U.S. government,” chief executive Steve Ballmer put it bluntly last month. Read more here.