Immigration is the key to innovation in America.

Immigrants come to the United States and take menial jobs so that their children have a chance at a better future, he told me. While the jobs they take are below their intrinsic capabilities, they’re focused on giving their children a better life, not personal job satisfaction.

Second-generation children, seeing how hard their parents work to give them an opportunity, in turn work hard at school, where, he noted, they often focus on mathematics and science in pursuit of the economic returns promised by careers in engineering and medicine.

Third-generation kids figure the economic return on effort expended is better for business and legal professionals and pursue those professions instead of technical ones.

By the fourth generation, any immigration-related incentives to work hard are largely nonexistent.

Mike Speiser argues that smart immigration policy will shape America’s success more than broad-based science education. While education and research will prepare a workforce and innovation in specific areas, respectively, the ROI for immigration blows both away.

As an aside, Speiser’s comments about preparing a workforce ring especially true for members of a generation increasingly frustrated with formal education. In a world where knowledge is a little passion and a Google search away, more students (fourth-generation, Mike?) realize education’s role is to program a workforce, not propel you past your classmates to champagne wishes and caviar dreams.

Anyway, I agree wholeheartedly with him.

If we get strategic about immigration, I believe the U.S. can preserve its economic leadership position in the world far longer than anyone currently expects.
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It’s time for a more strategic and aggressive immigration policy, one that targets the best and brightest around the globe and makes it easy for them to become permanent residents. We should be recruiting the world’s best talent the same way top companies recruit the best talent.

America’s Secret Innovation Weapon: Immigration

Or so an email I received from my Dad would have you believe. I get a pretty constant stream of conservative-written forwards, which I actually like because it gives me the opportunity to call attention to any incorrect information.

In the email, Obama’s Global Poverty Act is proclaimed to commit the U.S. to sending 0.7% of its GNP to the U.N., equivalent to $845 billion more than current foreign aid spending. It’s likened to a global tax.

Here are some other quotes:

When you see Obama referred to as “Barack Hussein Obama,” I think it’s safe to assume what you’re reading is fairly biased.

This particular email is a rare breed. Since its content hasn’t been aired by any prominent media, you won’t find any real sources if you search for “obama global poverty act.” It isn’t until the fourth page of results that you get any perspective.

The bill does not:

• impose a tax
• recommend contributions to the U.N.
• commit any funding to fighting poverty

The bill does recommend:

• leveraging trade policy to help developing nations
• improving the effectiveness of development assistance
• coordinating poverty reduction goals with other development goals
• continued participation in U.S.-led programs related to poverty (eg. HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis prevention)
• integrating principles of sustainable development and entrepreneurship into policies and programs

The bill is pretty benign. It requires the President to submit his plan to reduce poverty within one year of passage. The goal is to promote policy that reduces the number of people worldwide who live on less than $1 a day by half. (Go inflation!)

All that’s required is a statement of the plan. The plan can be anything, whether it’s doing nothing beyond current efforts, defining poverty goals for existing programs, coordinating with other countries to lower trade barriers, or adjusting aid to be directed more toward teaching to fish instead of giving fish.

This bill is nothing like the people who authored this email would have you believe, and you won’t get the facts anywhere in the first three pages of Google results.

If you receive this email, please reply to all with a link to this post.

The full text of S. 2433: Global Poverty Act of 2007 can be found here.