Illegal immigration responds best to market forces

The Council on Foreign Relations has a paper on American immigration policy that finds,

This analysis concludes that there is little evidence that legal immigration is economically preferable to illegal immigration. In fact, illegal immigration responds to market forces in ways that legal immigration does not. Illegal migrants tend to arrive in larger numbers when the U.S. economy is booming (relative to Mexico and the Central American countries that are the source of most illegal immigration to the United States) and move to regions where job growth is strong. Legal immigration, in contrast, is subject to arbitrary selection criteria and bureaucratic delays, which tend to disassociate legal inflows from U.S. labor-market conditions. Over the last half-century, there appears to be little or no response of legal immigration to the U.S. unemployment rate. Two-thirds of legal permanent immigrants are admitted on the basis of having relatives in the United States. Only by chance will the skills of these individuals match those most in demand by U.S. industries. While the majority of temporary legal immigrants come to the country at the invitation of a U.S. employer, the process of obtaining a visa is often arduous and slow. Once here, temporary legal workers cannot easily move between jobs, limiting their benefit to the U.S. economy.

Steve Henn reported on on the immigration bill:

If the bill passes, America will start choosing its new immigrants differently, giving more weight to education.... Under the proposed system, a well-educated philosopher could beat out a high-tech engineer.

[Robert Hoffman, a vice president at Oracle and co-chair of Compete America, a coalition of high-tech firms] says not all Phds. are created equal. He'd like to keep the current system, which lets employers choose the exact worker they need.

As if employers knew better what they needed than the government.