Pia M. Orrenius – författare

"I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"—the last line of Emma Lazarus's famous poem invites immigrants to enter a land of economic opportunity. Many have accepted that invitation; today, foreign-born workers make up nearly 16 percent of the U.S. workforce and account for almost half of workforce growth over the last decade. Rather than capitalizing on these gains, however, recent immigration reforms have resulted in an inefficient, patchwork system that shortchanges high-skilled immigrants and poorly serves the American public. Beside the Golden Door: U.S. Immigration Reform in a New Era of Globalization proposes a radical overhaul of current immigration policy designed to strengthen economic competitiveness and long-run growth. Pia M. Orrenius and Madeline Zavodny outline a plan that favors employment-based immigration over family reunification, making work-based visas the rule, not the exception. They argue that immigration policy should favor high-skilled workers while retaining avenues for low-skilled immigration; family reunification should be limited to spouses and minor children; provisional visas should be the norm; and quotas that lead to queuing must be eliminated. A selective immigration policy focused on high-skilled, high-demand workers will allow the United States to compete in an increasingly global economy while protecting the interests of American citizens and benefiting taxpayers. Orrenius and Zavodny conclude that "while not all potential immigrants who knock at the golden door should be admitted, the door should swing wide open to welcome those who desire nothing more than the opportunity to work for the American dream."

Texas' economic growth has consistently outpaced that of the United States as a whole over the past quarter century.

The fourth edition of this classic work provides a systematic, comparative assessment of the efforts of major immigrant-receiving countries and the European Union to manage migration, paying particular attention to the dilemmas of immigration control and immigrant integration. Retaining its comprehensive coverage of nations built by immigrants—the so-called settler societies of the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand— the new edition explores how former imperial powers—France, Britain and the Netherlands—struggle to cope with the legacies of colonialism, how social democracies like Germany and the Scandinavian countries balance the costs and benefits of migration while maintaining strong welfare states, and how more recent countries of immigration in Southern Europe—Italy, Spain, and Greece—cope with new found diversity and the pressures of border control in a highly integrated European Union. The fourth edition offers up-to-date analysis of the comparative politics of immigration and citizenship, the rise of reactive populism and a new nativism, and the challenge of managing migration and mobility in an age of pandemic, exploring how countries cope with a surge in asylum seeking and the struggle to integrate large and culturally diverse foreign populations.