Conor Friedersdorf writes:

If we’re concerned with self-interest, the United States should certainly admit more high skill immigrants, but perhaps it should also prefer Mexican immigrants to similarly skilled immigrants from poorer countries. Were I arguing for that proposition, I’d point out that the Mexican diaspora can help future immigrants to transition and flourish more easily than (for example) a French-speaking Haitian.

The Haitian example is not a good one. There is a large and flourishing Haitian community in the United States, defined by relatively high levels of educational attainment and upward mobility. Its cultural distinctiveness is often described as an asset rather than a barrier to assimilation, and English-language proficiency among Haitians in the U.S. is impressively high given Haiti’s unusual linguistic profile and its poverty. The Center for Immigration Studies, a group that advocates restriction, offers the following statistics on education among Haitian-born workers in the U.S. between 25 and 65:

Of Haitian immigrants (ages 25 to 65) 22 percent have not graduated from high school and 18 percent have a college degree. This compares to 9 percent and 30 percent, respectively, for native-born Americans.

Among Mexican immigrants, in contrast, 63 percent of men and 57 percent of women haven’t completed high school and 3 percent of men and 5 percent of women have college degrees.

One can make a reasonable case that we should give some kind of preference to college-educated Mexican migrants. But college-educated Mexicans tend to prefer living and working in Mexico, in part because the place premium doesn’t outweigh the lure of home.

Conor continues:

Presumably our proximity and similarity in cultures matters too. I’d add that if our immigration policy serves as a release valve in some countries (which countries most benefit from that?), and remittances serve as a kind of indirect foreign aid, then our interest in Mexican stability might also militate in favor of preferring immigrants from our southern neighbor to newcomers from places father afield.

This is entirely fair: there is a strategic case for serving as a “release valve” for young, less-educated Mexican men, a group with a labor market position that is deteriorating in Mexico and the United States. It is not obvious, however, that this is a very attractive proposition for the United States. And it is at least possible that limiting the use of this “release valve” would encourage Mexico to embrace a better mix of social and economic policies that would help families in the impoverished southern and central regions remain intact.

Back to Conor:

And if our concerns are strictly humanitarian, we cannot just consider poverty levels in a prospective immigrant’s country of origin: we must also consider how economically successful immigrants from that country are upon arrival in the US, their pattern of remittances, how efficiently their relatives back home use those remittances, whether there is a brain drain effect, even cultural factors that affect how happy people are moving to a foreign place far away from friends and family… it gets very complicated.

Even by this standard, however, it’s not clear that we’d have as strong a preference for less-skilled migrants from Mexico, as suggested by the Haitian example. It seems that migrants from Haiti and desperately poor countries in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia fate at least as well as Mexicans, if not far better. And the remittances they send to their home countries go much further than remittances from Mexican migrants to their relatively affluent relatives.

I certainly don’t think this issue is a no-brainer. But by the criteria Conor sets, I’m pretty sure our explicit and implicit immigration policy shouldn’t be quite so biased towards Mexico.