PERSPECTIVE ON IMMIGRATION : Overwhelmed by Our Generosity : Family reunification and amnesty have brought millions ill-equipped to serve our nation’s needs, a luxury we can’t afford.

Amazingly, U.S. immigration policy now admits, legally and illegally, the equivalent of the population of San Francisco every six months without a clear idea of what it will mean to the country.

As early as 1982, the National Academy of Sciences complained that the government was failing to collect much meaningful data about immigrants. The bureaucrats in Washington can tell us approximately how many immigrants are here and where they come from, but alarmingly little about what sort of human capital they bring with them and the fiscal impact they have on the country after they arrive.

Now, with a growing number of states and local governments screaming for federal reimbursement for costs associated with immigration, Washington is belatedly attempting to assess the economic and social impact of its policy.

The data that do exist about recent immigration explain why California and other states are demanding relief.

One of the few groups of recent immigrants that we have had a chance to examine in some depth consists of those who received amnesty as a result of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. An obscure provision of that law required that the executive branch compile a statistical profile of the 3.1 million people who were legalized under IRCA. The portrait painted by the Department of Justice study in 1992 is a troubling one because it indicates a trend toward lower skills, lower earnings and greater dependency on public assistance.

The typical immigrant who received amnesty under IRCA had lived in the United States for at least 10 years. Nevertheless, the median annual income for a family of four in this group was a mere $16,000, just barely above the official poverty line. Only 13% of amnesty recipients lived in households that had an annual income of more than $30,000 a year. Not surprisingly, the same profile revealed that the average amnesty recipient had just seven years of formal education.

In Los Angeles, data collected for a 1994 United Way survey tell much the same story. One-third of the county’s population, or 2.9 million people, was born outside the United States. The 1990 annual per-capita income for the “non-Hispanic white” population of Los Angeles was a shade under $25,000, while for Latinos, the largest immigrant group in the county, it was a mere $8,000. Again, education levels explain this wide discrepancy. While about 70% of U.S.-born Latino adults have completed high school, the influx of recent immigrants has been so large and their educational attainment so low that the picture of the Latino community as a whole has been turned on its head: Overall, 61% of all Latino adults in Los Angeles County have less than a high school education.

Similarly, the nationwide data show an unmistakable and ominous trend. At a time when our economy is placing a premium on a highly skilled, educated work force, our immigration policies are admitting ever-growing numbers of unskilled, poorly educated people. Moreover, our policies, as they are currently formulated to favor family reunification, will result in an acceleration of this trend in the coming decades.

Of the nearly 1 million people who come here through the legal immigration, refugee or asylum processes, a mere 160,000 visas are set aside for people based on their skills. And even that is a misleading statistic, because approximately two-thirds of those visas go to the dependents of the skilled workers. In addition, between 250,000 and 500,000 illegal aliens settle permanently each year. Thus, of the 1.2 million to 1.4 million permanent immigrants who come to the United States each year, only about 60,000, or 5%, are selected because they have some unique qualifications that our country desires. No doubt some highly skilled individuals come through the family reunification or refugee process, but relying on that is the policy equivalent of fishing with a drift net.

Things are not likely to get any better. The 3.1 million amnesty recipients are just beginning to become eligible for citizenship, and there is a concerted effort to increase the naturalization rate for other long-term legal residents. As people become citizens, the current law allows them to begin petitioning to bring relatives to this country. There is no reason to expect that those relatives will be any better educated or have greater earning potential than the amnesty recipients who sponsor them.

As honest, sincere and hard-working as most of these people may be, the profile of today’s immigrants simply does not match our needs as a nation. Faced with the already daunting task of making the transition to the high-tech, highly competitive global economy of the 21st Century, an immigration policy that admits more than a million people a year, without regard to their skills, is a luxury we can no longer afford.

Nearly three decades into the greatest and most sustained wave of immigration in our nation’s history, the United States should not be wrestling with elemental question about who the immigrants are and whether they are a benefit to our society. If, by this time, we cannot state with absolute certainty that we are getting people we really need--and only people we really need--little red lights ought to be flashing inside the heads of those who make our immigration laws.

There is ample evidence to suggest that immigration is not serving the social or economic interests of our country. It’s time we stop for a while and recover from an immigration binge that has lasted for more than a quarter of a century.