A thorny path to reform
“What kind of immigration reform do we need?” asked Edward Schumacher-Matos of Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) during his introduction to the “Inequality and Social Policy” panel on March 3 in Tsai Auditorium. Schumacher-Matos, director of Harvard’s Inter-Faculty Initiative on Immigration and Integration Policy and Studies, moderated a panel featuring three of the country’s foremost immigration scholars: George Borjas, Robert W. Scrivner Professor of Economics and Social Policy at HKS; Mary Waters, M.E. Zukerman Professor of Sociology at Harvard College; and Douglas Massey, professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton. Borjas launched the discussion by summing up two crucial questions of immigration reform: How many people do we want and how are we going to choose? “Because many, many more people want to come to the U.S. than we are willing to accept,” he said, “and therefore there will have to be discrimination” in the sense that policy must specify rules. Waters took...