High-skill immigrants are more complementary to America’s existing productive infrastructure. High-skill immigrants pay more in taxes and receive fewer services. Exceptional high-skill immigrants will introduce knowledge and abilities that we will learn from, making us more productive, and expanding the frontier of what is economically possible in our country. And high skill immigration, unlike low-skill immigration, will reduce, rather than increase, income inequality. In fact, the people who will lose out the most from the Cotton-Perdue proposal are the high-skill workers in STEM fields, both native and foreign-born, who are here already. They will now have to compete with many more qualified workers for available jobs.

But there is no need to believe any of these arguments to see the pros of high-skill immigration. Whether we like it or not, there is already a global market for high-skill immigrants, with various countries adopting policies designed to convince the potential migrant to move there. Just look at the policies that other immigrant receiving countries pursue. Many already have point systems to filter the applicant pool, or they have put other policies into place that do the same thing, like the “blue card” in the European Union, giving preference to high-skill applicants. All these countries know something that the United States, to its detriment, has ignored for several decades: High-skill immigration is economically more profitable.