What % of US immigration is of high skilled people?

[King]

We need more young people.  Skill is unimportant.  Actually, low skill may be preferred.  The biggest problem facing this country in the future is lack of payroll tax revenue for the baby boomers' Medicare and Social Security benefits.

Low skilled immigrants are young, produce large families, and will go for wage jobs where they pay FICA as opposed to be becoming an entrepreneur who does not.  They're also less likely to save instead of spend their money.

[King]

Probably worth pointing out that the US has historically gone for the hard worker over the skilled worker. Teeming masses and whatnot. That's who made this country.

Those teeming masses tended to be the cream of the crop of those masses in the places from which they came. That was why, for example,  New England in the 19th century had the highest literacy rate in the world - going away.

New England's literacy success came from the local governments' response to the immigrants, not from the nature of the immigrants themselves.  First generation immigrants were generally just as low skilled and illiterate as illegals are today.  It was the huge influx in public education in hopes of speeding up the assimilation process which made it work.

[King]

It should also be noted that, by today's immigration standards, Ellis Island was essentially a huge illegal immigrant amnesty program.  Everyone who showed jumped on a ship without any guarantees, no filing of paperwork beforehand, and no citizenship tests, and we forgave them as soon as they touched on shore. 

[King]

It should also be noted that, by today's immigration standards, Ellis Island was essentially a huge illegal immigrant amnesty program.  Everyone who showed jumped on a ship without any guarantees, no filing of paperwork beforehand, and no citizenship tests, and we forgave them as soon as they touched on shore. 

There were very few immigration laws back then. You didn't even need a passport. With the caveat that you could not be sick or Chinese.

And it didn't have as many problems as the current system.

If we want to fix the immigration system in this country, we need to make it far easier to become a citizen, much as it was back then, that way the only people who would immigrate illegally were true criminals and not those trapped in bureaucracy.

Build a wall along Mexican border, if we must, but also have major ports where same day immigration can be achieved.  Ellis Islands on land in Laredo, El Paso, Columbus, Nogales, and San Diego.  They arrive in the morning, basic background checks are performed, and if clear they are United States citizens before sunset.  If such an option were available, no good impoverished Mexican seeking a better life would ever choose paying the cartel to smuggle or breaking the law jumping the wall.  Only truly undesired people would carry the tag illegal alien.

[King]

Probably worth pointing out that the US has historically gone for the hard worker over the skilled worker. Teeming masses and whatnot. That's who made this country.

Those teeming masses tended to be the cream of the crop of those masses in the places from which they came. That was why, for example,  New England in the 19th century had the highest literacy rate in the world - going away.

New England's literacy success came from the local governments' response to the immigrants, not from the nature of the immigrants themselves.  First generation immigrants were generally just as low skilled and illiterate as illegals are today.  It was the huge influx in public education in hopes of speeding up the assimilation process which made it work.

You might check this out. My impression was that the rates were high because the immigrants were dissenters (a big percentage from East Anglica) who read the Bible. Sure as my link indicates, then public schools were pushed by the Yankees facing the new influx. One thing leads to another, and the Yankees did the same thing all over the Yankee diaspora through the northern parts of Ohio, Illinois and Indiana, Michigan, and Iowa -with small colleges still heavily dotted over the landscape that have been there since the 19th century. My grandparents went to one of those schools, Simpson College in Iowa, following George Washington Carver whom my great grandmother nursed back to health over a summer, and then helped to arrange his admission there.

If the Protestant Reformation happened in the 1800s, maybe, but I don't see the 19th century as a time when people fleeing Europe would be more likely to read than Bible than those who stayed in the homeland.  It also doesn't explain the Irish Catholics.  There were plenty of non-Biblical things to read as well.

New England pioneered compulsory public education.  That's what made the difference and that's all.  We were the first to educate poor people.  The first to make farmers send their kids to school as opposed to just the urban upper class kids.  Other nations did not do this and those nations fell behind.