Text 2 Imaginea new immigration policy Acentury ago, the immigrants from across the Atlantic included settlers andsojourners. Along with the many folks looking to make a permanent home in theUnited States came those who had no intention to stay, and who would make somemoney and then go home. Between 1908 and 1915, about 7 million people arrivedwhile about 2 million departed. About a quarter of all Italian immigrants, forexample, eventually returned to Italy for good. They even had an affectionatenickname, "uccelli di passaggio," birds of passage. Today,we are much more rigid about immigrants. We divide newcomers into twocategories: legal or illegal, good or bad. We hail them as Americans in themaking, or brand them as aliens fit for deportation. That framework hascontributed mightily to our broken immigration system and the long politicalparalysis over how to fix it. Wedon't need more categories, but we need to change the way we think aboutcategories. We need to look beyond strict definitions of legal and illegal. Tostart, we can recognize the new birds of passage, those living and thriving inthe gray areas. We might then begin to solve our immigration challenges. Croppickers, violinists, construction workers, entrepreneurs, engineers, homehealth-care aides and particle physicists are among today's birds of passage.They are energetic participants in a global economy driven by the flow of work,money and ideas. They prefer to come and go as opportunity calls them. They canmanage to have a job in one place and a family in another. Withor without permission, they straddle laws, jurisdictions and identities withease. We need them to imagine the United States as a place where they can beproductive for a while without committing themselves to staying forever. Weneed them to feel that home can be both here and there and that they can belongto two nations honorably. Imaginelife with a radically different immigration policy: The Jamaican woman who cameas a visitor and was looking after your aunt until she died could try living inCanada for a while. You could eventually ask her to come back to care for yourmother. TheIndian software developer could take some of his Silicon Valley earnings hometo join friends in a little start-up, knowing that he could always work inCalifornia again. Or the Mexican laborer who busts his back on a Wisconsindairy farm for wages that keep milk cheap would come and go as needed becausehe could decide which dairy to work for, and a bi-national bank program washelping him save money to build a better life for his kids in Mexico. Accommodatingthis new world of people in motion will require new attitudes on both sides ofthe immigration battle. Looking beyond the culture war logic of right or wrongmeans opening up the middle ground and understanding that managing immigrationtoday requires multiple paths and multiple outcomes, including some that arenot easy to accomplish legally in the existing system. A newsystem that encourages both sojourners and settlers would not only help ensurethat our society receives the human resources it will need in the future, italso could have an added benefit: Changing the rigid framework might help usresolve the status of the estimated 11 million unauthorized migrants who areour shared legacy of policy failures. Currently,we do not do gray zones well. Hundreds of thousands of people slosh around inindeterminate status because they're caught in bureaucratic limbo or becausethey have been granted temporary stays that are repeatedly extended. PresidentBarack Obama created a paler shade of gray this summer by exercisingprosecutorial discretion not to deport some young people who were brought tothis country illegally as children. But these are exceptions, not rules. Thebasic mechanism for legal immigration today, apart from the special category ofrefugee, is the legal permanent resident visa, or green card. Most recipientsare people sponsored by close relatives who live in the United States. As thename implies, this mechanism is designed for immigrants who are settling down.The visa can be revoked if the holder does not show "intent toremain" by not maintaining a U.S. address, going abroad to work full timeor just traveling indefinitely. Legal residents are assumed to be on their wayto becoming Americans, physically, culturally and legally. After five years ofliving here, they become eligible for citizenship and a chance to gain votingrights and full access to the social safety net. Thisis a fine way to deal with people who arrive with deep connections to thecountry and who resolve to stay. That can and should be most immigrants. Butthis mechanism has two problems: The nation is not prepared to offercitizenship to every migrant who is offered a job. And not everyone who comeshere wants to stay forever. It mayhave once made sense to think of immigrants as sodbusters who were coming tosettle empty spaces. But that antique reasoning does not apply when the countryis looking at a long, steep race to remain competitive in the world economy,particularly not when innovation and entrepreneurship are supposed to be ourcomparative advantage. To succeed, we need modern birds of passage. Thechallenges differ depending on whether you are looking at the high end of theskills spectrum, the information workers or at low-skilled laborers. Afrequent proposal for highly skilled workers comes with the slogan, "Staplea green card to the diploma." That is supposed to ensure that a greatershare of brainy international students remain in the United States afterearning degrees in science and technology. But what if they are not ready for along-term commitment? No one would suggest that investment capital or designprocesses need to reside permanently in one nation. Talent today yearns to beequally mobile. Rather than try to oblige smart young people from abroad tostay here, we should allow them to think of the United States as a place wherethey can always return, a place where they will spend part, not all, of theirlives, one of several places where they can live and work and invest. Temporary-workerprograms are a conventional approach to meeting low-skilled labor needs withoutillegal immigration. That's what President George W. Bush proposed in 2004,saying the government should "match willing foreign workers with willingAmerican employers." An immigrant comes to do a particular job for alimited period of time and then goes home. But such programs risk replacing onekind of rigidity with another. The relatively small programs currently in placedon't manage the matchmaking very well. Competingdomestic workers need to be protected, as do the migrant workers, and theprocess must be nimble enough to meet labor market demand. Nobody really haspulled that off, and there is no reason to believe it can be done on a grandscale. Rather than trying to link specific migrants to specific jobs, differenttypes of temporary work visas could be pegged to industries, to places or totime periods. You could get an engineering visa, not only a visa to work atIntel. Bothshort-term visas and permanent residence need to be part of the mix, but theyare not the whole answer. Another valuable tool is the provisional visa, whichAustralia uses as a kind of intermediary stage in which temporary immigrantsspend several years before becoming eligible for permanent residency. The U.S.system practically obliges visitors to spend time here without authorizationwhen they've married a citizen, gotten a job or done something else thatqualifies them to stay legally. Wealso could borrow from Europe and create long-term permission to reside forcertain migrants that is contingent on simply being employed, not on having aspecific job. And, legislation could loosen the definitions of permanentresidency so that migrants could gain a lifetime right to live and work in theUnited States without having to be here (and pay taxes here) more or lesscontinuously. Theidea that newcomers are either saints or sinners is not written indeliblyeither in our hearts or in our laws. As the size of the unauthorized populationhas grown over the past 20 years or so, the political response has dictatedseeing immigration policy through the stark lens of law enforcement: Whomdo we lock up, kick out, fence off? Prominent politicians of both parties,including both presidential candidates, have engaged in macho one-upmanshipwhen it comes to immigration. So, President Obama broke records fordeportations. Mitt Romney, meanwhile, vows to break records for bordersecurity. Breakingout of the either/or mentality opens up many avenues for managing futureimmigration. It could also help break the stalemate over the current populationof unauthorized migrants. No election result will produce a Congress thatoffers a path to citizenship for everybody, but there is no support for totaldeportation, either. If weaccept that there are spaces between legal and illegal, then options multiply. Citizenshipcould be an eventual outcome for most, not all, people here illegally, buteveryone would get some kind of papers, and we can engineer a way for people towork their way from one status to another. The newly arrived and least attachedcould be granted status for a limited time and receive help with returning totheir home countries. Others might be offered life-long privileges to live andwork here, but not citizenship. We'd give the fullest welcome to those withhomes, children or long time jobs. Byinsisting that immigrants are either Americans or aliens, we make it harder forsome good folks to come and we oblige others to stay for the wrong reasons.Worse, we ensure that there will always be people living among us who areoutside the law, and that is not good for them or us. 26“Birds of passage” refers to those who____ [A]immigrate across the Atlantic. [B]leave their home countries for good. [C]stay in a foregin temporaily. [D]findpermanent jobs overseas. 27 Itis implied in paragraph 2 that