Last night I think I got a glimpse of why so many people are so worried about immigrants.

On Jeopardy!

It was the final night of the Jeopardy College Championship, and the three contestants were a Stanford student of Indian descent, a Naval Academy freshman whose last name was Tshu, and an MIT student from Decatur, Georgia of Chinese descent. None of them looked like me, even when I was their age.

Then it occurred to me that those people who are ranting about immigrants may well be scared. They’re having to compete against immigrants who are smarter, willing to work harder, and sacrifice more. So, instead of stepping up their game to compete with them, they ask the government to shut them out. They don’t seem to realize us that every time they have a rally saying that they are coming to take our jobs, what they are really saying is that we don’t think we can compete with them.

They’re scared.

And they may have good reason to be scared. More than half the patents issued in the United States are issued to people who were not born here. And three-quarters of the patents issued to the top ten patent-producing universities had at least one foreign-born inventor. The natives of the country that has for years held itself to be the leader in innovation have essentially left the field.

It’s not just the nerds. The immigrants also make a big impact on what we (sometimes erroneously) call unskilled jobs. We proved it in Georgia.

In 2011, State Representative Matt Ramsey and his like-minded colleagues wrote a bill entitled HB87. According to Forbes, he said that the goal “was to eliminate incentives for illegal aliens to cross into our state.” That may have been the goal, but the result was that South Georgia farmers suffered an estimated $140,000,000 in agricultural losses as crops rotted in the field.

The idea was that if the immigrants didn’t take the jobs away, locals would be employed. Most of them didn’t last a day. They didn’t have either the drive, the strength, or the skills to effectively harvest the crops. Then Georgia decided that they would dispatch prisoners to harvest the crops. That didn’t work either.  

This is what happens when you do things like Matt Ramsey and his buddies did. Or like the current President and his buddies are doing. They approach the subject of immigration reform like a horticulturist pruning a rosebush with a hatchet. And like that, the results aren’t pretty.

Anyone who knows me might say that because I’m old and no longer really competing I can afford to have such a sanguine attitude to the (insert color or ethnicity here) horde. And that’s true. But both my children and their spouses go to work every day in places where multiple languages are spoken and many of their coworkers aren’t from around here.

In fact, when my son married his bride, it was a sort of segregated reception, segregated by dietary restrictions. We had Chinese food at several tables and at least one table of Indian food. My wife and I sat at the international table and ate Chinese food. It was delicious.

To me, my children and children-in-law have the right idea. They get up in the morning, go to work, and do the level of work that it takes to succeed in that environment.

I don’t know anyone who thinks that we shouldn’t have immigration laws. Obviously we should, but we need to have sane ones, levels of immigration that not only serve the needs of our country, but provide a path to success for those who come into this country from other places.

In my lifetime you could pretty well map the immigration process from the names on the major league baseball teams. By the time I began paying attention, the dominance of the Irish players (O’Rourke, Casey, McGraw, Doyle, Kelly, etc.) and the Jewish players (Cohen, Berg[1], Arnovich, Feldman, etc.) had given way to the Italians (the Dimaggios, Rizutto, Berra, Campanella, etc.), then to what we called Negro baseball players, beginning with Jackie Robinson and soon becoming numerous, on up to Spanish speaking players. New groups came in, competed, and they did take away some jobs, but because they did them better.

That’s the way it’s always been, and I really doubt that there anyway we can stop it now. Nor should we.

There are three things I think we should do, and since I know very little about immigration, I offer these as possible suggestions with details to be worked out (if ever) by people who do know something.

First we should recognize the difference between immigration reform and xenophobia. Right now our politicians are using immigration as a blunt instrument to keep the base stirred up.

Secondly, we should make sure that immigrants we do let in are treated properly. Our country has a sorry history of immigrant labor. Read about the Chinese who came here to build our railroads, or the middle Europeans who worked in Chicago’s slaughter houses, or the Jews who did piecework in New York. And that, of course, is not mentioning the most flagrant human violation of all: the Africans who involuntarily immigrated to support the plantation economy. It’s surprising that generations of the Chinese, Japanese, Poles, Czechs, Jews and dozens of other immigrant nationalities haven’t risen up against us. Instead, in a large part, they managed to work their way up, and some became very successful.

Finally, we should create an immigration program that is no longer shrill and political, but is sane and businesslike. We can start with the fact that to maintain any position of leadership in the world, we need the immigrants, those with Ph.D.s and those who know how to harvest vegetables.  Then we can determine how we can balance this against the security concerns we have without looking callous and dumb to the rest of the world.

I don’t know how to do it, but I know that there are a lot of people out there smarter and better informed than I am. I hope—in the words of that great philosopher Larry, the Cable Guy— they’ll get’er done.

[1] One of the best lines ever was said about Berg. “He can speak six languages and can’t hit in any of them.”