Birdman director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu during his acceptance speech for Best Picture at the Oscars late last month brought the immigration issue front and center for Hollywood’s finest.  His honest and heartfelt sentiments caused a huge reaction in the online world reopening debates about US immigration policies all over social media.

“I want to dedicate this award for my fellow Mexicans, the ones who live in Mexico,” said Inarritu.  “I pray that we can find and build the government that we deserve. And the ones that live in this country, who are part of the latest generation of immigrants in this country, I just pray that they can be treated with the same dignity and respect of the ones who came before and built this incredible immigrant nation.”

The common person may not know much about American immigration guidelines, and in many cases when asked a citizen will respond with whatever rhetoric his/her party leader supplied them with during the latest network “debate.” Instead of learning about what the actual pros and cons are of the United States’ immigration policy, people put blind faith into what they are told by their favorite politician.

US immigration protocol is very complex and it is hard to easily explain the cut and dry positives and negatives. However a few fairly simplistic principles of the policy include familial unification, employment, protection of refugees, and promotion of diversity. These are the positives of our immigration policy, keeping families together, stimulation of the economy, and the protection of those who would be persecuted in their original homeland. Nonetheless, downsides present themselves as well including the increase in competition for jobs and the oversupply of labor leading to wages being cut and held drastically low. Iñarritu wants nothing more than equal treatment for Mexican natives. One of the steps we need to take is to end the oversupply of low-skilled labor so that immigrants are able to attain a higher standard of living.

Under current policy, benefits flow primarily to the affluent while the expense is usually borne by the poor. Many progressives suggest that reform is in order, to increase the limit of immigrants granted entrance to the country in order to stabilize the economy. On the other hand, conservatives feel that too many immigrants are being allowed in currently and that a much smaller cap should be put on the amount allowed in.  Both of these plans are misguided and are not what the people of the United States needs, both future and current. By letting every single immigrant that applies for citizenship into the US, the abundance of labor we already have will continue to grow at uncontrollable rates.  If we were to put a much stricter limit on the amount of immigrants coming into the country, highly skilled or not, that would only sustain the wealth gap and further sequester immigrants to the stereotypical image of low skilled, poor, working class people.

Instead we need to focus on admitting highly skilled workers like engineers and technicians and drastically decreasing the amount of lower skilled ones. This keeps the demand for service jobs in America high and gives employers incentive to maintain livable wages so that service class workers may support their families.

Our current immigration policies are antiquated and need to be updated in order to keep up with the blindingly fast progress of the rest of the world.