College Education as a Gateway to Immigration as a Means to Sustained Economic Growth

Another post from our friend, designer Nathan Felde:

These times do call for big, bright ideas.

We not only need to repair the damage we have done to our immigration policies and thereby to immigrants, legal and illegal, but we need a renaissance of our nation's concept of immigration. In the larger sweep of our history, immigration, not war, has been the primary fuel for long term sustainable economic growth.

With a land mass nearly equal to China and far superior infrastructure we can obviously support twice our current population and there are plenty of people all over the world who would love to help build our country and economy as they always have in the past. 

This can be done by dramatically opening and promoting a logical gateway and path to citizenship through our colleges and universities, something we have already realized we can do through our military services. This would immediately revitalize the currently threatened enrollments and financial viability  of all of our colleges and universities and would provide a wonderful qualifying, moderating acculturation and assimilation experience. The infrastructure for that experience and valuable education that our schools of higher learning are known throughout the world for, are in place. The applicants are ready in vast numbers, creating an endless pool of valuable and qualified emigrants. 

Of course we would have to establish and tighten the regulation of land use, water and air quality and other elements of rapid growth, to avoid expanding our recent and wasteful suburban sprawl, but all of our cities and towns actually look like their civic and architectural aspirations, established in the latter 19th century were abandoned to go to war in the mid 20th century.

The gaps between buildings in every town and city are the framework into which towns and cities with a dense and pleasant residential, public and commercial mix of use could be made as charming as the old world cities we jet to when we want relief from cities and suburbs made unpleasant and/or boring by designing them around the automobile. (You could not that long ago take trolleys from Bangor, Maine to New York City, if that example helps.)

Let's look at the numbers and get back on track to greatness in our new global circumstances with the old principles of our founding Constitution and new creative ideas that improve upon our present urban-suburban-rural-wilderness social and ecological balance. We have our treasure of classic architectural models in small cities and our real human economic history to inform us. 

And, as ever, an education in the liberal arts, those things that a free person should know to be of most benefit to others can guide us all, as it did our founding immigrants.

Nathan Felde

Chair, Design Department

The Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University

Boston, MA 02215

nfelde@lesley.edu