With immigration a top concern of many heading into the November election, the Center for Migration Studies of New York hosted a seminar convening experts for a deep dive into the issue here in the U.S.

The goal was to dissect the topic from select sociological, demographic, resettlement, legal and policy perspectives with an eye on discussing long-term solutions.

Mark Hugo Lopez, director of race and ethnicity research at the Pew Research Center, explained that the data shows U.S. demographics are certainly shifting as a result of migration.

“We’re seeing a moment where we are going to match the historic peak that we saw in the 1890’s in the share of the U.S. population that was born in another country,” he said.

Lopez emphasized that while three quarters of that migration is happening legally, the U.S. has seen an uptick in unauthorized migration since 2019, and Americans’ frustration has grown.

“Fewer Americans say the U.S. is doing a good job. The share that say it's doing a bad job is up to 80 percent, and that’s either a somewhat or a very bad job,” he said.

With the conversation turning to solutions, David Cronin, senior policy and legislative specialist for Catholic Relief Services, insisted that the U.S. needs to develop a bipartisan immigration policy that transcends administrations.

“We cannot have pendulum swings in policy, it creates too much confusion. It doesn’t attack the challenges of our time,” he said.

He argued part of that means addressing root causes like political unrest and food insecurity, and establishing U.S. policy that takes into account what he calls “push factors,” or things that drive individuals and families from their home countries, and creating “stay factors” that deal with those root causes in the form of humanitarian aid and U.S. policy.

“From investing in communities, to partnering with governments, to engaging at that hemispheric level to ensure that communities and families and individuals can find opportunities in their home countries,” he said.

The seminar also took a detailed look at fixing the system used by those who do choose to migrate.

Muzaffar Chishti, senior fellow and director of the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) at New York University School of Law, shared that there is one area of America's immigration system that strikes him as especially problematic: the selection system.

“We have an immigration selection system that is based on 1952 architecture and has only been tweaked and tinkered with only two or three times since,” he said.

He explained that it hasn’t seen even minor changes since 1990, and doesn’t take into account the modern labor market.

With more open positions in the U.S. than workers to fill them, he argued that selection process needs to be constructed in a way that it can fluctuate along with the needs of the labor market, proposing what he calls a bridge visa. The bridge visa would have options to allow both circular migration for work, as well a path to remain in the United States. It would also take into account the skills of an individual and how those skills relate to demand.

“We would allow people to be sponsored by an employer for a particular job, we would test the US labor market so U.S. workers and working conditions are not undermined,” he said.

According to the Migration Policy Institute, the bridge visa would “flexibly expand and shrink in scale based on the deliberations of an independent expert body,” which would adjust an annual cap to reflect labor market demands, immigration trends and other relevant factors. It says that testing of the labor market should occur before such a policy is implemented to ensure that bridge visa holders are note replacing U.S. workers, or undermining wages and conditions.