Traveling in Israel this week, I was surprised to learn that the one place the United States is getting immigration right is in Jerusalem. Yesterday I toured the Mevasseret Absorption Center, a sprawling facility that processes some 1,300 Ethiopian immigrants every year. It's a popular place: Al Sharpton, Hillary Clinton, and Condi Rice have all visited Mevasseret. That's because the complex is largely funded via a $40 million annual State Department grant, which covers about two-thirds of the center's costs.
My instinct is to be skeptical about U.S. taxpayer money funding the assimilation of immigrants in Israel. On the surface, it seems slightly outside the State Department's mandate. But regardless of how you feel about the policy generally, you can't help but come away from Mevasseret feeling that this is the way immigration should take place. Rather than letting poor, uneducated immigrants hit the streets running, which would almost certainly doom them to permanent underclass status (as has happened to many immigrants to the United States), Israel teaches them how to be productive citizens. About 85 percent of the Ethiopian immigrants to Israel arrive illiterate. So for 10 months, they spend five hours a day in language classes. One such class is shown in the photo here. In all, the immigrants will stay at Mevasseret for one year. In addition to language training, children attend school and adults learn such basic skills as how to shop in markets and how to rent housing for themselves.
With a new immigration debate about to heat up in the United States, Mevasseret's success makes me wonder: Why is it so hard for the United States to get immigration right? The U.S. government spends millions to incarcerate and deport its immigrants, when a relatively small investment in education upfront could make much of that expense unnecessary. It's strange to think that the United States can get it so right in a foreign country, and yet so wrong at home.
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