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When it comes to immigration, America's politicians are trying their best to keep the world's best and brightest from darkening America's doors, says the Economist. Consider the annual April Fool's joke played on applicants for H1B visas, which allow companies to sponsor highly-educated foreigners to work in America for three years or so:

• The powers-that-be have set the number of visas so low -- at 85,000 -- that the annual allotment is taken up as soon as applications open on April 1st.
• America then deals with the mismatch between supply and demand in the worst possible way, allocating the visas by lottery.
• The result is that hundreds of thousands of highly qualified people -- entrepreneurs, doctors and scientists are kept waiting on the spin of a roulette wheel.
• Bill Gates calculates, and respectable economists agree, that every foreigner who is given an H1B visa creates jobs for five Americans.

This is a policy of national self-sabotage, says the Economist...

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