Today’s FT covers the immigration issue on two fronts–one in a cover story about cellist Yo-Yo Ma’s testimony before Congress, the other in a first-of-two-parts editorial by Martin Wolf.

Wolf raises, but doesn’t completely address (in his defense, it is a two-parter) the impact low-skilled immigrants have on low-skilled native-born workers. This is a serious issue and worthy of much more attention than I can adequately provide in this post today. Raising the skill level of native workers throughout the region, though, has been one of the things we’ve frequently cited as essential to the recovery of our economy. (Only the teaser to Wolf’s article is freely available, but you can get a 15-day free trial access to the Financial Times online).

But let me turn for a minute to the Yo-Yo Ma article, and some of the other aspects of immigration as it relates to having a vibrant, innovative economy. [Note: because I am writing this from home and don’t have access to the exact figures, all the numbers I’ll be using are estimates, but they should be close enough to make my point.]

Ma argues that current US visa restrictions, imposed after 9/11, put the US at risk of “cultural isolation.” I would argue that the risks are even far greater than that. The Financial Times, it seems, would agree:

“Foreign artists, along with students, scientists and business travelers, have been among the hardest hit by tightened border security and visa procedures enacted to prevent would be terrorists from entering the US. Unive4rsities and some big companies have echoed concerns over the delays facing skilled workers, students, and artists.”

TechFutures not only echoes but wants to amplify those concerns.

Yesterday we spoke about the Tupperware Effect and the desire many have to resist change or even worse, return to the past. We can’t go back–nor should we try to–but there are certain lessons we can learn from the past that are worth, if not repeating, at least replicating today. A high level of immigrants in our population is one of these.

Perhaps Guhan or someone else from the Fed will provide me with more accurate numbers (and other examples), but in its heyday, when the Cleveland area was, as Naomi Lamoreaux calls it, “The Silicon Valley of the Nineteenth Century“, the immigrant population in the region approached or even exceeded 40 per cent of the total population. We were a region of immigrants. Today, net new immigration, and our regional immigrant (foreign born) population, is well below ten per cent. If memory serves, it may even be as low as three per cent. This, I would argue, is a major inhibitor to new innovations emerging from the region. Why?

Immigration is an essential component of innovation. Immigrants add new ideas, different ways of approaching problems and thinking about things, different expectations and unique cultural perspectives to the mix. Otherwise we all just continue merrily treading water in the shallow end of the (intellectual) gene pool.

After three or four decades of the kind of managerial (as opposed to entrepreneurial) thinking and problem solving that has dominated our region (justifiably so, given the types of companies and opportunities that were available here), immigrants by their very nature tend to bring more risk tolerance to the table.

It takes a lot of guts to pick up and leave one place and move to another, especially when that “other” place is in another country, where everything–the language, the culture, the educational system, the habits and lifestyle–may be radically different from what you were used to.

Emigrating is inherently an entrepreneurial activity. The risks and the changes are huge. But so, too, are the opportunities: for everyone, immigrant and native-born alike.

Since 9/11, however, we as a nation have tucked our collective heads into our protective turtle-like shell and have tried to insulate ourselves from the rest of the world, when what we need is to embrace it. Instead of making it difficult for the best and brightest foreign-born college students to come to the US to pursue advanced degrees and research activities, we make it almost impossible for them to enter the country. And since we practically kick them out the day they graduate, even those who could come or loathe to since they have few if any prospects for staying in America after they graduate.

Instead we should be opening up the doors of our colleges and universities to as many international students as we can get, and we should grant each and every one of them a green card the moment they graduate and get a job in the region or start a new company. This is not an either/or proposition with respect to our native born population; it is a both/and. We need to encourage educational attainment and entrepreneurial activity among those already living here and those who want to come to live here. And it will be in the mixing of the two, the interplay between different ideas, backgrounds, thought patterns and approaches to solving problems that we make Northeast Ohio a hub of innovative activity again.