Saturday, March 3, 2007

Oppose the Kennedy/McCain/Bush Comprehensive Immigration Reform

SACRAMENTO - March 3, 2007 - The pending comprehensive reforms allow 12 million illegal workers to retain their jobs with no requirement that their employers first try to fill the jobs with U.S. workers. Typically illegals are paid below market wages, giving an unfair advantage against employers who have complied with the law.
  • This is amnesty for the illegal aliens: They are granted a U.S. job and path to citizenship based solely upon their illegal entry to our country. This makes a sham of the 1986 “one time only” amnesty.

  • This is amnesty for employers of illegal aliens: These employers, such as landscape, roofing, drywall, restaurants, manufacturing, have gained market share by blatantly violating the federal employment verification statutes. They have driven down wages for all Americans in these professions. Now, with no penalty, they will be able to retain these cheaper workers.

These reforms create a guest worker program in a wide range of professions for which there is no shortage of U.S. workers. I do not oppose a strictly control guest worker program for migrant farm labor. But, as proposed, these guest worker programs would allow recent immigrants to use the program to bring in their friends and family as “employees” at the exclusion of Americans. All they would have to do is check a box “I could not find any Americans” and run a bogus classified ad – ignoring all applicants.

This undermines our free market labor supply/demand where the employer would have to increase wages to attract applicants. (In nearly every case there is not a shortage of workers, only a shortage of workers willing to accept the wages and terms offered.) The U.S. Government should not be in the business of undermining the natural market forces that retain our middle-class standard of living.

President Bush calls for a guest worker program "to match willing employers with willing foreign workers to fill jobs that Americans have not taken." What does that mean? Isn't every job in the classified section a job that, at the moment "Americans have not taken?" Might a job be "not taken" because it was never advertised or pays below market wages?

We already have this program with the H-1B and PERM Greencard guest worker program. Disproportionately Indians arrive, secure a software contract, then use the H-1B program to start bodyshops to bring in friends – or to sell U.S. citizenship for $10,000 under the table kickbacks. Rarely are such crimes prosecuted since both parties benefit. (This news article about the ASK Law Firm reveals the problems associated with allowing the private sector to manage who is admitted to the country – this is the tip of the iceberg of current abuse that would only increase under a massive guestworker program.)

California, like many other areas, already has too many people:

  • "Caltrans officials say they are in near-crisis mode: Freeways statewide are at their carrying capacity" ["Caltrans, city in traffic battle" (Sacramento Bee 2/16/2007 - Tony Bizjak)]

  • Prime croplands are being replaced with subdivisions.

  • Prisons are overcrowded.

  • Congress cannot assure that sufficient oil will be available for current Americans over the next few decades.
Legalizing 12 million illegal immigrants will substantially increase our population: Chain-migration occurs when an immigrant becomes a citizen. Citizens have a legal right to bring in family members other than spouses and children. They can bring in their parents, their adult siblings and the spouses and children of their adult siblings. What is the result?


WASHINGTON — Monday, May 15, 2006 -- U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) today unveiled an impact analysis that shows the Senate immigration bill – should it become law – would permit up to 217.1 million new legal immigrants into the United States over the next 20 years, a number equal to 66 percent of the total current population of the United States.

Amnesty is not in the U.S. economic interest:
  • The plan would flood in cheap labor that, not only would not pay federal income tax, but would often be entitled to the earned income credit.
  • Recent immigrants send over $56 billion back to their home countries each year. Over $15 billion bleeds to Mexico, $25 billion to South America and $16 billion to Asia. (Frosty Woodbridge “America's Death by a Thousand Cuts” March 2007)
  • The massive population increase would increase demand for imported oil and consumer goods, further exasperating our energy dependency and trade deficit with China.

Proponents of the comprehensive approach claim that it is not feasible to “round up and deport 12 million people.” I agree. But granting the citizenship and thus the ability to petition tens of millions of theirl their relatives – regardless of job skills or displacement of U.S. workers – is not a solution.

Furthermore the comprehensive plan does not stop illegal immigration. So in 20 years we’d have to grant another amnesty. If we don’t draw a line this will never end.

The comprehensive approach permit birthright citizenship anchor-baby to continue. Women from as far a China are making tourist trips to the U.S. to drop an anchorbaby, assuring themselves of a path the U.S. citizenship in the future.

Congress has considered changing the Constitution for trivial matters like flag-burning (I don’t recall the last time a flag was burned, nor that it was ever a “problem.”) So why do they lack the will to end this anchor-baby sham? The 14th Amendment pertained to granting citizenship to slaves, not to the children of visitor that hold citizenship in other countries.

SOLUTION

First enact enforcement provisions, including tamper-resistant worker identification, and require all U.S. workers to re-verify their status – under penalty of jail for the employer, worker, and agent processing the application. Some sort of biometric measure is needed, such as thumbprint. Without work most illegals will return home without enforcement and legal appeals. (If the “comprehensive solution” does not include such provisions, it should not be called “comprehensive.”)

6 comments:

weaver said...

No amnesty for illegal employers, we need to prosecute illegal employers using testimony provided by "undocumented workers."

The IRS should audit and deny all payroll deductions/exemptions of wages paid to illegal workers.

Anonymous said...

Here are some good points from a Business Week article by Vivek Wadhwa
http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/jul2006/sb20060710_949835.htm

1) Shortages usually lead to price increases. If there were a shortage of engineers, salaries should have risen. Yet in real terms, engineering salaries have actually dropped (see BusinessWeek.com, 9/15/05, "Good Time to Learn Accounting").

2) We've got enough qualified computer programmers. The Wall Street Journal reported that Microsoft received résumés from about 100,000 graduating students in 2004, screened 15,000 of them, interviewed 3,500, and hired 1,000. It said that Microsoft receives about 60,000 résumés a month for its 2,000 open positions.

3) The vast majority of engineering undergraduates aren't foreign nationals. According to the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE), the percentage of undergraduate engineering degrees awarded to students with U.S. citizenship or permanent residency has remained close to 92% for the past seven years.

4) U.S. students don't gain enough financial benefit from postgraduate engineering education. The proportion of domestic to foreign students completing graduate degrees in engineering dropped from 60.3% in 1999 to 57.4% in 2005, and doctoral degrees from 54.4% to 40.4% in the same period, according to the ASEE. This is because salaries for scientists and engineers are lower than for other professions, and the investment that students have to make in higher degrees isn't cost-justified.

Doctoral graduate students typically spend seven to eight years earning a PhD, during which time they are paid stipends. These stipends are usually less than what a bachelor's degree-holder makes. Some students never make up for this financial loss.

Foreign students typically have fewer opportunities and see a U.S. [postgraduate] education as their ticket to the U.S. job market and citizenship.

Unknown said...

There are only 140,000 green card being issued for employment based and Families. 217 million projected by Jeff sessions looks astronomical and does not make sense. Even if the number of green card increased to 1 million even then the 217 million is a far cry and uteer nonsense.

weaver said...

Rajagopalan,

Mr. Sessions statement is accurate, although he wasn't speaking about B1 visas.

http://sessions.senate.gov/pressapp/record.cfm?id=255969

Almost 2 weeks ago, my staff and the Heritage Foundation did separate extensive analyses to determine the total number of people who would be coming into America under this bill, if it passes.

At a press conference last Monday--the first time anybody had even discussed it--Robert Rector, senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, joined with me to reveal the results of our studies and to shed some light on the future immigration policy changes in the bill.

According to my projections, the bill would have increased the legal immigration population by 78 million to 217 million over the course of the next 20 years. I would note, the current population of the United States today is less than 300 million. So 100 million would be a one-third increase in the population by immigration; 200 million, of course, would be two-thirds of an increase in the population.

Anonymous said...

Thank you for the accurate and complete scientific data. Unfortunatly, the needs of the American people have been, and will continue to go ignored.

Anonymous said...

I perceived that there was a disconnect between what was being said by corporate America and Politicians and the reality of life. Over a 6 month period I responded to over 2,000 job ads for technical positions (for which I was more than qualified). I only received one offer. The most interesting thing is that I did not make compensation a question by indicating a rate within their desired range.

I determined that, not only is there not a shortage of qualified workers, there is a glut of qualified technical personnel available. This is further supported by the fact that 95% of the positions available were contract (an indication that it is a employer's market).