Somewhere between Taylor Swift conspiracies and Jewish space lasers causing forest fires, there actually are pragmatic GOP suggestions, solutions with bipartisan support, that offer partial stress relief with genuine immigration policies. For a nation of immigrants, we have becoming increasingly hostile to immigrants at all levels. It’s so easy to see images of clearly out-of-control accumulations of wannabe immigrants at our southern border… and just freak out, demanding an immediate stop to it all. It’s even easier if you are a white incumbent American worrying about getting your voting control diluted somehow… even if that means “electing” a white supremacist facing criminal convictions as the next president (perhaps only president until he dies or appoints his son to take over).
But we have been struggling with an immigration reform overhaul since the last Reagan-era immigration legislation. And if immigration reform would pass, there is a harsh fact that Republicans have known for decades and Democrats have been unable to overcome: without an obvious optic – hordes at the border – exactly what domestic policy would Republicans run against? Our economy is solid. Overall crime rates are down. And while foreign policy generally does not force voters to change their votes unless American forces are dying, the Hamas horror and the IDF Palestinian overkill will probably only move the needle so far… but not enough to change the election. Biden’s age vs Trump’s age and “me, me, me, the victim” probably cancel each other out. Simply put, satisfactory immigration reform takes away a key GOP issue.
First, our immigration obsession has wreaked havoc with US companies trying fill very sophisticated tech jobs for which there are insufficient qualified US residents. Hundreds of thousands of unfilled jobs. We’ve made bringing these experts, foreign residents, into the US excessively difficult. Forms. Time. Not allowing their wives and children to join them. Other countries, particularly Canada and the UK, are welcoming the same experts we do not allow to enter the US. Major US tech companies have had to locate new research centers in those countries, knowing that the jobs they will create will not migrate into the US. The job creators, it seems, are not the billionaire enjoying their lower tax rates… it those tekkie immigrants we are keeping out. Take a good hard look at the immigrants behind Google and Tesla.
It is even worse than that. As people complain about the rising price of groceries, sky-high real estate (rental and owned), and restaurants are raising their rates, supported by state and local governments’ struggling with their tax base, few associate any of those variables with immigration. But reality is that Americans are now reproducing at a rate well below the 2.1 live births per couple replacement rate. Like many developed nations, our resident population is contracting. Add to that the fact that lower-level construction jobs can no longer be filled with low-wage workers. As office building values plunge and residential housing is not meeting demand, we are paying more to build what we need! The cost to harvest crops and maintain farms is also soaring as American are loath to engage in stoop labor and traditional seasonal farm workers are in desperately short supply. These demographic realities are discussed in greater detail in my January 3rd Immigrateful? blog.
Writing for the February 6th Los Angeles Times, author DW Gibson (currently working with Cornell Law School on immigration issues) suggests a path forward, one that actually allows states to participate in the solution: “It’s no secret that our country’s gobsmacking backlog of more than 2 million asylum cases is driven, in large part, by migrants fleeing poverty. Yes, some are fleeing poverty and violence, but many are directly fleeing poverty. Their asylum applications, by and large, will be denied because economic desperation, no matter how severe, is not one of the few legally recognized criteria for asylum. Still, these migrants enter the years-long adjudication process because there are no other options for them.
“Many Americans think ‘economic’ migrants should ‘get in line and wait their turn,’ but this admonition fails to recognize that, other than the asylum morass, there is generally no line for those fleeing poverty to wait in. The U.S. offers approximately 140,000 employment-based visas each year, in a labor market that is short somewhere around 3 million workers — and many of the workers are needed for types of labor that have few or no visas available. By creating more guest worker programs we would not only thin the crowds at the border, but also help the country meet some glaring economic needs.
“There are already bipartisan road maps for such programs… Take, for instance, the proposed Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013, which included the creation of a W visa to allow entry for low-skilled temporary workers seeking jobs that do not require a college degree. This would have met so many of our country’s needs when it comes to critical industries like construction, landscaping and food services — pieces of the economy for which we already rely so heavily on unauthorized workers, as much as we hate to admit it.
“The 2013 legislation did not become law — despite support from 68 senators — but there are similar bipartisan proposals on the table now, even in our explosive political environment. Rep. Lloyd Smucker (R-Pa.) and Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) introduced a bill called the Essential Workers for Economic Advancement Act last spring, which would establish a new visa category, H-2V, for filling jobs that have remained open for a required amount of time and are located in regions where the unemployment rate is below 8%.
“The ‘essential worker’ approach would work to the benefit of migrants and a range of American industries, as laid out in ‘Immigration Reform: A Path Forward,’ a recent white paper from Cornell Law School’s Immigration Law and Policy Program . One of several suggestions made there is to start with healthcare.
“The government already allows some non-U.S. resident healthcare professionals who have been trained in the U.S. to stay in the country to work, if there is a facility seeking to hire them. The Conrad-30 Waiver Program — “30” refers to a cap for each state on how many individuals can receive the waiver each year — used to be called the Conrad-20 program, but demand required a jump to 30, and still it’s not providing enough healthcare workers in states such as South Dakota, the home of former Republican Sen. Kent Conrad, who originally proposed the program. Our need for more healthcare professionals — particularly in rural, Republican-leaning regions — is so vast that it becomes difficult to understand why we insist that foreign healthcare professionals who are trained in the U.S. leave the country after graduation.” Pragmatics and solution-driven efforts should govern. They do not!
I’m Peter Dekom, and when you have an entire political party dedicated to stopping immigration reform to preserve a horrible to campaign against, we all suffer.
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