Labor Secretary: Obama Will Take 'Aggressive Exec Action' on Immigration for 'Shared Prosperity'

Labor Secretary Thomas Perez said President Barack Obama will take “aggressive executive action” on immigration, which Perez said will bring about more “shared prosperity.”

Addressing the National Press Club this week, Perez, who is reportedly on the short list to be Obama’s next attorney general, said the country needed to “fix our broken immigration system” with comprehensive amnesty legislation that is “big and bold” to ensure that there is “shared prosperity,” which he said is a goal of his Labor Department. Though the Congressional Budget Office determined that comprehensive amnesty legislation would lower the wages of American workers, Labor Secretary Perez championed it.

Obama, after delaying his executive amnesty until after the midterms to help Senate Democrats retain control of the Senate, has said he would enact it before the end of the year. Breitbart News first reported this week that the federal government is preparing millions of identification cards for immigrants who may be given temporary amnesty and work permits via executive action.

Despite studies from Harvard Professor George Borjas and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office that have concluded otherwise, Perez said amnesty legislation would also increase wages for American workers. 

Perez, who worked on immigration reform with the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA), said he has also “spent a lot of time with folks in the Silicon Valley” in response to a question about Silicon Valley business leaders demanding immigration reform “because there is not enough workers to fill the demand for high-tech workers.”

Silicon Valley companies like Microsoft are laying off thousands of American workers, even as they clamor for more guest-worker permits for cheaper foreign labor. Though numerous scholars and studies have found that America has a surplus of high-tech workers, Obama suggested in Southern California recently that he is considering granting more guest-worker visas to high-tech companies via executive action. Perez spoke about the importance of giving more opportunities to enter the middle class, but he did not address Professor Ron Hira’s concerns that massively increasing guest-worker permits for high-tech workers would “cut off” entry into the middle class for people from working-class backgrounds.