Thursday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) made a pitch for the legislative effort he and Sen. David Perdue (R-GA) have teamed up on to put limits on current legal immigration policy.
Cotton told host Joe Scarborough their bill was meant to stop the “downward pressure” put on the labor market with the influx of legal immigrants.
This bill is all about helping working class Americans get a pay raise and helping grow our economy. Our legal immigration system right now, our green card system simply doesn’t work for working-class Americans. We admit over 1 million immigrants a year. That’s like adding the population of Montana every single year.
But only one out of 15 of those immigrants come here because of their jobs skills or education or so forth. Our legislation would reorient our immigration system so that we are not competing, not putting downward pressure and forcing working class Americans to compete with unskilled and low skilled immigrants while at the same time attracting the best and most talented immigrants from around the world who are going to come here and apply their entrepreneurial skills or innovative spirit to create new jobs for all Americans, whether their families came over on the Mayflower or whether they just took the oath of citizenship last week.
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