Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, (D-NY) and other progressives have drafted a George W. Bush-like corporatist immigration policy that insists the nation’s economic power is more important than Americans’ ability to earn decent wages.
“All of us are harmed when our outdated and biased immigration system does not respond to the needs of the United States,” says the draft congressional resolution that was provided to Vox.com by India-born Rep. Pramila Jayapal, (D-WA), chair of the far-left Congressional Progressive Caucus.
The plan says the federal government must adopt a border policy that “honors the courage and tenacity of [foreign] people who have moved to pursue a better life.” It is signed by Ocasio-Cortez, Jayapal, Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-NY), Judy Chu (D-CA), Rep. Jesús García (D-Il), and Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas). Garcia was born in Mexico. Jayapal was born in India.
The progressives’ draft plan would massively expand the population of temporary foreign workers by letting them stay: “All people who are recruited to meet verifiable labor market needs are able to change employers, bring and live with their families, and earn a roadmap to citizenship,” the resolution demands.
The plan is “almost exactly the same labor policy as George W. Bush called for in 2004,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies. Bush’s policy allowed “any willing worker who could find a willing employer to move here and be paid any wage in any occupation anywhere in the country,” Krikorian said, adding:
By essentially allowing unlimited immigration, every [American] worker is competing with the lowest wage worker abroad. It is ironic that Jayapal, a socialist, is the one pushing it … Her objection to immigration law is that it keeps anybody out.
Bush described his “Any Willing Worker” cheap labor plan in 2004, saying:
Out of common sense and fairness, our laws should allow willing workers to enter our country and fill jobs that Americans have are not filling. (Applause.) We must make our immigration laws more rational, and more humane. And I believe we can do so without jeopardizing the livelihoods of American citizens.
Our reforms should be guided by a few basic principles. First, America must control its borders …
Second, new immigration laws should serve the economic needs of our country. If an American employer is offering a job that American citizens are not willing to take, we ought to welcome into our country a person who will fill that job.
The federal government accepts one million legal immigrants each year, just as four million American teenagers turn 18.
But the government also awards more than one million work permits to temporary workers each year, so the progressives’ unpopular plan would flood the labor market. The total includes roughly 400,000 work permits for university graduates in the Optional Practical Training (OPT) and Curricular Practical Training (CPT) programs.
The progressives’ draft plan ignores the distinction between legal and illegal immigrants, and it ignores Americans’ economic and civic interests. Vox.com’s reporter, Nicole Narea, did not address the impact on Americans.
However, Trump failed to block the more profitable wave of white-collar migration — including H-1B visa workers – that suppresses salaries for American graduates.
The progressives’ plan also echoes President John Kennedy’s demand the United States become a “nation of immigrants” to fight the Soviet Union in the Cold War. The resulting 1965 immigration act sharply increased the inflow of foreign workers — and coincided with a subsequent multi-decade flatlining of Americans’ wages.
The progressives’ effusive praise for migrants also matches Bush’s language. In August 2020, for example, Bush said:
People all around the world are willing to leave their homes and leave their families and risk everything to come to our country. Their talent and hard work and love of freedom have helped us become the leader of the world. Our generation must ensure that America remains a beacon of liberty and the most hopeful society the world has ever known. We must always be proud to welcome people as fellow Americans.
Ocasio-Cortez, Jayapal, and the other progressives say in their resolution that “our strength as a country has always been greater when we welcome newcomers” and that the federal government should enforce “a presumption of liberty for all immigrants.”
The progressives’ desired flood of foreign labor would slow — and perhaps reverse — the wage-boosting mechanization and automation that helped create an American middle-class, Krikorian said.
A Haitian worker or an Albanian or an Indian low-skilled worker who comes here would enjoy dramatically greater productivity than they had in the old country. But American rates of productivity would decline dramatically because we’re talking about less skilled, less-educated [migrant] workers. Because labor would be become so much cheaper, you can actually see some jobs that are now mechanized being unmechanized. Where there’s a surge in the size of the labor force, things that were done by machines may now be cheaper to do by hand. That’s not the route to increased national prosperity.
The progressives want their open-doors policy — titled “Roadmap to Freedom” — to be endorsed by a majority vote of the Democrat-run House of Representatives.
Migration moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to real estate investors, and from the central states to the coastal states.
Migration also allows investors and CEOs to skimp on labor-saving technology, sideline U.S. minorities, ignore disabled people, exploit stoop labor in the fields, short-change labor in the cities, impose tight control and pay cuts on American professionals, corral technological innovation by minimizing the employment of American grads, undermine labor rights, and even get many progressive journalists to cheerlead for Wall Street’s priorities.