House Speaker Paul’s Ryan’s amnesty bill could reduce long-term immigration by transferring green cards from future immigrants to current DACA illegals and visa-workers.
The bill achieves this trick by denying green cards to would-be new immigrants and then transferring the freed-up green cards to people already living in the United States.
For example, the bill ends the annual award of green cards to roughly 88,000 extended-family chain-immigrants and 55,000 visa-lottery immigrants. That is a direct cut of 143,000 immigrants per year, or 1.43 million people over ten years.
Then the green cards are given year-by-year to the resident populations of illegals and Indian guest-workers and their families. That process transfers the green cards to roughly 1.43 million DACA illegals and guest-workers over the next ten years.
The real population in the United States does not grow because the 1.43 million green cards go to people already in the United States.
The bill would also help to trim the smaller inflow of illegal immigrants if it fulfills its promise to build the border wall and close border-wall loopholes.
But the big impact comes from legal immigration numbers that the bill does not mention — assuming the Senate and the judiciary do not rewrite the bill.
If the bill passes, the visa lottery will be ended, and the 55,000 people who would have won the diversity-lottery in 2019 will not get green cards. But those unidentified 55,000 would-be migrants also will not get extra green cards for their nuclear-family — their spouses and young children — or their in-laws and parents.
This reduction is not mentioned or tracked in the bill, because the bill does not set any curbs on nuclear-family chain-migration or on the inflow of parents. The nuclear-family inflow is now roughly 200,000 people per year, excluding the arrival of people who are married to U..S.-born Americans. The inflow of parents is also nearly 200,000.
Over a decade or more, the 55,000 visa-lottery migrants who arrive each year eventually bring in roughly 190,000 nuclear-family and extended-family chain migrants. That means each year of the visa lottery eventually produces 245,000 immigrants.
Fifteen years after the Ryan is passed — assuming no other changes — the number of immigrants in the United States will be 245,000 lower people because there was no visa lottery in the single year of 2019. If that process continues for ten years, the projected long-term reduction adds up to 2.45 million over 10 years.
The same logic applies to the excluded 88,000 extended-family chain-migrants directly cut from the bill. When they are excluded, so also are their immediate family members and their parents. If each of the 88,000 people also brings in just one additional chain-migrant, then the annual inflow eventually drops by almost 176,000, or 1.7 million per decade.
Repeat that process for perhaps 15 years, and the apparent reduction of 143,000 immigrants per year becomes a reduction of roughly 400,000 a year or 4 million per decade.
The Ryan bill is more ambitious in this area than President Donald Trump’s ‘Four Pillars’ proposal, which would have allowed all extended-family chain-migrants who are now on the list to enter the United States.
The bill was drafted under Ryan’s supervision by competing groups of business-backed “moderates” and a group of cautious House Freedom Caucus conservatives who are being tugged in two directions by voters and donors. The bill includes many carefully-crafted components of the Goodlatte bill — but it also excludes many of those components.
The Ryan bill is far better for Americans than the 2013 “Gang of Eight” amnesty, which would have legalized and imported 30 million additional people in one decade — so flooding the labor market while boosting Wall Street. “The rate of return on capital would be higher [than for labor] under the legislation than under current law throughout the next two decades,” said the Congressional Budget Office, in a 2013 report titled “The Economic Impact of S. 744.”
Americans will lose out in the Ryan bill, but may gain from the longer immigration bill prepared by Rep. Bob Goodlatte, the chairman of the House judiciary committee, says Rosemary Jenks, policy director for NumbersUSA.
The Goodlatte bill ends the visa lottery, provides a work-permit amnesty to the 700,000 illegals who are registered in the DACA program and it accelerates the award of green cards to contract-workers in the United States. That bill would ensure deeper immigration cuts — and it also includes much careful language to hinder fraud or progressive judges from hijacking the amnesty for their own goals, said Jenks, who opposes the Ryan bill.
Ryan opposes the Goodlatte bill, so it likely to be rejected on Thursday. It is not clear if Ryan’s bill can win a majority in the House vote.
The ‘DACA’ Illegals and Guest-Workers
The likely decline in immigration numbers in the Ryan bill is partly offset by the legalization of many illegals and a few hundred thousand tech-workers.
For example, the 55,000 visa lottery green-cards are given to DACA illegals for at least 20 years, until all the young illegals are given green cards. How many chain-migration people will they bring into the United States? Likely far fewer than new immigrants, because they likely will marry people living in the United States, and because many of their parents already sneaked in years before.
The other group to benefit from Ryan’s bill is the large and little-recognized population of Indian tech-workers.
These Indian contract-workers are legally working in the United States and are forcing down wages for Americans white-collar workers. They can do this because Congress, administration officials and business lobbies have gradually created a complex variety of work-permit programs — such as the H-1B and OPT programs — which allows the workers to work in the United States for several years while they try to gain green cards. Data provided by the Department of Homeland Security shows that 306,000 Indian tech-workers (and 326,000 family members) are in a backed-up line to get green cards.
Under current rules, half of that Indian population — roughly 300,000 — will get green cards within 12 years if Ryan’s bill does not pass.
Ryan’s bill will speed up the process, ensuring nearly all of the Indians will get green cards within 12 years. That acceleration has several consequences.
First, the switched green-cards will go from new immigrants (who would otherwise import their uncapped nuclear-family spouses and children, plus parents) to the Indians who are already living in the United States. Many of the Indians already have wives and children in the United States. That switch likely cuts the uncapped inflow of nuclear-family chain-migration of spouses and minor children.
Also, many of the Indian migrants are likely to convert their green cards into citizenship so they can import their parents into the United States. Ryan’s bill does not trim the inflow of non-working, elderly or ailing parents — even though their annual inflow is rapidly approaching 200,000 people, who pay little in taxes as they impose huge retirement costs amid the rising costs of retired American boomers. “The ‘parents’ category is going to explode,” said Jenks. “I think that will more than make up for any reductions.”
Overall, if each of the legalized 1.8 million DACA illegals and 300,000 visa-workers brings in two chain-migrants after they get a green card and citizenship, then they will bring in roughly 4 million chain-migration people. That inflow would wipe out the decline caused by the cancellation of the visa lottery and the two extended-family chain migrants.
Impact
If implemented, the Ryan bill’s reforms and immigration reductions would help transform the U.S. economy and national politics, even as legal immigration would continue to add roughly 700,000 legal migrants every year, just as 4 million young Americans start looking for jobs.
The absent migrants would not flood into workplaces and force young Americans’ salaries downwards, would not move into cities and pressure real-estate prices upwards in the coastal cities, and would not add to the diversity disputes in schools and colleges. Also, coastal investors would be less able to hire new immigrants at coastal airports and more pressured to invest their dollars in mid-country communities where young Americans want to stay and raise their own families.
The reduced inflow would also shift politics. It would push Democratic politicians to seek more votes from working-class American-born voters, and it would reduce the role of immigration politics in the GOP. It would also nudge national politics away from cultural fights, back towards economic redistribution from the older wealthy people towards younger working-class and middle-class people.
But this future of lower immigration and higher wages is opposed by Paul Ryan.
Ryan has long favored a large-scale inflow of foreign workers and an “open door” into U.S. labor markets, such as California. Those policies cut Americans’ wages and shift Wall Street’s job-creating investments away from middle-American population centers towards the coastal cities where immigrant workers arrive and settle. California is a test case of Ryan’s cheap-labor vision which he described in 2013.
Business
Business groups will complain that the reduced inflow of consumers and workers will reduce the overall size of the economy and will limit investors, even as Americans’ average per-capita income and wealth rise.
For example, the switch is denounced by a cheap-labor advocate at the Cato Institute, David Bier, who said via Tweet that the bill’s authors:
hate the diversity & family sponsored immigrants: 95% of them are “new arrivals,” meaning that they are entering for the first time, while 95% of employer sponsored categories are already here. So it does more to cut foreign population growth
That is the same reason they are willing to give diversity green cards to Dreamers b/c it cuts the foreign population, while keeping the number of green cards the same.
He writes that “the bill would make the immigration system worse than it is right now.”
That demand for more imported labor and consumers is a central goal of the donors who are funding the group of GOP politicians who signed the discharge-amnesty list and forced the creation of the “moderate” immigration bill.
“Our goal is to not cut legal immigration,” Rep. Carlos Curbelo told RollCall.com on June 8. The number of illegals who get green cards from the amnesty should be “as high a number as possible,” he said. The number of young illegal immigrants in the United States is estimated at up to 3.6 million, and 1 million people legally immigrate each year.
On June 13, Curbelo repeated his demand, telling TheHill.com that “some visas may be shifted towards employment visas, but our goal is to not cut legal immigration.”
ABIC promotes sensible immigration reform that supports the economy of the United States, provides American companies with both the high-skilled and low-skilled talent they need, and allows the integration of immigrants into our economy as consumers, workers, entrepreneurs and citizens.
Unknowns
There are far too many uncertainties in the immigration dispute to safely predict the future.
1: Americans voters may conclude that the planned amnesty is simply unfair and wrong, even if the bills also provide offsetting benefits. That unfairness is especially painful for the millions of American professionals whose wages and careers have been damaged by Fortune 500 companies’ use of the cheap Indian tech-workers who will gain from Ryan’s amnesty.
2: Trump’s support for the amnesty could tank his 2018 turnout, give the Democrats control of the Hosue and allow the alliance of Democrats and cheap-labor Republicans to push through their own massive amnesty in 2019. That danger suggests Trump should wait until he wins the 2018 election to push an even better bill through the House and Senate, says people opposed to the Goodlatte amnesties. “There is good possibility that Republicans can keep the House … but not if they are focussed on amnesty,” said Jenks.
3: Any amnesty will create incentives for others to migrate to the United States. Also, the Ryan bill does not include all the young illegals in the United States, and excluded migrants will become the next victim group to be highlighted by business groups, Democrats, and media progressives. The total number of young illegals in the United States is likely closer to 3.6 million, not 1.8 million.
4: Many foreigners will rationally try to jump into the amnesty via fraud and forged documents. For example, many foreign parents will take huge risks to win the hugely valuable prize of U.S. citizenship for their children — especially because it is being given for free to at least 1.8 million ‘DACA’ foreigners whose parents cheated the system.
5: Immigration numbers are uncertain and errors can have huge impacts down the road, making any predictions very risky. The estimates in the Ryan bill are “based on estimates the Migration Policy Institute,” said Jenks. “What if those estimates are wrong?”
6: The Goodlatte bill includes many carefully written sections which are intended to prevent judges, agencies or Congress from massively expanding the amnesty. Many of these sections were cut out in talks overseen by Ryan. For example, most of the 1.8 million people in the Ryan amnesty have not been identified. This guarantees that many foreigners, progressive groups, business interests and judges will try to further expand the amnesty far beyond the claimed totals.
7: The Ryan bill will be expanded by the Senate. No immigration bill can get through the Senate without support from 60 Senators. That high number means a bill has to be backed by roughly 15 Democratic Senators plus nearly all of the GOP’s cheap-labor caucus, which includes at least 20 Senators out of the 51 GOP members in the Senate. In February, for example, Sen. Susan Collins and eight other GOP Senators pushed a surprise bill that would have provided a “priority amnesty” for all 8 million illegal immigrants who are holding jobs. On June 17, Collins told CBS:
I think we should try again. We should not give up. It is important that we enact immigration reform.
The GOP’s cheap-labor caucus will likely demand huge changes to the Ryan bill to ensure that millions of additional immigrant workers, consumers, and renters are delivered to U.S. businesses over the next several years. If those increases are approved by the House and Trump, Ryan’s immigration reform would end up lowering wages, raising rents, boosting Wall Street and proving that the GOP is dominated by employers and investors, not by hard-working employees and by 2016 voters.
The vast majority of the Democratic caucus will help the GOP’s cheap-labor caucus by opposing legal reforms and the immigration cuts in the bills. Democrats know that greater immigration creates more poor voters who will seek aid from a large government. Immigration also imposes more “diversity” and civic conflict on American communities, creating more opportunities for Democrats to gain power.
8: The cheap-labor caucus will simply invent new ways for migrants to undercut Americans’ wages and raise investors’ returns.
For example, Ryan’s bill is coupled to his promise to provide a new source of cheap labor to the cash-strapped agriculture sector. This pending legislation could provide 800,000 “H-2C” temporary workers to the agriculture sector, greatly inflating the labor supply even as Americans’ wages are barely rising. That extra supply may be offset by a reduction in the number of illegal immigrants who work in the agriculture sector.
9: Media professionals are conditioned to view immigration debates as all about foreigners. Very few media people recognize that immigration policy is a federal economic strategy which boosts older investors by importing consumers and cutting wages for young Americans. Fewer recognize how that economic strategy imposes a huge price on them by boosting housing costs in their higher-status urban districts, driving up education costs and freezing the white-collar salaries earned by their white-collar peers, spouses, siblings and adult children. If media professionals recognize that immigration policy drains their own wealth, they may pressure politicians to ensure that immigration policy is changed to favor employees, not employers and investors.
Journalists won’t change, said Jenks:
They are elites so they don’t have the same experience with immigration as Americans do. They don’t have to compete with them for jobs and I think they see this as a way they can stand up for the poor and downtrodden against those deplorable Americans.
Migration Economics
Currently, four million Americans turn 18 each year and begin looking for good jobs in the free market — but the government provides green cards to roughly 1 million legal immigrants and temporary work-permits to roughly 3 million foreign workers.
The Washington-imposed economic policy of economic growth via mass-immigration shifts wealth from young people towards older people by flooding the market with foreign labor. That process spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. The policy also drives up real estate prices, widens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least 5 million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions.
Polls
Amnesty advocates rely on business-funded “Nation of Immigrants” push-polls to show apparent voter support for immigration and immigrants.
But “choice” polls reveal most voters’ often-ignored preference that CEOs should hire Americans at decent wages before hiring migrants. Those Americans include many blue-collar Blacks, Latinos, and people who hide their opinions from pollsters. Similarly, the 2018 polls show that GOP voters are far more concerned about migration — more properly, the economics of migration — than they are concerned about illegal migration and MS-13, taxes, or the return of Rep. Nancy Pelosi.