Candidate Donald Trump promised to reform the nation’s cheap-labor immigration strategy, and President Donald Trump unveiled the merit-based immigration reform plan on Wednesday.
Here are seven major features of the new merit-based economic and immigration legislation.
1. The Senate bill was jointly drafted by two GOP Senators who were elected in the 2014 wave. In that election, Senate Democrats lost ten seats because voters were angry at the Democratic-dominated “Gang of Eight” plan that would have doubled immigration for at least ten years, and shifted more of the nation’s annual income from employees to employers. The two Senators are Georgia CEO David Purdue, and Arkansas veteran and Harvard grad Tom Cotton
2. The plan would roughly halve the inflow of unskilled labor into the United States, so forcing employers to boost recruitment, training and pay for ordinary Americans. It would halve the inflow of unskilled by canceling the so-called “diversity lottery” which annually hands green cards to 50,000 people picked by lottery, by capping the inflow of refugees at 50,000 per year, and — most importantly — by largely ending the “chain migration” which allows new citizens to bring in their parents, adult children, and siblings, regardless of health, skills or ability to work.
3. Trump’s plan would allow companies to bring in highly skilled or “ultra-skilled” foreigners — if those foreigners can prove their skills by showing job offers which pay MORE than what is being paid to local Americans. That merit-based process would put an upward ratchet on Americans’ wages, instead of the current process which drags down wages by flooding the labor market with unskilled workers.
4. Most applicants for immigration and citizenship would be graded on a points system, determined by their age, education credentials, English-language skills, professional awards, investment resources, and job offers. That process likely will allow the immigration of highly skilled foreigners who want to assimilate into Americans’ democratic culture — and who can also develop new technology that makes Americans more productive and wealthy.
5. Progressives want to hate the reform. It would end their plan to seize national power via the mass immigration of unskilled, government-dependent migrants. That plan has already won them near-complete power in California and Illinois. But without those future migrants, progressives would be forced to seek the votes from actual blue-collar and white-collar Americans, so shifting the focus of national politics back towards a focus on middle-class Americans, and away from the progressives’ media-magnified push for pro-transgender laws, free abortion and weather control.
6. Business and investors rationally hate the merit-based plan. It would reduce the inflow of cheap labor and of welfare-funded consumers which have helped boost profits and the stock market. Without those migrants, companies will have to raise wages for employees, recruit and train now-sidelined Americans, and invest in American-made, labor-saving machinery, such as robots for farms, restaurants, and slaughterhouses.
7. Prior polls suggest Trump’s plan will be very popular because it prioritizes Americans over foreigners, employees over employers, wages over profits, and solidarity around the English language over imposed multiculturalism. But the media polls will try to suppress that Trump advantage by portraying the pro-American plan as being mean to weak foreigners, so allowing many elected officials to ignore the public’s real views until around September 2018. That is when the Americans will have the decisive opportunity to vote for or against politicians who support or oppose Trump’s reform. To read more about immigration polls, click here.
Under pre-Trump policies, the federal government annually imports 1 million legal immigrants into the United States, just as 4 million young Americans turn 18.
The federal government also awards roughly 1.5 million temporary work permits to foreigners, grants temporary work visas to roughly 500,000 new contract workers, such as H-1B workers, and also largely ignores the resident population of eight million employed illegal immigrants. That huge extra inflow of wage-cutting workers is to be handled via different legislation and regulation.
The current annual flood of foreign labor spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. It 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, and sidelines at least 5 million marginalized Americans and their families.
Click here to read the full text of the legislation. Click here for a section-by-section summary and click here for a fact sheet on the legislation.