The nation’s immigration policy must serve the needs of ordinary Americans, not a cosmopolitan elite or the business class, Sen. Tom Cotton said September 19 at a Constitution Day speech.
He declared:
The guidepost of our immigration policy should be putting Americans first-not foreigners and not a tiny elite. Our immigration policy should serve the “wealth and strength” of our people, as [James] Madison said in that first Congress. It should not divide our nation, impoverish our workers, and promote hyphenated Americanism.
Citizenship is the most cherished thing our nation can bestow on someone. Our governing classes ought to treat it as something special. We ought to put the interests of our citizens first, and welcome those foreigners best prepared to handle the duties of citizenship and contribute positively to our country. When we do, our citizens will begin to trust us once again.
Cotton used his speech to promote the popular RAISE Act, which he has drafted with Georgia Sen. David Perdue. The act is being backed by President Donald Trump, who has said its features should be included in any congressional deal related to the 700,000 current DACA-amnesty beneficiaries.
Cotton told his Washington D.C. audience:
The economy we’re living in today is in no small part a result of the 1965 Act because it opened the door to mass immigration of unskilled and low-skilled workers, primarily through unlimited family chain migration. And that’s not an economy anyone should be satisfied with.
Today, we have about a million immigrants per year. That’s like adding the population of Montana every single year-or the population of Arkansas every three years. But only one in 15-one in 15 of those millions-plus immigrants-come here for employment-based reasons.
The vast majority of them come here simply because they happen to be related to someone already here. That’s why, for example, we have more Somalia-born residents than Australia-born residents, even though Australia is nearly twice the size as Somalia and Australians are obviously better prepared, as a general matter, to integrate and assimilate into the American way of life.
In sum, over 36 million immigrants, or 94 percent of the total, have come to America over the last 50 years for reasons having nothing to do with employment. And that’s to say nothing of the over 24 million illegal immigrants who have come here as well. Put them together and you have 60 million immigrants, legal and illegal, who did not come to this country because of a job offer or because of their skills. That’s like adding almost the entire population of the United Kingdom. And it also says nothing of the millions of temporary guest-workers we import every year into our country…
The RAISE Act will correct the flaws in the 1965 Act by reorienting our immigration system towards foreigners who have the most to contribute to our country. It would create a skills-based points system similar to Canada’s and Australia’s. Here’s how it would work. When people apply to immigrate here, they’d be given an easy-to-calculate score, on a scale of 0 to 100, based on their education, age, job salary, investment ability, English-language skills, and any extraordinary achievements. Then, twice a year, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services would invite the top scorers to complete their applications, and it would invite enough high-scoring applicants to fill the current 140,000 annual employment-based green-card slots.
We’d still admit spouses and unmarried minor children of citizens and legal permanent residents. But we’d end the preferences for most extended and adult family members-no more unlimited chain migration. We’d also eliminate the so-called diversity visa lottery, which hands out green cards randomly without regard to skills or family connections, is plagued by fraud, and doesn’t even promote diversity since Europeans are the fastest growing beneficiaries. No offense, Penny. We’d remove per-country caps on immigration, too, so that high-skilled applicants aren’t shut out of the process simply because of their country of origin. And finally, we’d cap the number of refugees offered permanent residency to 50,000 per year, in line with the recent average for the Bush era and most of the Obama era-and still quite generous.
Add it all up and our annual immigrant pool would be younger, higher-skilled, and ready to contribute to our economy without using welfare, as more than half of immigrant households do today. No longer would we distribute green cards essentially based on random chance, nor would we import millions of unskilled workers to take jobs from blue-collar Americans and undercut their wages. And over a 10-year period, our annual immigration levels would decrease by half, gradually returning to historical norms.
Read the entire speech here.
Four million Americans turn 18 each year and begin looking for good jobs. However, the government imports roughly 1 million legal immigrants to compete against Americans for jobs.
The government also hands out almost 3 million short-term work permits to foreign workers. These permits include roughly 330,000 one-year OPT permits for foreign graduates of U.S. colleges, roughly 200,000 three-year H-1B visas for foreign white-collar professionals, and 400,000 two-year permits to DACA illegals.
That Washington-imposed policy of mass-immigration floods the market with 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, 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.
Amid the huge inflow of new workers, wages for men have remained flat since 1973, and the percentage of working Americans has declined steadily for the last few decades.
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