Archives for Immigration

I could root for the immigration bill to become law just to see if Congress can get anything done. But that’s not a strong enough reason - especially when jobs are at stake. Amid the earliest start to a presidential campaign in anyone’s memory, bruising rhetoric on talk shows and in the (often wacky) blogosphere, comes word that employers are unhappy with the bill and a research study out of Canada that suggests immigration undercuts wages of unskilled workers in North America.

“The tendency for the supply of immigrant labor to the United States to be concentrated among low-skilled workers served to depress the wages of workers in the lowest skill groups,” reports a Canadian journal, citing a new Statistics Canada study. “Coupled with only a small dampening effect of immigration on the wages of highly-skilled workers, who saw their real weekly wages increase by 20% in the United States between 1980 and 2000, immigration served to magnify growth in US wage inequality between low-skilled and high-skilled workers over the same period.”

You mean a rising tide of salaries doesn’t lift all ships? An interesting finding, but it won’t change the debate. What’s happening now is pure, partisan hardball.

“It is less a bill than a big dirty ball of mischief, malfeasance and mendacity, with a touch of class malice, and it’s being pushed by a White House that is at once cynical and inept,” writes Peggy Noonan, the former Bush senior speech writer, who can turn a phrase better than she analyzes a bill.

While the efficacy of so-called border protection draws most of the opponent’s ire, there is relatively little debate about the provisions that may have the most long-term impact: the “merit point” system of scoring that for the first time institutes a bias toward admitting highly skilled, educated and gainfully employable foreigners. According to the bill, points are awarded according to employment, education, English proficiency, civics knowledge and family ties in the US.

In devising this system, the U.S. is following in the path of Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom, which reportedly grants work visas to graduates of one of the world’s top 50 business schools. “Compared to most other selection systems, points systems appear to avoid the ‘gamesmanship’ between employers and bureaucrats that afflict case-by-case selection systems,” Demetrios Papademetriou of the Migration Policy Institute told National Public Radio.

The Secure Borders, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Reform Act of 2007, if approved, will be recalled as an historic - and rare - compromise between liberals and conservatives. The bill’s co-author, Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), recently said, “Our competitiveness in the global economy is at risk when our employers cannot find the able workers they need.”

This week we will find out if the Senate buys into Kennedy’s reasoning, but approval is far from certain.