Pat Allen: The View from Right Field

Employers and Immigration: You Will Violate Something

Thursday’s Wall Street Journal reports on how the Obama administration is enforcing the various laws on hiring legal immigrants and not hiring illegal immigrants:

"Even as the Obama administration cracks down on companies that hire illegal immigrants, it is simultaneously going after employers that it says go too far in vetting job applicants to ensure they are entitled to work in the U.S.

The Department of Homeland Security currently is auditing employment records of many companies suspected of hiring undocumented workers. Yet in an emerging paradox for businesses, the Justice Department and other agencies have stepped up probes of employers – including restaurant groups, factories and retailers – for allegedly violating anti-discrimination laws by demanding too many identity documents from applicants who aren’t U.S. citizens. …

‘The message is: Employers beware,’ said Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration-law scholar at Cornell University. ‘You need to worry just as much about asking for too many immigration documents as you do about not asking for enough.’ …

The [Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986] prohibits employer from knowingly or intentionally hiring illegal immigrants; companies must verify a person’s work eligibility through the ‘I-9’ form process, in which new hires present identity documents and employers examine them for authenticity.

Anti-discrimination protections in the [Immigration and Nationality Act], meanwhile, guarantee ‘all individuals authorized to work in the U.S. have the right to seek employment without the added burden of special rules or document demands based on their citizenship status or national origin,’ said Thomas E. Perez, assistant attorney general for civil rights. He said his unit is prioritizing enforcement of the INA provisions."*

In other words, companies can violate one law, and get in trouble with one agency, by not asking for enough information, and they can violate another law, and get in trouble with another agency, by asking for too much information.

So, at the same time President Obama is telling us we need a comprehensive solution to the problem of illegal immigration and is trying to convince us that he can come up with that solution, we have his administration acting like something out of "Sixteen Tons" by Tennessee Ernie Ford: "If the right one don’t a-get you, then the left one will."

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* Miriam Jordan, "Policing Illegal Hires Puts Some Employers in a Bind," The Wall Street Journal, July 15, 2010.

Immigration and the Arizona Law

I don’t know anything about the new Arizona immigration law beyond what I read in the newspapers, which means I don’t know anything about the new Arizona immigration law. Similarly, I don’t know much about the lawsuit that the Justice Department has brought to invalidate the Arizona law. The Justice Department may have a really good case on the legal principles involved.

However, if, as I understand it, the lawsuit is based on the principle that "controlling immigration is a federal responsibility," it would seem to me that the federal government might have a better case if it was actually fulfilling its responsibility to control immigration. It certainly isn’t doing it now and hasn’t been for quite a while.

Obama Doesn't Do Immigration Reform and Hispanics Think It's Rahm's Fault

Candidate Barack Obama said that immigration reform would be one of his top priorities, but an article in today’s Chicago Tribune says that the prospects for immigration reform happening this year are fading and that "some Democratic lawmakers are focusing blame on the pugnacious Democratic operative who works just down the hall from President Obama", i.e., Rahm Emanuel.

The article goes on to quote numerous Hispanic leaders, including members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, as saying the administration’s failure to push immigration reform is because of Rahm Emanuel.

Which shows that Mr. Emanuel is doing his job very well. He is making sure that he gets the blame for President Obama’s failure to follow through on what then-Senator Obama said he would do. Very impressive.

Buy American – And Don't Hire Foreigners Either

I’m sorry I missed this earlier. In his blog this week, Greg Mankiw, economics professor at Harvard, quoted the following from an article in The Harvard Crimson:

"Troubled financial institutions that recruit heavily from Harvard may soon face restrictions on hiring international students if they accepted federal bailout funding. Under a recently passed amendment to the federal stimulus bill, companies participating in the Troubled Assets Relief Program – a government financial-rescue plan implemented last fall – will face more restrictions in hiring H-1B visa holders, foreigners with at least a bachelor’s degree and ‘highly specialized knowledge’ in a particular field. "

A little background: The H-1B is a non-immigrant visa that allows U.S. employers to temporarily employ foreign workers with at least a bachelor’s degree in certain specialty occupations. Subject to some exceptions, only about 65,000 H-1B visas and an additional 20,000 visas for workers with advanced degrees are granted annually. Because so many foreign workers and their prospective employers want these visas, the program is swamped, and the visas are awarded by a lottery among those who apply within the first few days that applications are accepted each year.

I assume the purpose of this amendment is like the Buy American provisions that some in Congress tried to include in the stimulus bill.* A lot of people are unemployed. We need to help Americans get jobs before we let foreigners come in and take the jobs. Except, of course, this is dumb, like the Buy American provisions, though perhaps for somewhat different reasons.

The Buy American provisions not only forced our government to pay more for the products it needed to buy, but it also invited retaliation by other countries. That retaliation would cost the United States more jobs (when foreign countries don’t buy goods from U.S. companies in response to our government’s refusal to buy the goods from companies in other countries) than we would gain buy forcing our government to only buy American-made goods. It could also lead to a trade war not unlike what happened in the ‘30s.

I don’t know what the risk of retaliation would be if we refuse to let foreign people work in the United States. Would other countries not let our citizens work there? Would they refuse to buy our goods if we didn’t hire their people? I don’t know. But it doesn’t matter because there is an even more important reason why these rules are dumb.

The more important reason is simply this: Why do we want to keep smart, motivated, highly educated people out of the United States?

As I have said before, the worry that these people are going to be taking jobs from people already in the United States assumes that our economy is a zero sum game; that what one person gains another has to lose. That’s not the way it is. The more smart people you have, the bigger your economy will be and the richer your country will be. Instead of limiting the number of people who can come in on H-1B visas, we should increase it.

One final point: If limiting H-1B visas really protects American workers, maybe we ought to try applying this idea in other areas, too. How about baseball? Why are we letting all these people from Latin America and Japan come here to play baseball when we have plenty of Americans who want to play? I go to minor league baseball games, and I can assure you there are lots of American players who would love to play in the majors if we kept all those foreigners out. And if some of the minor leaguers went to the majors, we could find even more American players in the independent leagues to fill the spots in the minors.

Seriously, provisions like the one in the stimulus bill are a bad idea. We need to let more of these people come here, not fewer of them. No country ever got poorer by letting in more smart, motivated, highly educated people.

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* The Buy American provisions in the final stimulus bill included a limitation that, in effect, they were to be as strong as possible without violating international law. While this was an improvement over what was originally in the bill, it still wasn’t good, and it certainly does not give the United States any credibility to speak against similar restrictions other countries might try to impose.

An Idea to Help the Housing Crisis and the Recession

The idea: Dramatically increase the number of highly skilled immigrants allowed into the United States each year.

Before you quit reading because this idea sounds silly, let me explain. U.S. immigration policy is currently slanted toward immigrants coming in for family unification and other such reasons. I suggest that we redirect our immigration policies to favor immigrants with high skill levels and education.

We already have the cream of the world’s student population attending our colleges and graduate schools. Instead of forcing them to go home when they are done with school, we should let them stay. And we should let highly educated people from overseas come to the United States if they want to. Opponents will say that we are going into a recession and these people will take jobs from Americans. No, they won’t. We don’t have enough people with these kinds of the skills. But even if we don’t have a shortage right now, no country has ever been hurt by letting in, or letting stay in, smart, motivated, highly educated people. These people won’t take jobs. Their intelligence, enthusiasm and drive will help create new jobs and will help the economy grow out of the recession quicker.

The economy is not a zero-sum game. It is not a matter of one person losing if somebody else gains. If we have more skilled, educated people, jobs that are currently going overseas because we don’t have enough people to fill them, will stay here. One of the reasons Microsoft opened a new tech center in British Columbia was because they couldn’t hire enough people in United States, We wouldn’t let them in, but Canada would. Also, new businesses will be started by these immigrants, and those businesses will create additional jobs for people.

But what does that have to do with the housing crisis? Part of the housing problem is the large number of houses for sale. All of these unsold houses are depressing the market. These new immigrants are going to make enough money to buy some of those houses, which will help the housing market start to recover, too.

Letting more skilled, highly educated people into the United States is a win-win situation. It is a win for them, and it is a win for us.

Is It Really True "Americans Won't Do These Jobs"?

"Americans won’t do these jobs." "The only people who will do those jobs are illegal immigrants." "If they don’t come, things won’t get done."

At least that is what a lot of people say. On July 6 The Wall Street Journal reported on the large number of lifeguards at local swimming pools who are foreigners here for the summer.* The article explained why many jobs, such as lifeguarding, that American students used to do are now done by foreigners: College students are taking internships to improve their resume. High school students are in summer classes or doing other things to make their college applications look better. College starts so early that it is hard for kids to do some jobs. But then, the article mentioned one last reason why at least some American students may not want the lifeguard jobs it reported on: the $8.00 per hour the lifeguards make.

In other words, we really do not know whether "Americans won’t do" lifeguarding and other relatively low-pay jobs. All we know is that you cannot find enough Americans, both citizens and legal immigrants, to do these jobs at the wages employers are now paying. Or, to phrase it another way, all we know is that you cannot find enough Americans and legal immigrants to do these jobs at wages the employers have to pay to be able to charge prices the Americans are willing to pay.

The question then is how Americans would feel about paying, either directly or through the higher prices we pay to other people, wages that would be high enough to get citizens and legal immigrants to do the work that illegal immigrants do now.

Actually, this question reminds me of one of the nominees Bill Clinton proposed for Attorney General before he finally appointed Janet Reno. When it was discovered that the nominee and her husband had hired an illegal immigrant to take care of their child (or children), her husband (who was in charge of the hiring) said that he had been forced to hire an illegal immigrant because he could not find a citizen or legal immigrant to do the job at the going rate.

No, that is not true, and that is the point. If you cannot find a citizen or legal immigrant, or enough citizens and legal immigrants, to do a job at a particular wage, then that is not the "going rate". It may be all you want to pay, it may be what you can pay an illegal immigrant, but it is not the going rate. The going rate is what you would have to pay a citizen or legal immigrant to do the job.

With respect to all those jobs that we are told American won’t do, the fact is that we do not know if Americans will do them because we have not tried raising wages enough to make the jobs attractive to Americans or legal immigrants. Maybe Americans and/or legal immigrants would be lifeguards and childcare providers and lawn care workers, and whatever other jobs Americans "won’t do," if the jobs paid more.

I have no problem with doing this, but let me be clear what this means. If there are no illegal immigrants to do these low-paying jobs and if we want these jobs done, we are going to have to pay more to get them done. We are going to have to pay lawn care workers more. We are going to have to pay more for childcare. And if we have to pay more to the people who harvest our fresh fruits and vegetables, then our food is going to cost more. In other words, we are going to have to pay the real price for those goods and services, instead of some artificially low price that we can only get away with because illegal immigrants do the work.

If we increase wages and then increase them again (if necessary), and we still cannot find enough citizens and legal immigrants to do certain jobs, then we will know that "Americans won’t do these jobs," but until we try we won’t know. And if we find that the only way we can get some jobs done, at any wage, is to have illegal immigrants do them, then let’s admit it and change the rules to make those people legal.

One final point: Democrats always want to raise the minimum wage. They say it is to help those people earning really low wages. But many Democrats do not seem all that interested in reducing illegal immigration. It seems to me that, if there were fewer illegal immigrants to do the low-wage jobs, then employers would have to pay more to get those jobs done. It is a matter of supply and demand. If there are fewer people available to do low-wage jobs, employers are going to have to pay more to get those jobs done. I do not understand why these Democrats do not want to give it a try.

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* I note that the foreign lifeguards in the article are here legally on H-2B visas, but the point of their story and that of illegal immigrants is the same. The jobs are being done by people who are not in the United States on a legal, long-term basis because the employers cannot find enough Americans to do the job at the wage they are paying.

The Defeat of Immigration Reform – Or How Is It My Fault You Guys Came Up With Such a Lousy Bill?

I am tired of being called stupid and prejudiced and anti-immigrant because I was against the failed Kennedy-Kyl immigration bill (officially called the Secure Borders, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Reform Act of 2007). I am not stupid, I am not prejudiced (except perhaps against a few politicians and certain commentators), and I am definitely not against immigrants. What I am against, however, is illegal immigration and arrogant, condescending politicians.

The immigration bill was supposedly a combination of measures that would deal with the illegal immigrants here now, provide for guest workers to come in legally, and implement tougher border security and employer sanctions to stop (or at least greatly reduce) illegal immigration in the future. But the problem was that nobody really believed the last. In 1986 we were promised that, if we passed a comprehensive immigration reform bill (giving amnesty to those already here), the government would get control of our borders and stop illegal immigration. The bill passed, but the enforcement never happened – or at least it didn’t work. 

And that is the problem. Many of us who opposed the Kennedy-Kyl bill did so not because we hate Hispanics (or Poles or whoever) – we don’t – but because we did not trust its proponents to really try to stop illegal immigration. If stopping illegal immigration was all that much of a priority for President Bush, why did he wait until late last year to try to do something about it? Does anyone, anywhere, really think Ted Kennedy and his fellow Democrats would follow though on enforcement when they control both the presidency and Congress after the next election?

We are now told that nothing can be done about illegal immigration and that it is the fault of those of us who opposed the Kennedy-Kyl bill. Of course, that is not true. Congress can still do something – if it wants to.

And what it can do is simple. Start small. Start by actually, finally, trying to control the borders. I am not suggesting expelling all the illegal aliens tomorrow. I just want to see the federal government do something to reduce illegal immigration in the future.

Once that is done, Congress can come back to the American people. We are nice people. We are not mean. We do not want to see families torn apart (not even Elián González’s). We like to help people, especially those who help themselves.

But we also do not like to be taken for fools and lied to. That is what happened in 1986, and that is what we were afraid was being done to us again. Until we can trust Congress and the President to actually get some control on illegal immigration (and the proof is in the pudding), we are not going to give them want they want. It is too bad it has to be that way, but it does.

One final thing. All those commentators who supported the Kennedy-Kyl bill are now telling us that Hispanics are going to hold the defeat of this bill against Republicans. Some Republican leaders are saying the same thing and acting like it is true. I don’t see why it has to be true. I think, if we explain to Hispanics what our real position was (we just want to see the federal government get some control of our borders; then we can work out the situation of the illegal immigrants), they will understand.

Republicans are not against Hispanics. We have a lot of positions I think they would like. We are not against immigrants. They like this country and work hard to better themselves. No problem with that. We just want to reduce illegal immigration. That does not make us anti-Hispanic or anti-immigrant, and there is no reason we should let anybody say that we are.

Governing, the Democratic Way

An article in Tuesday’s Chicago Tribune reported on President Bush’s new immigration proposal. The article noted that the President’s plan in the last Congress was stopped by Republicans, especially those in the House.

One might think, with the new Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, that President’s task might be easier this time. After all, as the article noted, most Democrats agree with Bush on immigration. So there shouldn’t be a problem, right? Wrong.

The article explains why:

"House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and top Senate Democrats, including Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, have told the White House that they will not pass a bill relying almost exclusively on Democratic votes, forcing the administration to work for Republican support."

The problem this creates for Bush is that, as he changes the plan to get Republican support (by adding stricter requirements for visas and citizenship for illegal immigrants), he may lose support among liberal Democrats.

So what we have is this: Democrats agree with what Bush is proposing. I assume means this means they think Bush’s plan would be good for the country. But they won’t pass it, even though they think it is good for the country, unless enough Republicans vote for it so the Democrats won’t get into political trouble with the voters by passing it. And Senator Edward Kennedy is one of the Democrats taking this position.

Who was it that wrote Profiles In Courage?

Immigration and Amnesty

Amnesties can sometimes be a good solution to a difficult problem. You have to be careful, though, not to overuse them. Amnesties have a feeling of unfairness to them. Somebody who did not pay his taxes on time is getting a chance to pay them now, without all the penalties and hassles. Amnesties have a feeling of favoring the law breakers, by letting them get off easy, and penalizing the person who just obeys the law all along.

That is why it is important to not use them too often. Once is okay. Twice starts to be a problem. Three times is just too many. There are two problems with repeat amnesties. First, law-abiding citizens get really upset. Second, you wind up encouraging the very behavior you are trying to stop. People stop obeying the law and start waiting for the next amnesty.

This is the problem with the amnesty* that is included in many of the proposed immigration plans. We already had an amnesty, back in the 1980s. A lot of people did not like it then. It seemed unfair. People who waited and followed the rules were pushed back while those who broke the law got to the front. Ultimately, the amnesty was passed, and accepted, on the basis that it would solve the problem of a large number of illegal immigrants in the US and that it would never have to happen again.

Obviously, it did not work. We now have several times the number of illegal immigrants that we had back then. The people who reluctantly agreed to an amnesty last time, on the basis that it was a one-time deal, feel betrayed. And now they are being told the same thing again: if you just agree to this amnesty, we will never have to do it again because we will control illegal immigration.

Not surprisingly, these people do not believe it. They think the same thing will happen again. Illegal immigration will not be controlled, and 15 to 20 years from now, we will be in the same situation.

What the people who want an amnesty have to understand is that, to get agreement on an amnesty, they are going to have to convince people that they really will control illegal immigration this time. Mere words are not going to work. It is going to take action. On the basis of "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me", people want to see real actions first.

If those who want an amnesty would take real action to control illegal immigration, then they could come back and ask for an amnesty. If they do it in that order, controlling illegal immigration first, asking for the amnesty second, I think they can get their amnesty. Trying to get the amnesty first will not work.

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* Actually, I am not sure any of the plans uses the word "amnesty". They all seem to use terms such as "path to citizenship" or something like that. But, as once was said in a slightly different context, if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck and looks like a duck, it is a duck. The same is true of all these "paths to citizenship"; they’re just one form or another of an amnesty.