Future Harm: If Restricting Legal Immigration Becomes Law in 2018

We will hear from FAIR in 2018 (Federation for American Immigration Reform). Recently, Robert Law, its director, wrote: “Decades of flooding the labor force with low-skilled workers has caused blue collar wages to flat-line or decrease. In many cases, most notably construction, new low-skilled immigrants have replaced blue collar Americans, especially native born minority males.”

The GOP has a bill to dramatically curtail legal immigration.

In a snapshot, here’s how this legislation would likely harm our communities.

The major sports teams in St. Louis and Chicago have lots of players who are here on specialty sports visas—think of Latin American players on the Cardinals, Cubs, and Sox; European and Canadian players on the Blues and Blackhawks; Mirotic on the Bulls.

The Danville VA hospital likely has physicians from Pakistan, India and other nations.

Carle and Presence may have similar physicians who are more specialized and are here on higher-grade visas.

If you’re reading this and live in Chicago or other major city, the same is essentially true.

Next month, the Russian Ballet and symphony are performing at Krannert—all need a work visa to do this.

Research Park at the University has many employees on specialty visas for computer and engineering jobs.

Caterpillar has many engineers from India (I teach some of them)—hired, I assume, because Caterpillar wants the best and these folks fit the bill.

Some of our agricultural depends on legal immigration—Illinois, as the leading pumpkin growing state, brings in workers on specialty visas (or harvests with undocumented workers). Southern Illinois winemakers, apple orchards, and seed companies make occasional but important use of these visas.

Hotels are heavily dependent on a different type of visa for low skilled labor.

And the University has numerous people on these visas, and some bring in large grants that provide jobs for local Americans.

The Cotton-Perdue bill— heavily touted by President Trump— assumes that Americans are being shut out of the market. The proposed law would cut these visas and replace them with “merit” criteria—young age, English fluency, and educational attainment, all good things to value in a labor market.

Okay, the Cubs can put Kyle Schwarber in at catcher and send Willson Contreras home to Venuzuela; and the St. Louis Blues can find an American player for Russian-born Vladimir Tarasenko.

Your grandma and grandpa who live in Paris, Illinois would probably lose their 50 year-old foreign-born doctor who has a practice right there in town. 

American physicians want to work in large cities and suburbs—they no more want to work in rural America than other Americans want to pick tomatoes.

Caterpillar might simply offshore their engineering department, taking it to Mumbai, leaving another hole in the Peoria economy. They're not going to hire more American engineers-- they've already made that decision based on their hiring criteria.

The list goes on.

The last time the U.S. did this was 1924 with a law called the National Origins Act. It was implemented by a nativist president, Herbert Hoover, in 1928. Within four years, 32 percent of Americans were unemployed in the Great Depression.