Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions on Monday slammed President Obama’s plan to open the floodgates to immigrant workers eligible for worker visas at a time when U.S. firms are dumping higher-wage Americans for lower-wage immigrants.
“The number of aliens authorized to work in the United States each year is limited by law, according to the number of foreign work visas and green cards that are statutorily available. Under this breathtaking executive action, those limits set by Congress are waived,” said Sessions in a statement.
It came after his Judiciary subcommittee issued a new analysis of Census data revealing a coming immigration surge over 700 percent, a massive population spike equal to adding 25 cities the size of Los Angeles.
The Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest, chaired by Sessions, released data showing the tidal wave of immigrants increasing 715 percent between 1970 and 2060. Between now and 2060 the population will nearly double from 42 million to over 78 million, or a quarter of the current U.S. population.
Critics of new immigration surges argue that it is eating into the employment and other opportunities for native-born Americans and could depress wages further.
In a release, the subcommittee noted that after the prior immigration spike, between 1880 and 1920, Congress moved to reduce immigration, a model Sessions would like the current Congress to follow.
There was net zero growth from 1920 to 1970, and the total population of immigrants fell.
For perspective, during the entire 1880-1970 period, the foreign-born population grew about 40 percent.
Today, the immigration population is at a record high of 42.4 million and the administration is approving worker visas for hundreds of thousands more.
Said the subcommittee’s release: “Census data shows the U.S. will add the population equivalent of 1 new city of Los Angeles exclusively through new immigration every three years. Including the future children of new arrivals, Pew data shows new immigration will add the equivalent of 25 cities of Los Angeles over the next fifty years – even as today’s excess labor supply pulls down wages, as manufacturing jobs go overseas, and as automation reduces demand for workers. Nearly 1 in 4 U.S. residents in their prime-working years is not working; median household income today is more than $4,000 beneath levels reached fifteen years ago.”
Immigration has become a huge issue in the presidential race and polls show that most would rather see Americans hired than immigrants.
Still, the recently approved budget jumped the level of immigrants allowed to enter the U.S. to take blue-collar jobs.
In a separate release, Sessions slammed the president’s executive action on worker visas taken over the holidays. He said:
“Here is how the scheme works: under current law, there is a statutory cap on the number of aliens who can receive green cards based on sponsorship from their employers, and thus a cap on the number who can receive the all-purpose work authorization those green cards provide. Under this new rule, the administration can bypass those caps with two easy steps. First, it would simply approve as many aliens as it wishes to seek green cards in excess of the cap. hen, it would give those workers – and their spouses and children – a renewable all-purpose work permit while they wait for their green cards to become available, nullifying Americans’ statutory protections against job-threatening flows of excess foreign labor. Adding further to the pool of workers, it expands the number of H-1B visas exempt from the annual cap.
“Brazenly, the proposed rule would also result in the automatic renewal of work permits for aliens who, among other things, merely file applications to have their deportations cancelled or asylum granted. It is as if these policies were designed to create chaos and disorder.”
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected].
