[Congressional Record Volume 159, Number 66 (Monday, May 13, 2013)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3357-S3359]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              IMMIGRATION

  Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, tomorrow we will continue the markup on 
the Gang of 8 immigration bill. They have been meeting with 
businesspeople and special interest groups trying to craft a piece of 
legislation they can agree to, that they think is good. They didn't 
have anybody representing mainstream America. They didn't have anyone 
representing the law enforcement community who would explain how this 
system ought to work. As a result, their bill doesn't have any kind of 
improvements in our law enforcement that would be effective.
  I wanted to talk today, because we will be going into it tomorrow, 
about the fundamental question on the nature of our immigration; how 
much this country would be able to sustain in a healthy way for 
immigrants, as well as American workers.
  I have been concerned for some time that the numbers are just too 
large. We are not able to effectively assimilate people in these large 
numbers. Significantly, we don't have sufficient jobs to allow us to 
employ them. As the bill stands now, it would have only a negative 
impact on American workers.
  People say: You need to be positive, Sessions. We are growth 
oriented. We are just going to grow this economy, and there will be 
plenty of jobs out there. Be like Ronald Reagan, would you? Be sunny 
all the time. Don't talk negatively. Don't worry about this.
  I am looking at some numbers, and I think it is wise for America to 
be prudent, smart, and careful, before we establish policies we can't 
sustain, before we establish policies that create more unemployment in 
America and damage our economy. That could happen.
  I asked one of the sponsors of the bill, Senator Schumer, how many 
people would be admitted under the bill. Well, he wouldn't say.
  I said: It looks like it might be 30 million; is that correct?
  He said: No.
  I said: Well, how many is it, Senator Schumer?
  He didn't say. They have yet to say how many people would be admitted 
under the biggest change in immigration we have had since at least 
1986, and really it is larger in its impact than 1986.
  This is an odd thing. Frankly, we ought not to proceed another day in 
the Judiciary Committee until the sponsors of the bill--and their great 
advisers who have been meeting for months, aided by the administration 
and all the staffs they have in Homeland Security and the Department of 
Justice--can tell us how many people would be admitted. They don't do 
that, I think, fundamentally because they don't want us to know. They 
really don't want to acknowledge what a huge alteration in our policies 
this will have in terms of economics and so forth.
  Let's think about it. Here are some of the things we know: We know 11 
million people are here illegally--some say 12 million--and they would 
all be given a legal status. Virtually all would be given a legal 
status immediately.
  They would then immediately be allowed to pursue any job they would 
like to take. They could go down and apply for the county government, 
the city government, trucking firms, coal mining companies, oil 
companies, any good job out there they would like to apply for. That is 
not happening now because many of them have no identification and 
aren't able to take anything other than jobs off the books. Some have 
estimated--supporters of the bill--that at least half of the people 
here illegally are working off the books in some form or fashion. These 
numbers are big. We have those numbers.
  In addition, there is a plan over the next years to legalize 4.5 
million additional individuals in the so-called backlog. They are 
really not backlogged in the sense the immigration service isn't 
processing their papers fast enough, they are backlogged because we had 
caps on how many in these categories could come in and people apply 
until they reach the number. Well, they would remove the caps on those. 
That would be another 4.5 million that would come in.
  Then they have a future flow that we are working hard on to analyze 
with my staff. I don't have the entire immigration service. I don't 
have the immigration lawyers association. I don't have the chamber of 
commerce or Richard Trumka to come in and do all the work for me, but 
we think there will be quite a number of immigrants coming in the 
future.
  The Los Angeles Times--and I will use their number; it seems to be 
the number others have come up with and may be in the ballpark--they 
have increased the annual flow by 50 percent. That would be a 50-
percent increase. We are supposed to be at about 1 million a year now, 
and this would increase the legal flow by 50 percent. It could be 
considerably more. So we estimate that something like 30 million people 
will be given legal status in the next 10 years, when, if the law were 
faithfully applied, there would be about 10 or 11 million over the next 
10 years given legal status. Yes, of that 30 million, about 10 or so--
10-plus--will be those who are already here, but many of those are 
really not effectively competing for jobs with the American worker, who 
by a large degree is out of work and needing a job.

  First and foremost we are a nation of immigrants. We have always had 
a generous immigration policy. A million immigrants a year exceeds that 
of any other country in the world ever, and we are about to absorb a 
huge number of new people--15 million--and then we are going to 
increase the flow by 50 percent. So I am asking, can we handle this? 
That is all I am asking at this point on this subject, and we really 
should think about that. Don't we owe it to our workers to ask those 
questions?
  Professor Borjas, at Harvard--himself an immigrant and the most 
serious student of immigration and wages and jobs in America, and he 
wrote a book on it a number of years ago and still writes papers in 
contributing to the debate--has demonstrated absolutely, through 
intense, high-level economic studies, that increases in workers 
produces reduced wages. Surprise--more workers reduces wages. It allows 
a business to find a worker without having to pay more money. They 
would be able to get more people to work for less, and they like that. 
That is great--for them.
  My Democratic colleagues have been pointing out for a long time--and, 
sadly, there is too much truth in their complaints--that the average 
wage of the American worker since at least

[[Page S3358]]

2000--and some say as far back as 1970--has not kept up with inflation.
  Profit is going pretty well for a lot of companies, but workers' 
salaries haven't even kept up with inflation, and our unemployment rate 
is exceedingly high today. That is a fact. Professor Borjas attributes 
a good bit of that to the immigration we have had over these years, 
which is at a level that, he said some years ago--and I remember when 
he wrote this--was higher than the country really ought to have then.
  What is our current situation? Well, we looked at the analysis of the 
Congressional Budget Office in the budget study they present to 
Congress every year. And they work hard at this. Nobody knows the 
answers to all of these questions, but CBO's is as good and objective a 
number as one normally gets, and this is what they predict. They are 
predicting that what experts are saying is correct; that is, the 
economic growth in mature economies, such as the United States, Europe, 
and Japan, is not going to reach the peaks of growth we have had in 
some of the go-go eras of the past. Bill Gross, head of one of the 
biggest bond firms in the world--PIMCO--has called it a new normal. We 
are going to have lower growth. It will be steady, hopefully, but it is 
going to be lower and it will create fewer jobs. That is what the 
projections are for the future.
  In February of this year, the CBO projected that job growth per 
month--the number of jobs employers expect to add to their workforce--
in the second 5 years of their 10-year budget analysis, years 2019 
through 2023, would average only 75,000 a month. Isn't that something? 
Hopefully we can do something better than that. This is a 10-year-plus 
plan of immigration policy from this Gang of 8. Have they talked to Mr. 
Elmendorf? Have they talked to anybody about how many jobs we are 
actually going to need, other than some of the Silicon Valley gurus, 
the chamber of commerce, some of the big agricultural industries, and 
some of those folks? Is that all the people they are talking to?
  What about the Blue Chip forecast? This is a forecast that is watched 
very closely. They make forecasts on a lot of different issues. It is 
the average of 55 private economic forecasters. So what do the Blue 
Chippers say the growth will be? They say that there will be 2.8 
percent growth between 2016 and 2019 and that will drop to only 2.5 
percent between 2020 and 2024. In short, they agree with CBO that 
economic growth will slow down over the next 10 years and not really 
pick up from the slow growth we are in now to any significant degree.
  A number of academic economists--Robert Gordon at Northwestern 
University and Tyler Cowen at George Mason--argue that the U.S. economy 
has entered a long period of slower economic growth that is not likely 
to improve dramatically anytime soon.
  Today the Wall Street Journal published its latest survey of 52 
economists, who predict steady but slow economic growth in the near 
term. Slow growth means slow job creation. It means job caution.
  Here is what the Brookings Institution says:

       Adjust for population growth, and it will take 9 more years 
     to return to the prerecession level of unemployment at the 
     current rate of growth.

  That is a liberal think tank, and they are saying it is going to take 
9 more years just to get the unemployment we have now down to a more 
normal historic level in the United States. At the same time, job 
participation, labor force participation is at a record low. Not since 
the 1970s, when not many women were working, have we gone that low. 
People are giving up on looking for work.
  It was 2 months ago that we had 88,000 jobs created in this country 
in 1 month--88,000 people got employment--while 486,000 left the 
workforce. Imagine that. In 1 month we only created 88,000 jobs, while 
486,000 left the workforce. We checked those numbers, and about one-
fifth of those were retirements--I am sure some early, or at least 
earlier than they wanted, and they started drawing Social Security 
earlier than they intended to draw it because they couldn't find work--
but a little less than 400,000, one-fifth, dropped out, gave up, 
couldn't find work. So that is troubling, and it is pulling down wages 
of American citizens who have lost their jobs and can't find good work.
  The Labor Department reported earlier this month that 4.4 million 
Americans have been out of work for more than 27 weeks and that the 
broadest measure of unemployment--that includes part-time employment 
and other things--stands at 13.9 percent, which is very high.
  So first, I would say, do we want to tell somebody to come to 
America, but we don't have a job for them or it will only be temporary, 
and then they will be laid off? We can't expect to be able to maintain 
a workforce.
  There is no doubt that those who want large and ready supplies of 
labor and who don't want to have to pay more money or provide more 
benefits to get that labor are happy with the steady, large flow coming 
into the country. It might even make them have a little better profit. 
But Professor Borjas at Harvard makes clear that by maybe $1,600 a 
year--low-income people making $20,000 or so a year will have their 
wages brought down that much as a result of an influx of large amounts 
of low-skilled labor.

  So it is not helpful to immigrants who came lawfully and who are 
looking for work and having their wages pulled down, and it is not 
helpful for our native born who are looking for work and can't get on 
that ladder of success where someone starts working as a carpenter's 
helper and one day ends up as a carpenter and then a foreman, and they 
have saved a little money and have a retirement plan and health care 
for their family. That is what we would like to see happen in America. 
So I am worried about those numbers.
  Mr. President, we had a hearing--kind of hard to keep up with this, 
but I believe this was the hearing on high-tech workers--and I would 
like to highlight the testimony of Professor Ron Hira. He has written 
for the Economic Policy Institute, which is a liberal think tank. He 
has done an op-ed at BusinessWeek and has presented at the Brookings 
Institution and printed academic papers on this subject. He testified 
before our committee that he has been studying our high-skilled 
immigration policy for more than a decade.
  Most of the people entering the country under the Gang of 8 bill will 
not be highly skilled. Most of them will not enter through the more 
merit-based point system we have heard about. It looks pretty clear 
that those entering on the point-based system, where there is some sort 
of competitive process--although an individual gets extra points if 
they have family connections--represent less than 10 percent of those 
who would be admitted under the legislation.
  So this is what Mr. Hira says about the way our high-skilled 
immigration policy is being operated. He says the U.S. policy, as 
currently designed and administered, does more harm than good. To meet 
the needs of the U.S. economy and U.S. workers, our guest worker and 
permanent resident programs need immediate and substantial overhaul, 
and we don't have that kind of reform in this legislation. The 
principal goal of these programs is to bring in foreign workers who are 
supposed to complement American workers, making American workers more 
effective. But loopholes have made it too easy to bring in cheaper, 
foreign workers with ordinary skills who directly substitute rather 
than complement workers already in America.
  We have all heard of this complementary idea--that we bring in 
foreign labor, and that helps American workers be more efficient and it 
will make everybody better. But according to Mr. Hira, the workers who 
are being brought in under the H-1B and similar programs--J-1, L-1--are 
not doing that. They are bringing in people through a loophole where 
they actually compete with Americans for jobs. He says many of these 
individuals have ordinary skills, and they substitute for American 
workers.
  He also said that loopholes in these programs provide an unfair 
competitive advantage to companies that are specializing in offshore 
outsourcing, speeding up the process of shipping high-wage, high-tech 
American jobs overseas, which has disadvantaged companies in the United 
States that hire mainly American workers.
  Essentially, as I understood his testimony, people would come from a 
foreign country. They live here and train and work here. Then they go 
back to

[[Page S3359]]

their foreign country and set up a plant or business and the company, 
U.S. company, outsources the work, costing American jobs. He has done 
studies on this. This is not just a theory he came up with.
  He further testified that the actual H-1B and L-1 visa use has become 
antithetical to policymakers' goals due to four fundamental flaws: The 
work permits are held by the employer, so basically these individuals 
come as indentured servants and are able to be controlled in a way that 
gives the employer the advantage over an American worker. No. 2, he 
says that the visa period is far too long for them to come and, in 
addition to the inherent design flaws, there is little oversight or 
enforcement on these programs. Nobody is watching them. According to 
Professor Hira, by closing H-1B and L-1 loopholes, Congress would 
create and retain tens of thousands of high-wage American jobs and 
ensure our labor market works fairly for American and foreign workers 
alike.
  I am summarizing now. In his opinion, the following needs to be done: 
institute an effective labor market test--make sure we actually need 
these workers, pay workers true market wages--he asserts they are not 
being paid true market wages; limit the visa to a maximum of 3 years--
for a lot of reasons I suggest that is very important--with no renewal. 
If they come for longer periods of time and they can renew and renew, 
then we end up with somebody who is married here, their children are in 
junior high school, maybe they are American citizens by now--and we are 
going to ask them to leave even though the law says for them to leave? 
It is not likely.
  That is how 40 percent of the people here illegally have come to 
America. They have come legally but overstayed the visa they had.
  We should eliminate access to additional H-1B and L-1 visas for any 
dependent firm. Those that are dependent on these programs to maintain 
their basic workforce, those are the ones who should get their numbers 
reduced, rather than getting more visas. We should shine a light on the 
process, institute sensible oversight, establish a clear single 
objective for the programs. Also other programs, he notes, are badly in 
need of an overhaul and are being used to circumvent the annual 
numerical limit on H-1Bs and the regulatory controls on the L-1 
program.
  Given the widespread use of H-1B and L-1 visas by offshore 
outsourcing firms--people who are truly moving jobs out of the United 
States--Congress should take affirmative steps to make clear that most 
guest worker programs and permanent residents are immigration issues, 
not trade and policy issues.
  Finally, we heard over and over again from our good friends in 
Silicon Valley all the great things they have done. We are proud of 
them and they have been great for America. He talks about some of that. 
He contested the assertion by Mr. Brad Smith of Microsoft. Microsoft 
has been aggressive in pushing this program. He pushes back and 
contests the assertion that the United States does not have enough 
high-skilled workers. We have heard we don't have enough high-skilled 
workers. He says no. He studied it. According to Professor Hira, the 
unemployment rate for STEM graduates--science, technology, engineering, 
and mathematics--is higher than that of regular college graduates.
  Goodness. He noted that in the petroleum engineering field things 
have gone better. Wages have increased prompting an increase in the 
enrollment in such programs by American college students who almost 
exclusively have filled the petroleum engineering jobs. That is the way 
the system is supposed to work. Wages start going up, there is a 
shortage of petroleum engineers and workers, people start majoring in 
that, and they go out and find jobs. That is the way the system is 
supposed to work. This example, he says, shows that markets do work 
when they are allowed to work. But he said H-1B and L-1 programs are 
intervening in labor markets. With that privilege should come 
accountability.
  I will conclude by saying I urge my colleagues, before we rush out 
and sign on to an immigration proposal that has all kinds of special 
interests and political interests, somebody has to question what it is 
doing to recent college graduates as well as low-skilled workers. The 
actual statistical data from experts indicate these workers are 
struggling today and many are unemployed and in much need of work.
  The Civil Rights Commissioner, Abigail Thernstrom, also wrote a 
letter to the Commission and the Congress that said we don't have a 
shortage of low-skilled workers in America. We have a glut of them. We 
have more low-skilled workers looking for jobs than we have jobs. But 
to read the papers, one would think just the opposite; that we have 
this crisis with high unemployment, high numbers of people dropped out 
of the labor force, and we have to bring in more workers to do basic 
American work.
  All I am saying is that immigration policy needs to allow the right 
flow to come into America. It needs to be faithfully enforced. It needs 
to serve the national interest, not the special interest. It needs to 
remember the dutiful workers out there who lawfully entered the country 
through immigration or native born, and their interests need to be 
protected in this process. I do not believe they are being protected 
properly.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. King). The Senator from Kansas.
  Mr. MORAN. I ask unanimous consent to address the Senate.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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