Thread: Debunking immigrations myths

http://www.businessrecord.com/Main.asp? ... cleID=2821

Sunday, June 25, 2006

Debunking immigrations myths

By Beth Dalbey
bethdalbey@bpcdm.com


"We don’t provide legal ways for workers to come here. We have a big, giant help-wanted sign and a big, giant keep-out sign and – surprise, surprise – people are conflicted."

–Benjamin Johnson, director –Immigration Policy Center, American Immigration Law Foundation

Business leaders’ concerns about filling jobs for which there is a shortage of workers are legitimate, a panel of immigration experts speaking in Des Moines said last week, but they’re being muffled by the emotional tenor of the debate as conflicting bills to overhaul U.S. immigration law move into a congressional conference committee.

Benjamin Johnson, director of the American Immigration Law Foundation’s Immigration Policy Center in Washington, D.C., told about 75 people attending the Greater Des Moines Partnership roundtable discussion that business leaders need to do a better job of debunking the myth that they’re driven to support lenient immigration policies by a desire for cheap labor.

The Partnership, which made immigration reform a featured priority during its recent lobbying trip to Washington, D.C., favors the approach taken by the Senate that would allow employers to recruit foreign workers when there is a shortage of U.S. workers and that would put screened, undocumented workers on a pathway to citizenship by giving them legal status. Specifically, the Senate bill establishes a guest-worker program that addresses shortages in industries such as agriculture, hospitality and retail; increases the number of employment-based visas for skilled workers to 115,000 per year from 65,000 and allows for an adjustment in those visas to keep pace with fluctuations in demand; and exempts from the threshold certain foreign nationals who hold advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

However, business leaders are concerned that as the issue goes to the conference committee, some elements of the enforcement-only approach taken by the House of Representatives could seep into the law. The House version calls for deporting the estimated 11 million to 12 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States and beefing up border security. The Iowa Center for Immigrant Leadership and Integration at the University of Northern Iowa estimates the cost to round up and deport undocumented workers at $260 billion, excluding resulting loss of labor, taxes and other contributions those immigrants make to the economy,

“There’s a lot of hand-wringing across the country,” Johnson said. “The debate has focused exclusively on undocumented workers, the huge 800-pound gorilla of less-skilled labor.”

Missing from that argument, Johnson and other experts on the panel said, is the fact that with only 5,000 green cards are issued annually, and temporary visas also restricted, immigrants have few options but to come to the United States without documentation.

“We don’t provide legal ways for workers to come here,” Johnson said. “We have a big, giant help-wanted sign and a big, giant keep-out sign and – surprise, surprise – people are conflicted.”

A commonly held belief in the emotionally charged atmosphere surrounding the immigration debate is that foreign nationals are taking jobs away from U.S. workers, but Johnson said the reality is that as Americans become better educated – only 12 percent of workers in the United States don’t have high school diplomas – and the country moves toward a knowledge-based economy, employers scramble to fill low-skill jobs from the U.S. labor pool. There’s also a shortage of highly skilled labor in the United States, he said, pointing out that 60 percent of engineers with Ph.D.s are foreign-born.

“There are fewer people who view those kinds of low-skill jobs as part of their future,” he said. “We’re no longer uneducated, but we’re not highly educated either. We’re in the middle.”

Exacerbating the problem is a graying U.S. work force. The U.S. Department of Labor predicts a shortage of 10 million skilled workers by 2010. That shortage is expected to be felt especially hard in Iowa, where it’s predicted 310,000 new workers will be needed by 2010. One strategy is to increase the labor pool through immigration, which the Partnership supports.

The agricultural and high-tech industries have lobbied in the past to increase the caps on the number of visas available to their specific sectors, but the greater business community has been largely silent on the issue. That’s changing as groups representing the food service, hospitality and home building industries, for example, become more vocal about their increasing reliance on unskilled immigrant labor.

The National Association of Home Builders, for example, says its industry is on track to build 18 million new homes over the next decade and will generate more than 1 million new jobs, but because of the maturing work force has come to depend on foreign-born workers to fill vacancies. The NAHB estimates that 23 percent of the current residential construction work force is foreign-born.

In a position paper on immigration, the International Foodservice Distributors Association said, “For employers, especially in low-wage, low-skill industries such as hospitality, increasing the number of legal immigrants represents an important opportunity to relieve an ongoing shortage of available and willing employees.”

The IFDA said that “the strident nature of the immigration debate has made this an extremely contentious issue” and that “a large and vocal minority of the Congress is actively hostile to immigration reform that includes any provision allowing currently illegal aliens to remain in the country even temporarily.”

Johnson said Congress’ “fascination with the border is misplaced.” Increasing the size of the Border Patrol as been advanced as vital to homeland security and while “it’s true that the environment creating human smugglers is an environment that terrorists could exploit,” he said, well-financed terrorist organizations are more likely to sneak into the United States through ports or across the Canadian border. With more than one-half million people crossing the U.S. southern border each day, whether U.S. citizens, tourists or foreign nationals crossing legally or aliens coming across surreptitiously, “that’s way, way too big of a haystack to be searching terrorists,” he said.

The last wholesale amnesty period for undocumented immigrants was in 1986, but since then, laws have placed employers relying on immigrant labor in a Catch-22.

Employers are subject to $2,200 fine for each instance of unlawful hiring, but have no practical way of verifying if a new employee has proper documentation. The I-90 forms employers use to verify employment eligibility are easily counterfeited. Of equal concern to employers is their vulnerability to charges of discrimination if they request more documents than the number required, or require documentation from a foreign national that isn’t required from a U.S. citizen seeking employment.

“You cannot do enforcement only,” Johnson said, “and you cannot do amnesty only.”

Others on the panel advocated an approach to immigration reform that addresses human rights and social justice issues. Sandra Sanchez, an immigrant from Mexico, said that in her job as director of the Immigrants Voice Project for the American Friends Service Committee in Des Moines, she has heard “painful stories” of immigrants whose families may not be able to come to the United States legally for many years.

“We need to reclaim that human element,” Sanchez said. “This country, for some reason, is losing touch with its heart, it’s losing touch with its faith, it’s losing touch with its principles of freedom and justice, and we need to reclaim them.

“If you feel powerless,” she said, referring to U.S. citizens who have voiced frustration when dealing with the government, “what kind of hope is there for first-generation immigrants or those who are undocumented?”

Another panelist, Max Cardenas, an immigrant from Peru who has worked for the past several years on the economic and social integration of Iowa’ immigrant populations, said Latinos – the main immigrant group in Iowa – have made positive contributions to the economy.

Citing Small Business Administration statistics, Cardenas said there are 1,500 Latino-owned businesses in Iowa and 80 percent of start-up businesses in the state last year were established by first-generation Latino immigrants. In his visits with Latino families through his business, Diverse Innovative Solutions, he works largely with immigrants, “I really have not met a household where someone doesn’t have a dream of starting a business.”

Regardless of the immigration reform package that comes out of the conference committee, it is sure to affect U.S. employers’ hiring practices, said Lori Chesser, a shareholder and vice president at Davis, Brown, Koehn, Shors & Roberts, where her practice is limited to immigration law. “I encourage you to not be silent because, believe me, it’s going to affect you,” said Chesser, who is one of the country’s foremost experts on immigration law and the national chair of the Immigration Reform Committee of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

“We need something that works,” she said. “We need something that works for business, and we need something that works for Iowa.”

"We don’t provide legal ways for workers to come here. We have a big, giant help-wanted sign and a big, giant keep-out sign and – surprise, surprise – people are conflicted."

Is all the open borders crowd can do is lie? Of course we have a legal system for workers to come here. What we don't have is a legal system to accommodate exploiting workers or a globalist mindset.

Business leaders’ concerns about filling jobs for which there is a shortage of workers are legitimate, a panel of immigration experts speaking in Des Moines said last week,

These are the same folks who helped create this problem and we are just supposed to accept their word for it?

The Partnership, which made immigration reform a featured priority during its recent lobbying trip to Washington, D.C., favors the approach taken by the Senate that would allow employers to recruit foreign workers when there is a shortage of U.S. workers and that would put screened, undocumented workers on a pathway to citizenship by giving them legal status. Specifically, the Senate bill establishes a guest-worker program that addresses shortages in industries such as agriculture, hospitality and retail; increases the number of employment-based visas for skilled workers to 115,000 per year from 65,000 and allows for an adjustment in those visas to keep pace with fluctuations in demand; and exempts from the threshold certain foreign nationals who hold advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Why hasn't this been your concern before? How many numbers are we ultimately talking about? Are we talking about people who want to assimilate and become Americans. Based on your current workers the answer is a resounding no!

However, business leaders are concerned that as the issue goes to the conference committee, some elements of the enforcement-only approach taken by the House of Representatives could seep into the law.

Let's hope so. You guys remember "We the People"? Overwhelmingly that is what is wanted and needs to be done.

The Iowa Center for Immigrant Leadership and Integration at the University of Northern Iowa estimates the cost to round up and deport undocumented workers at $260 billion, excluding resulting loss of labor, taxes and other contributions those immigrants make to the economy,

Hmmm. Depends on who you ask. Estimates vary from a net gain to more than what you quote here. Bottom line though is there is no dollar value on American sovereignty and our way of life. Our bottom line seems to be different then yours. America is NOT for sale. Comprende?

“There’s a lot of hand-wringing across the country

Perhaps with the Open Borders crowd but on our side none at all. Just do what needs to be done.

Missing from that argument, Johnson and other experts on the panel said, is the fact that with only 5,000 green cards are issued annually, and temporary visas also restricted, immigrants have few options but to come to the United States without documentation.

Something we can certainly look at. But after we secure the borders and enforce current law. Then we will look at it. This rush to have to do all at once is hoping to obscure the numbers involved.

“We don’t provide legal ways for workers to come here,” Johnson said. “We have a big, giant help-wanted sign and a big, giant keep-out sign and – surprise, surprise – people are conflicted.”

Another lie. The open borders crowd may be conflicted but we are not. Secure the border, Enforce current employment laws and remove the invaders.

There’s also a shortage of highly skilled labor in the United States, he said, pointing out that 60 percent of engineers with Ph.D.s are foreign-born.

How'd it get that way? Ask around. Plenty of unemployed American engineers because of your abuse of the visa system. You must think we are all stupid!

Exacerbating the problem is a graying U.S. work force. The U.S. Department of Labor predicts a shortage of 10 million skilled workers by 2010. That shortage is expected to be felt especially hard in Iowa, where it’s predicted 310,000 new workers will be needed by 2010. One strategy is to increase the labor pool through immigration, which the Partnership supports.

Certainly some truth to that. However as Americans we can do what we do best. Adapt! IF in fact it can be proved we need imported labor then we will see, however there are always more than one way to do things.

The National Association of Home Builders, for example, says its industry is on track to build 18 million new homes over the next decade and will generate more than 1 million new jobs, but because of the maturing work force has come to depend on foreign-born workers to fill vacancies. The NAHB estimates that 23 percent of the current residential construction work force is foreign-born.

It is probably more than 23% Funny how they leave the part out about CHEAP! as in CHEAP labor.

The IFDA said that “the strident nature of the immigration debate has made this an extremely contentious issue” and that “a large and vocal minority of the Congress is actively hostile to immigration reform that includes any provision allowing currently illegal aliens to remain in the country even temporarily.”

How about a LARGE and vocal MAJORITY of the American people?

Johnson said Congress’ “fascination with the border is misplaced.” Increasing the size of the Border Patrol as been advanced as vital to homeland security and while “it’s true that the environment creating human smugglers is an environment that terrorists could exploit,” he said, well-financed terrorist organizations are more likely to sneak into the United States through ports or across the Canadian border. With more than one-half million people crossing the U.S. southern border each day, whether U.S. citizens, tourists or foreign nationals crossing legally or aliens coming across surreptitiously, “that’s way, way too big of a haystack to be searching terrorists,” he said.

Boy, think about that one. What are they really saying here? Too big of a haystack?????

The last wholesale amnesty period for undocumented immigrants was in 1986, but since then, laws have placed employers relying on immigrant labor in a Catch-22.

86 Amnesty has proved to be a real winner hasn't it? And you are now suggesting we should do it again only this time on a much larger scale?? They help create a problem and then call the fall out "catch-22"?

Employers are subject to $2,200 fine for each instance of unlawful hiring, but have no practical way of verifying if a new employee has proper documentation. The I-90 forms employers use to verify employment eligibility are easily counterfeited. Of equal concern to employers is their vulnerability to charges of discrimination if they request more documents than the number required, or require documentation from a foreign national that isn’t required from a U.S. citizen seeking employment.

Again what are you really saying here? All it takes is the will to fix it. Laws can be changed. Tamper proof ID's for legal workers. OF course that is not what you really want is it?

“You cannot do enforcement only,” Johnson said,

Sure we can!

and you cannot do amnesty only.”

Who is suggesting Amnesty? No Amnesty!

Others on the panel advocated an approach to immigration reform that addresses human rights and social justice issues. Sandra Sanchez, an immigrant from Mexico, said that in her job as director of the Immigrants Voice Project for the American Friends Service Committee in Des Moines, she has heard “painful stories” of immigrants whose families may not be able to come to the United States legally for many years.

Just painful! Law breakers should always but met with sympathy and pathetic stories of strife and struggle meanwhile ignoring all the detrimental aspects and the fact that they are breaking the LAW.

“We need to reclaim that human element,” Sanchez said. “This country, for some reason, is losing touch with its heart, it’s losing touch with its faith, it’s losing touch with its principles of freedom and justice, and we need to reclaim them.

We've got all the "human element" that we need. How dare you suggest the American people are not compassionate and giving. THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ARE THE MOST COMPASSIONATE AND GIVING PEOPLE ON EARTH! Don't you dare preach to me about freedom and justice. Many a fine American patriot, you know the ones you say are "losing touch with its faith and principles of freedom and justice", have died all over this earth for freedom and justice. So stick it up your ass!

“what kind of hope is there for first-generation immigrants or those who are undocumented?”

How about going home and respecting American laws and sovereignty?

“I really have not met a household where someone doesn’t have a dream of starting a business.”

A paycheck. That is all America is to most Illegal immigrants

“We need something that works,” she said. “We need something that works for business, and we need something that works for Iowa.”

How about something that works for the American people. You remember them, right?

AlturaCt.,

I was getting ready to post, when I realized you had already done it for me!!! I agree. Thanks.

No amnesty.

See my sig.