June 25, 2009: President Obama pushes immigration reform

Today President Obama spoke about the need for Comprehensive Immigration Reform with an aim towards tightening up our borders and to minimize employers’ ability to drive down wages by hiring foreign labor.  In saying this, he has effectively spoken to two separate interests simultaneously- One the side, the Restrictionists who want tighter border security and massive deportations of undocumented workers and on the other, the rapidly growing Latin American population and those who believe that they deserve a path to citizenship.

Video from CNN

President Obama does have a political solution based on sound and reasonable policy that both sides of the aisle should accept. Tailoring legislation around the enforcement of the Prevailing Wage could serve as a win/win solution to an immigration debate that is widely regarded both politically and practically as immensely complicated. 

The Prevailing Wage is a wage that is arrived at by the Department of Labor by conducting surveys across all occupational job titles in all geographic locations.  An incentive based immigrant visa program that requires individual workers to earn at least the Prevailing Wage before being issued permanent residence, coupled with strict employer sanctions against those employers who fail to pay it can serve as a self-regulating immigration policy.  It will be a policy that will also take away the advantages that some employers currently have in hiring foreign labor just for the sake of cutting costs by paying lower wages. 

The H-1B program has by and large through the years worked very effectively where nonimmigrant workers who report earning less than the Prevailing Wage are routinely denied visa extensions.  Once the visa extension is denied, the employee is left without legal status and the employer is left susceptible to being sued by the employee for back wages.  For the professional H-1B Visa, this makes it difficult for employers to hire foreign born individuals just for the sake of cutting wage expenses.  This year, with the economy in recession, the number of H-1B visa requests has dramatically declined.  Some have argued that this shows the H-1B quota system as an effective one that is purely market-driven.  Because it largely takes away the advantages that those employers who hire undocumented workers have, the H-1B quota system has lead employers to hire from overseas only when they truly need the worker and they cannot locate one within the U.S. borders.

This H-1B system of rewarding those who conform to the wage laws and punishing those who don’t can easily be transferred to any Guest Worker Program or Immigrant Visa program.  If you couple the policy of refusing immigrant visas to workers who earn less than the Prevailing Wage with sanctions imposed against employers who fail to pay it, you largely do away with the primary problem we experience with illegal immigration- the depression of wages.  It would be reform that would for once make sense.