Upward Mobility Will Be the First Casualty of President's Immigration Plan
Sunday, January 11, 2004
By: Dan Stein

El Paso Times

The secret to America’s greatness has been the expectation that working hard and playing by the rules would be rewarded with upward mobility. For generations, Americans have bought into the belief that their children would live better lives, at least economically, than they did.

That perception has begun to shift, as more Americans are working harder than ever before, but barely hanging on to their middle class status. The American middle class is under assault, and the President Bush’s January 7th immigration proposal could effectively end the American Dream for millions of working people in this country.

The President’s proposal contains two core elements: Legalization for perhaps as many as 12 million illegal aliens currently living in the United States and an open-ended guest worker program that will allow employers to seek workers anywhere in the world. The net effect of these proposals will be to reward millions of people who broke the law, while opening the door to unlimited numbers of guest workers who are willing to work for whatever American employers are willing to pay.

No matter what euphemisms the President and Karl Rove choose to employ, what they are proposing is an amnesty program for millions of illegal aliens and an untold number of relatives who will be allowed to join them. Simply declaring these people to be guest workers will not minimize the impact they have already had on the lives and livelihoods of the people whom they have driven out of many sectors of the labor market, or the costs that have been borne by the communities where they have settled for education, health care, housing and other basic necessities.

But the damage this proposal seeks to inflict on middle class Americans does not end with the legalization of millions of illegal aliens. Mr. Bush would also create an open-ended program that, in his words, “matches willing workers with willing employers” in the United States.

While that may sound like an economically sound, market-driven proposal, President Bush leaves out a very important condition. He seeks to create a program that matches foreign workers with American employers at a price to be determined by the employer. Rather than being a market-driven idea, such a guest worker program would be a market-busting idea.

In the past, American employers were forced to compete for workers by offering better wages, better benefits and other incentives to attract labor. It was this sort of free market condition that created a solid middle class and allowed Americans to improve their standards of living. However, if employers are free to seek workers anywhere in the world, what incentive do they have to ever raise workers’ wages? Under the President’s plan, they will have to offer the jobs to Americans at some designated “prevailing wage,” and if no Americans are willing to accept those wages they will be permitted to look elsewhere.

The Bush immigration proposal, combined with the massive outsourcing of American jobs to cheaper labor markets overseas will further erode America’s struggling middle class. If we destroy the middle class, we will effectively destroy the very foundation that has made this a great and prosperous society.