Illegal Border Crossings Today:

Chamber of Commerce Sugar Coats Push for More Immigration with Flimsy Enforcement Fixes

U.S. Chamber of Commerce with a large crowd of Immigrants

Taking a page from Rahm Emanuel’s playbook, “Never let a serious crisis go to waste,” the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has alerted our nation’s leaders that they have a solution for America’s raging border chaos. In reality, it’s an exploitative blueprint for dramatically increasing immigration, predictably by an organization that has long promoted unending flows of foreign labor and mass amnesty with no regard for how doing so would displace American workers.

In its recent letter to Congress, the Chamber announced the launch of its Legal Immigration and Border Enforcement Reform This Year (LIBERTY) Campaign promising to fix our “broken system” with a “comprehensive solution” – tiresome buzzwords that cause true immigration reform activists to run for the hills.

Six major pillars of “reform” are offered yet only two are enforcement-related, and only tenuously so:

  • Increase the human, physical, and technological resources along the southern border and ports of entry.  Notably absent is anything about enforcing the laws already on the books.
  • Institute modern, effective, and efficient employment verification reforms. Why no mention of E-Verify? The existing (still voluntary) E-Verify system offers all these benefits, and if the Chamber supported it, they would have simply said so.

The real core of the lofty-labeled LIBERTY Campaign consists of four other initiatives that propose increasing quotas for virtually all immigrant and non-immigrant visas, expanding guest worker programs, and creating new visa options for a wide range of occupations and categories. 

The Chamber is no border hawk, but impersonating one to disguise its agenda of increasing immigration is nothing new for them; it’s a tactic that goes back to their support for the 2005 McCain-Kennedy Bill and the 2013 Senate Gang of Eight Bill. Like the LIBERTY Campaign, both called for massive immigration increases while masquerading as enforcement bills.

Granted, the Chamber is not a union, nor does it make any pretense about representing American workers; it exists to increase profits for businesses. That said, the Chamber should consider that their push for more so-called cheap foreign labor is counterproductive for the economy at large, and for the very companies the Chamber represents. Foreign labor offers short-term private gain and socialized costs. It’s not “cheap” labor; it’s subsidized labor with redistributed costs that don’t magically go away. Adding large volumes of low-skilled and heavily government-dependent immigrants to the country increases competition for scarce jobs, reduces wages, and expands welfare burdens. The net effect is destabilizing; higher unemployment, less disposable income, and increased individual and corporate taxes are all adversely affecting the robust business climate the Chamber claims it wants.

The Chamber’s broad goals of supporting capitalism, free markets, low taxes, and reduced regulation are laudable; selling out Americans ready, willing, and able to work isn’t. To the extent that the Chamber is committed to promoting long-term economic growth, they’d better question their long-term support for flooding the U.S. labor market with mass immigration.

At the very least, and in the spirit of full transparency, the Chamber’s LIBERTY Campaign should be renamed for what it is:  (yet another) Chamber of Commerce Charade Campaign.