Minor Thoughts from me to you

While I have issues with the current state of our immigration laws, the Senate's attempt to fix those laws is looking uglier by the day. Thanks to an ACU alert which lead me to a Bob Novak column, I found a Heritage report detailing a few of the flaws in this immigration bill. Simply put, the Senate is attempting to mandate wages and working conditions for the new legal immigrants. As if that wasn't bad enough, the mandated wages and working conditions will be better than what American workers receive:

The Senate has devised a guest worker program that would extend bureaucratic control over some 5 percent of the labor force, via wage controls on the private sector. Rather than establish a simple cap on the number of temporary visas issued each month (which could be distributed fairly in a simple monthly auction), the Senate bill would create of a new Department of Labor bureaucracy that would be nothing less than a central planning agency for the U.S. labor market.

This new bureaucracy would include:

• "a 'Temporary Worker Task Force' with ten members (all political appointees from the federal government, none from states). More explicitly, the Secretary of Labor would determine which occupational categories in the U.S. have unmet demands for labor."

• "Dramatically Expanding Prevailing Wage Rules. Centrally controlling wages for every possible occupation is a breathtakingly ambitious project but would be mandatory for guest workers under the S. 2611."

The "prevailing wage rules" are the Davis-Bacon Acts requirements. This law requires that workers on Federal job sites receive whatever the "prevailing wage" is for their job. While it sounds like a harmless requirement, "prevailing wages" are often far higher than a worker's normal wages. This can lead to definite problems in the free market.

My dad worked quite a few jobs, in Norfolk, as an electrician. Every now and then, his employer would send him to job sites on the Norfolk Naval Base. While he worked those sites, his salary would increase dramatically. We all enjoyed the extra income, but it came with a price: reduced profits for his employer. He knew, and we knew, that his employer simply couldn't afford to pay him that wage on a regular basis. Had they been forced to pay that salary to my dad all of the time, he wouldn't have had a larger income; he would have been laid off.

I have to wonder who inserted the original provision into Section 404 of the Senate Immigration Bill. It's quite possible that it was an attempt not to make immigrants better off, but to make sure that immigrants couldn't find any work. After all, immigrant workers often work for lower wages than American workers. If employers were forced to pay immigrants far higher wages, they might never employ them at all.

Whatever the reasoning, this bill is a turkey. In its current form, I cannot support. Several of its provisions are worthwhile and desperately needed. However, I cannot tolerate its interference with free market wages.