Big Business’ New Plan Would Create Fifty New Immigration Policies – Federation for American Immigration Reform

The open-borders lobby is no stranger to bad-faith reform proposals, abusing the language of fairness as they try to scrap all migration controls entirely. Unfortunately for American citizens, bad ideas frequently come from unusual suspects. Even while acknowledging our Southwestern border crisis, two Republican governors are now among those advocating for a potentially disastrous plan that would wreak havoc on our legal immigrationpolicies.

Governors Eric Holcomb of Indiana and Spencer Cox of Utah endorsed state-sponsored visas in The Washington Post in February, strengthening more recent pushes for this flawed and destructive policy. Their proposal would allow states to sponsor visas (which only the federal government can grant) specifically for immigrants to fill entry-level, low-skill roles in that state. The governors inexplicably present this plan as a solution to both our border crisis and supposed local labor shortages, and business groups hungry for cheap labor to undercut Americans have joined their cause in Newsweek.

The basic premise of this proposal is fatally flawed because states do not exist in isolation and travel between them is unrestricted. Allowing sanctuary states like California to unilaterally admit immigrants into the U.S. undermines the most basic structure of federalism by usurping the federal responsibility to control and regulate immigration. No effective controls exist that would keep those admitted from moving wherever they want in the country, and the proposal would not extend to states the ability to refuse these immigrants. There are no solutions to state-level shortages addressed here because immigration is by its nature not something that can be restricted to one place. State-sponsored admission of low-skill foreign workers could become a backdoor for a few states to flood the rest with un-asked-for competition and crowd out Americancitizens.

In fact, that crowding actually seems to be the desired effect. The American Business Immigration Coalitions use of the nonsense term parole visas in their Newsweek piecebetrays the open-borders cheap labor lobbys true intentions. Immigration parole, intended for very limited uses, is currently being grossly abused without oversight to bring hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens into the U.S. every year (a number the piece incredibly calls very limited) with work authorization. If 360,000 illegal aliens ushered into the U.S. annually by the federal government is a very limited number to the cheap labor lobby, imagine how many millions would be admitted if the parole abuses of the White House extended to state capitols across the country. Cheap illegal alien workers are a huge net drain on the economy, not a benefit, and these governors proposals would actively hurt their American constituents who would be replaced by lower-paid foreign workers.

Bad policies that make U.S. immigration law look weak create a self-perpetuating cycle of illegal immigration, as weve seen throughout the Biden administration. Inadequate enforcement and poorly conceived handouts like this proposal draw, rather than deter, ever more migration to the U.S. and strengthen the pull to the border, while American citizens pay for the incredible expense that these migrants create in our schools and hospitals. American jobs should not be a free-for-all for the lowest bidder, but proposals like this show that the cheap-labor lobby and many politicians would be happy to put American citizens last inline.

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Big Business' New Plan Would Create Fifty New Immigration Policies - Federation for American Immigration Reform