Sen. Sessions Delivers Immigration Memo to House Republicans
As House Republicans prepared to leave Washington for a three-day retreat, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) has sent them a 30-page memo entitled "Immigration and the GOP Agenda." In it, Sessions argues against House action on immigration reform for any number of reasons that include a lack of trust in the Obama administration, the already high levels of legal immigration, wage stagnation, and the enormous growth in social welfare programs.
Sen. Sessions' purpose for drafting the memo, along with other GOP Members of the Senate Budget Committee, is to help educate House Members since the Chamber has not had a full-scale debate on immigration since late-2005. Further, he wanted to shed light on some of the economic impacts of mass legal immigration and an amnesty that aren't being reported by the news media.
"Significantly increasing the inflow of immigrants would adversely shock an already weak economy, lower average wages, increase unemployment, and decrease each American's share of national output," Sen. Sessions wrote. "As the Congressional Budget Office observed in its evaluation of the Senate's effort to increase immigration, the economy might be bigger because it would contain more people, but it would not be stronger."
He backed up that quote with information from a study by Harvard Economics Prof. George Borjas' last April. Dr. Borjas found that immigration reform would grow the economy, but it would mostly benefit high-wage earners while depressing wages for the lower class causing an even larger divide between economic classes in the United States.
Sen. Sessions went on to discuss the current state of the U.S. labor market, including high unemployment, a low worker participation rate, and a dire job outlook for America's youth and vulnerable workers. But despite all that, he said that pro-immigration reformers want to increase the number of workers in the country.
"It is against this difficult economic background that immigration reformers want to massively increase the number of work visas by increasing the flow of legal migrants and legalizing those in the country without documents: basically an increase from 10 to 30 million new workers over a 10-year period available to compete for any job," the letter states.
The House Republican retreat in Cambridge, Md. begins today, and whether or not the caucus decides to tackle immigration reform will be a topic of discussion. House GOP Leadership is expected to unveil a set of immigration principles that will include a legalization for illegal aliens.
You can view Sen. Sessions full memo here.