Don’t take it from me.
Listen to the liberal San Francisco Chronicle: Kennedy is “among the craftiest lawmakers in the Senate. His aides insisted the family-based system will remain intact. For the next eight years, they said, the proposal would award 75 percent of new green cards to family members to clear the existing backlogs.”
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So one of the key conservative victories in the grand immigration bargain is in reality a defeat. The advertised shift from family unification (currently 60 percent of legal immigration) to a merit-based point system actually disguises a 15-percent
increase in family-based immigration. That gives disgruntled business lobbyists and immigration advocates eight long years to replace, or gut, a merit-based point system scheduled to kick in three presidencies from now. Clearly, the crafty Senator Kennedy is playing conservatives for a bunch of saps.
If Kennedy’s own aides haven’t convinced you, let’s hear from some conservatives. What about Heritage Foundation analyst Robert Rector, the policy-wonk who first brought merit-based immigration to the attention of Congress? Is Rector happy with the compromise supposedly built around his own idea? “I think anybody who takes that bargain is a fool,”
says Rector. Given the eight year delay, “the change [to a merit based system] would never occur.”
Or how about Sen. Jeff Sessions, the Alabama Republican who seized upon Rector’s merit-system idea in 2006 and turned it into a personal crusade? Sessions
dismisses the eight-year delay on the promised merit system as bogus “bait for conservatives.” “We all bit it, and it’s not there.”
But wait, aren’t powerful business lobbyists going to line up behind the shift from family unification to a merit-based point system? Surely high-tech businesses are thrilled at the prospect of a growing pool of educated and highly skilled English-speaking immigrants. Nope.
Here’s Robert Hoffman, co-chair of Compete America, a coalition of high-tech companies: “...we have concluded that [the point system] is the wrong approach. Under the current system, you need an employer to sponsor you for a green card. Under the point system, you would not need an employer as a sponsor. An individual would get points for special skills, but those skills may not match the demand.”
Don’t even ask about low-skill employers. A merit-based point system may bring in the sort of immigrant most likely to assimilate, and least likely to impose a burden on the welfare system, but it would simultaneously reduce the number of workers likely to be employed in hotels, restaurants, nursing homes, hospitals, and the construction industry. In short, both high-tech and low-skill employers are determined to kill a merit-based point system (not even scheduled to kick in for eight more years).
In fact a coalition of business and immigrant groups have
already killed off a similar reform. Back in 1995, a federal commission headed by liberal Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Jordan recommended paring back family-based immigration and moving toward a skill-based system. But when Jordan died a year later, business and immigrant groups united to block any changes.
So business and immigrant groups are dead-set against the shift from family unification to a point system. But don’t Democrats realize that it’s in their interest to throw conservatives a bone in exchange for support of amnesty, and a citizenship path, for the 12 million immigrants already here illegally? Oh yeah.
Is that why Speaker Pelosi has already said, “I have serious objection to the point system that is in the bill now, but perhaps that can be improved.” (I’ll bet.) Then there’s Hillary Clinton. Is the woman-who-would-be-president eager to cement the grand immigration bargain? Is Hillary bent on signaling Republicans that, if elected, she would uphold the bill’s central compromise? Yeah, right. Actually, Clinton is just now offering an amendment specifically designed to restore family-based immigration. Should Hillary become president, what do you suppose is going to happen to the point system?
So the point system won’t kick in for eight years. So family reunification will actually accelerate during that time. So key conservative proponents of the point system think the “compromise” bill is bogus. So both high- and low- tech business lobbyists, immigrant advocacy groups, the Speaker of the House, and the prospective Democratic presidential nominee are all out in front trying to kill the point system and restore extended-family reunification. Can’t we at least take some heart from the fact that all of those folks are squawking? Doesn’t the chorus of complaints actually prove that Republican negotiators got something important in exchange for amnesty?
