As background, the immigration legislation passed by Congress in 1986 which created the original amnesty program essentially legalized approximately 8 million people. These individuals were primarily unskilled, semi-skilled and agricultural workers. More importantly, the reason these individuals were illegally in the United States was simply because there were no legal immigration categories for that type of employment. In other words, if a person had a bachelor’s degree or worked in some type of professional or technical capacity, our immigration laws provide both temporary and permanent visas to work in the U.S. But if you work in a trade such as an electrician, a plumber, construction or other type of skilled or semi-skilled work, the United States does not provide any immigration options.
In 1986 Congress provided a temporary solution by giving amnesty and legal status to millions of these workers but it also did not provide any visa categories for employers to use in the future. Therefore, as many predicted at the time, the problem simply happened again and we now see several million semi-skilled and unskilled workers who have no legal status simply because there is no legal category for that type of work.
Interestingly, this problem goes back all the way to the original Immigration Act of 1952 which currently governs our immigration policies and opportunities. In the 1950’s and early 1960’s Congress even created the Bracero Program which created the original “green card”. The Bracero Program was intended as a temporary means for workers to come from northern Mexico to assist with agriculture, construction and other work which had a severe shortage following World War II and the Korean War. Unfortunately, the economies of northern Mexico never developed adequately simply because there was always adequate work in the southwest U.S. so those workers simply took advantage of the Bracero Program and northern Mexico never developed its own industries.
Extrapolated far beyond the Bracero Program, we find that many parts of the world have underdeveloped economies and, despite the uninformed criticism of anti-immigration groups, the U.S. continues to generate hundreds of thousands of jobs for semi-skilled and unskilled workers which American workers either refuse to take or cannot do. In short, there are hundreds of thousands of jobs in the U.S. which are continually open due to a lack of U.S. labor and which have been traditionally filled by workers from other countries either legally or illegally.
Since we have not had any legal categories for this type of work since at least the 1960s, American employers have taken advantage of the only option which exists which is to employ these workers without status. If President Obama creates some type of executive order amnesty (which he has every constitutional right to do), this will only temporarily impact the problem. As those individuals gain legal status, permanent residence and ultimately citizenship, they will be able to become more educated, more skilled and move on to other jobs. The semi-skilled and unskilled jobs will then become vacant again and the entire process will repeat itself.
In 2007 Senator John McCain of Arizona proposed a visa category for just this type of work which would allow employers to bring in unskilled and semi-skilled workers for these unfilled positions. This proposal was also in the Immigration Reform Bill passed by the Senate in 2013. Unless Congress adopts an approach such as this, and amnesty will do nothing but provide a temporary solution to a long-standing problem, and in fact, probably make it much worse. It is unfortunate Congress refuses to address these extremely serious issues for our country which in turn apparently will force President Obama to take action on his own and that action will only provide a band aid for a much more serious disease.