Washington, D.C. (April 28, 2021) - The U.S. House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration and Citizenship examined the lawful immigration system, which awards more than one million new green cards and 700,000 temporary foreign workers annually. Three witnesses focused on the alleged barriers to larger numbers of immigrants entering the U.S. In contrast, Robert Law of the Center for Immigration Studies emphasized the impact of mass immigration on American workers.
Law, the Center's Director of Regulatory Affairs and Policy and former chief of the Office of Policy and Strategy at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, testified that the U.S. must choose either to allow unlimited immigration or set annual numerical limits. He said, “Unlimited immigration is not feasible, and numerical limits or caps are not barriers but are instead the rules under which our legal immigration system operates.”
Law noted that “Because the American people are the true stakeholders in U.S. immigration policy, the system should not operate in a way that harms American workers.”
The subcommittee's ranking Republican, Rep. Tom McClintock, in his opening statement praised Law’s written testimony and spoke specifically about the Optional Practical Training program (OPT) – a foreign worker program for former foreign students. "Unlike their American classmates, [aliens working on student visas] are exempt from payroll taxes, making them much cheaper than American graduates to hire. Your family's recent college graduate can't find work. There's a simple reason."
Law’s testimony described the income inequality caused by mass low-skilled immigration, pointing out the wealth transfer from American blue collar workers to the business elite and the immigrants themselves. He underscored the stagnation or decline of the real wages of non-college Americans due in part to government policies that flood the labor market with cheap labor.
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