Yesterday, senators voted to proceed with debating the immigration reform bill on the floor of the Senate. The Gang of Eight’s bill was amended numerous times in the Judiciary Committee but now it will face input and criticism from the rest of the Senate. There are four big areas of the legislation to watch for amendments and criticisms:
Welfare
Numerous amendments will be introduced to further block non‐citizen access to the welfare state. Cato colleagues and I have done a lot of work on this issue, including a forthcoming policy analysis, that has provided some of the intellectual ammunition demonstrating the viability of building a wall around the welfare state while increasing lawful immigration.
Border Security
Senators like John Cornyn (R‑TX) are deeply worried that the current bill does not provide enough border security. The current bill adds billions of dollars to an enforcement system that has grown along with the rest of the government over the last few decades. The best way to limit unlawful immigration is to increase legal immigration opportunities, such as temporary guest worker visas and other broader measures. Senator Cornyn’s border security amendment will be crucial for the bill’s political success but will not much affect the policy outcome of the legislation—except to make it more expensive.
E‑Verify
With scandals about government invasions of privacy, one would think a national electronic employment eligibility system like E‑Verify would raise opposition. Designed to weed unlawful immigrants out of the work force, the system is fraught with problems and raises numerous privacy concerns that my colleague Jim Harper has explored here. Given how internal enforcement has almost zero deterrent effect on unlawful immigration, it’s a mystery why so many so‐called limited government conservatives support it in the first place.
Legal Immigration
The guest worker provisions of the bill are too regulated, too restricted, and too limited for workers of every skill category. Applied retroactively, the proposed guest worker visa system would not be big enough to channel most unlawful workers who came in previous years into the legal market. Regardless, the immigration reform bill is a step in the right direction for guest workers—albeit a small one.
There are other important policy and political issues going forward, from controversy over the net fiscal cost of immigration reform to the tremendous economic benefits of increasing the number of productive people, but these are the big ones to follow for libertarians and fellow travelers.
