Want to know a secret about Obama’s new program to allow illegal young people to stay and work in the US legally? It isn’t really going to serve the population the administration it touting.
When the “deferred action” policy was announced by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, it was presented as a means to get 800,000 young illegal immigrants a better education and then a job. It was supposed to be temporary relief for those who wanted the stalled Dream Act to pass Congress. And the basic premise of that decade-old idea is to provide illegal immigrants who came to the US “through no fault of their own” the opportunity to go to school to gain legal status. Deferred action was only supposed to do through a rules change and policy shift, what wasn’t getting done legislatively.
Except that the illegals who will really benefit are farm workers, dishwashers, bricklayers and painters. According to an analysis by the Migration Policy Institute, “More than half of the 1 million young illegal immigrants eligible for the program are in the labor force, mostly working in low-wage industries.”
Which illustrates in real world terms why what’s most important when we talk about immigration reform is making changes to the legal visa system and basing more visas on the nation’s labor needs than other considerations. What is needed are all types of work visas from high-skilled to low and no-skilled labor.
The Republican Party is responding to this reality by having just added support for a guest-worker program to its platform. The GOP is already pushing for green cards for foreign-born PhDs and liberalizing other high-skilled labor visas.
Democrats, for their part, don’t like to talk about temporary work visas because when it comes to low-skilled labor, the union rules. Just listen to the head of the United Farmworkers Foundation on the subject of giving illegals working at low-skilled jobs a work visa. It’s all about joining the union.
“Our hope is that once they have papers, once you take away the fear of deportation, that will encourage workers to stand up for themselves and for others in their own workplaces, to form a union or complain to their boss when there is a problem,” UFW Foundation’s Richard Gorman says.
But the current policy of deferred action isn’t a permanent work visa, remember. It is a two-year trial balloon that may be reversed or changed by a different administration.
The answer still lies in changing the law.