Employers Balk at Proposed Immigration Reform

Employers are balking at the senate proposal for immigration reform according to articles in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. A Washington Post article asks the key question: how are the provisions of this bill going to be implemented?

Employer concerns apprear to be centered around the following issues:
1. Lack of flexibility to meet their labor needs. Most employers forsee severe labor shortages (which are already appearing in several industries), particularly as aging baby boomers enter retirement.
2. The requirement to check a database to verify employment eligibility.
3. The perception that hiring decisions are being taken out of the hands of employers.
4. The current inability of the goverment to set realistic immigration quotas that meet employer demands for labor (particularly in high tech industries, who have been screaming about this for years).
5. The responsibility for applying for a green card or visa is transferred from the employer to the worker. The application then goes into a system where it competes with every other worker for a spot. This could result in a situation where there are too many history teachers and not enough engineers.
6. The perception is that the chances of winning the lottery are greater than getting in under the proposed system.

It appears as though this bill is just too complicated and is headed nowhere. Expect this issue to continue to be spoken about, but not addressed until 2009 (at which time the issue of labor shortages may be more apparent to the general public and politicians.)

 

Immigration Facts

From the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal…. 

• Voters in the Dallas suburb of Farmers Branch, Texas, overwhelmingly approved an ordinance last weekend banning landlords from renting to most illegal immigrants. The law, the first such crackdown passed by voters, takes effect Tuesday but faces legal challenges.
 
• About 58% of all green-card recipients are married.
 
• In 1986, about 2.7 million illegal immigrants were given legal status under the Immigration Reform and Control Act, and 37% eventually chose citizenship.
 
• The Permanent Resident Card is referred to as a “green card” but isn’t actually green. Its predecessor, the Alien Registration Receipt Card, was printed on green paper from 1951 until 1964.
 
• The current green-card backlog includes applicants who face a 22-year wait time.
 
• India had the greatest number of visas approved for temporary workers and their dependents in 2005, followed by Mexico, Great Britain, Japan and Canada.
 
• The U.S. made 716 criminal worksite enforcement arrests and charges in 2006, an increase from 25 in 2002.
 
• Nearly two-thirds of all new green cards last year were issued to people living in six states: California, New York, Florida, Texas, New Jersey and Illinois.

 

Backlog of homes forces lenders to discount

An interesting tid-bit appears in today’s Wall Street Journal….”Mortgage Woes Force Banks To Take Hits to Sell Homes” tells the story of an auction of nearly 100 foreclosed homes in San Diego over this past weekend. “Ramsey Su, a San Diego investor and former real estate broker specializing in foreclosed properties, said prices were surprisingly low on some homes and the auction showed that ‘demand is not that strong.’”

 A similar sale is planned in Los Angeles on May 19 and it will be interesting to see if soft demand exists in the Los Angeles area as well.

 

Solve the immigration problem by making it easter to immigrate

Tamar Jacoby, a Senior Fellow at the Manahattan institute, has written an excellent piece published in the May 10th edition of the Los Angeles Times. “Temporary is Temporary Won’t Work for All Immigrants” explains clearly and logically why proposals for immigration reform that include only temporary provisions won’t work for either employers or immigrants (and ultimately us.) Jacoby has written one of the fiew pieces I’ve seen that clearly spells out the real issue….our economic demands have created the need for nearly 1.5 million immigrants annually, yet we operate in a fantasy land where we only issue approximately 1 million visas annually. And we wonder why we have an illegal immigration ‘problem’…

 

Welcome to Brentnal

Brentnal is intended to be a forum of sorts…a place where discussions about economic, political, and social issues can be explored and discussed.

The kernel of an idea for Brentnal came during participation in another on-line forum…and the realization in the format of that particular forum, there was no way for me to refer back to earlier posts. An entire body of writings, links, work, postings and discussions was lost after a week when the thread disappeared from the site. Yet, the same issues appear over and over again. Our conversations wouldn’t move forward because as new posters joined we would get pulled back into the same old issues. Our conversations never left the realm of our little site. I’m hoping we can join the network of conversations now taking place in cyberspace.

Why Brentnal?

Brentnal is the name of the street I lived on during my childhood….all of us under 18 on that block would gather in the middle of the street to play. It was a safe place where we could just be ourselves for the most part undisturbed by the ‘real world.’

 

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