Big Business’ New Plan Would Create Fifty New Immigration Policies
May 19, 2023
Michael Capuano
Researcher/Staff Writer
The open-borders lobby is no stranger to bad-faith “reform” proposals, abusing the language of fairness as they try to scrap all migration controls entirely. Unfortunately for American citizens, bad ideas frequently come from unusual suspects. Even while acknowledging our Southwestern border crisis, two Republican governors are now among those advocating for a potentially disastrous plan that would wreak havoc on our legal immigration policies.
Governors Eric Holcomb of Indiana and Spencer Cox of Utah endorsed state-sponsored visas in The Washington Post in February, strengthening more recent pushes for this flawed and destructive policy. Their proposal would allow states to sponsor visas (which only the federal government can grant) specifically for immigrants to fill “entry-level, low-skill roles” in that state. The governors inexplicably present this plan as a solution to both our border crisis and supposed local labor shortages, and business groups hungry for cheap labor to undercut Americans have joined their cause in Newsweek.
The basic premise of this proposal is fatally flawed because states do not exist in isolation and travel between them is unrestricted. Allowing “sanctuary” states like California to unilaterally admit immigrants into the U.S. undermines the most basic structure of federalism by usurping the federal responsibility to control and regulate immigration. No effective controls exist that would keep those admitted from moving wherever they want in the country, and the proposal would not extend to states the ability to refuse these immigrants. There are no solutions to state-level “shortages” addressed here because immigration is by its nature not something that can be restricted to one place. State-sponsored admission of low-skill foreign workers could become a backdoor for a few states to flood the rest with un-asked-for competition and crowd out American citizens.
https://www.fairus.org/blog/2023/05/19/big-business-new-plan-would-create-fifty-new-immigration-policies
