Home > Our Blog > Council on Foreign Relations 2-The “Grand Bargain”

Blog Post

Council on Foreign Relations 2-The “Grand Bargain”

Posted July 26, 2009 by Patrick Young, Esq.

This is the second installment in a five-part series on the recent immigration policy report from the Council on Foreign Relations. Part 1 of the series gives an overview of the report.
The Council on Foreign Relations report recommends that Congress move as quickly as possible to pass comprehensive immigration reform. It anticipates that Republicans and Democrats can strike a “Grand Bargain” that protects major domestic interests while advancing immigration law into the 21st Century. The Grand Bargain has three major elements:
1. Improvements to the legal immigration system so that it functions more efficiently to attract and retain talented and ambitious immigrants.
2. A robust enforcement regime that secures America’s borders and strongly discourages employers from hiring illegal workers.
3. A program of legalization that will allow many of those already living in the United States illegally to earn the right to remain.
The report also calls for:
new measures to bring in the best foreign students by removing many of the quotas
and other roadblocks currently in place. It also recommends reconsideration of some of the post-9/11 border measures that have discouraged travel to the United States. Moreover, the report urges opening avenues for lower-skilled workers to come to the United States both temporarily and permanently, but with new mechanisms for adjusting the numbers based on the needs of the American economy. Finally, it calls for continued improvements in enforcement, including the creation of virtual borders to monitor entry, an electronic verification system for the workplace, and much tougher sanctions against employers who deliberately hire illegal immigrants.
The task force that prepared the report says that immigration is vital to a successful American foreign policy. There are six issues that impact on the relationship between our immigration policy and foreign relations. These are: “the economy, national security, America’s image in the world, its core values, development policy, and the vital relationship with Mexico”.
The Economy
Its effect on the United States economy is perhaps the most discussed aspect of immigration policy. The task force points out that immigration has “helped make the U.S. economy…into the world’s strongest and most dynamic; maintaining that economic advantage is the foundation of America’s influence and power in the world.” The failure to get immigration policy right will lead to a decline in America’s economy and, thus, in its influence in the world.
The report points out that more than half of the growth in the U.S. labor force has come through immigration. Unlike Japan and some European countries, the U.S. does not face a declining labor force due to aging workers. This is due primarily to robust immigration to the U.S.
The report deals head on with the claim that immigrants are taking jobs Americans want:
The United States, along with other advanced countries, is producing many jobs in the service, retail, and leisure sectors that are not particularly attractive for native-born workers, but are a first step on the economic ladder for an unskilled immigrant. Immigrants are particularly overrepresented in sectors such as agriculture, construction, janitorial and maintenance work, and food preparation. The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that the majority of the fastest-growing jobs over the next decade will be ones that demand little or no higher education, including health, leisure, and hospitality services (though other low-skilled occupations such as stock clerks and cashiers will decline). Of the twenty occupations that will see the largest increase in the number of new jobs, twelve require only on-the-job training. At the same time, the potential domestic pool of such workers has shrunk as a steadily higher percentage of native-born individuals have gone on to higher education.
There has been much debate over whether more Americans would be willing to do such jobs if they were more highly paid. The best answer is “perhaps,” but there are many reasons why encouraging more Americans to do unskilled work would be difficult, would harm the economy, and would not be in the country’s interests. Among the native born, fewer than 10 percent of the population fail to complete high school or its equivalent, and just over 60 percent are educated beyond the high school level. Despite the growing number of low-skilled immigrants living in the United States, unskilled workers have continued to decline as a percentage of the overall labor force. Between 2000 and 2005, for example, the number of American-born working-age adults without a high school education fell by about one million. Efforts to further restrict immigration by low-skilled workers and to lure more educated people into unskilled labor by raising wages for those jobs might be successful, but only at the cost of lowering the overall size and productivity of the economy by employing people at jobs below their skill levels. The net costs to the U.S. economy as a whole would be significant. There is a long history in the United States in which the influx of new immigrants has induced native-born residents to further their education, enhance their skills, and move up the occupational ladder; reversing this pattern would send the U.S. economy backward, not forward.