Bipartisan 1997 Congressional Jordan Commission Report on Immigration Predicted Mass Importations of Low Waged & Low Skilled Foreign Workers Would Decimate Jobs & Wages: By Marc Chamot
“Report specifically said that the United States doesn’t benefit from foreign low skilled workers and undocumented aliens, only they do.”
President Barack Obama recently tried to get his new comprehensive immigration reform policies back on track, like amnesty for illegal aliens. But unfortunately, he was met dead on by a roadblock, and he was stopped dead on his tracks. He just couldn’t muster the votes to accomplish his mission, the votes weren’t there, and not even Democrats like the “blue dogs Democrats” were there for him on this one.
A 1997 congressional bipartisan commission report on immigration had warned of dire and dangerous consequences in keeping uncontrolled flow of both, legal and illegal low skilled immigrants into the United States, and that it would slowly deteriorate, obliterate jobs and lower wages for regular Americans.
It specifically recommended blocking our borders, and reducing immigration and reforming our entry visas systems for jobs.
These are the sad realities that President Barack Obama and this congress have to face with.
“The chief beneficiaries of immigration, on the other hand, are the immigrants themselves whose wages are still higher in the United States than they are in their homelands and the U.S. employers who are able to hire them at depressed wage levels.
The greatest losers are the native-born workers who are low skilled and the American taxpayers since the study also found that the fiscal costs of immigration (i.e., the public costs of health care, welfare, incarceration, and education) far exceed the amount of taxes paid by the foreign-born population, leaving the native-born population to pick up the considerable deficit.”
This is where we are at today, with over 15 million Americans unemployed and wages have dropped across the board for most of the currently employed.
Back around 1997, this comprehensive bipartisan commission report by experts on immigration, which was initiated by the U.S. congress and former president Herbert Walker Bush in 1990, went totally ignored by the previous two administrations and congress.
It was then in 1995, when former President Bill Clinton and the Republicans in control of congress; they all agreed and signed on to NAFTA. NAFTA was the death knell for American middle class workers who primarily made their living off industrial jobs.
NAFTA was the legalizing of American industries to take their factories and industries abroad for cheaper labor, and at the same time they would get tax free tariffs, to help them bring back their products into the United Sates and to the consumers at no cost to their business.
But two years later, and after NAFTA, this new explosive government initiated commission report comes out. And they, the powers to be, didn’t like it one bit. It wasn’t talking their kind of language, like money for their corporate buddies.
So Americans got a double whammy! A two punch knockout from our elected politicians!
So now, it looks like that President Barack Obama and congress may be forced to take a harder look, and revisit this report, and even act on it, if they want to get Americans back to work.
Here are tidbits of the report which has been making news lately.
The Report of the Commission on
Immigration Reform (i.e. the Jordan
Commission): A Beacon for Real
Immigration Reform:
The immigration policy of the United States is steeped in legal complexities and is considered to be so politically combustible that most politicians are loathing addressing the issue unless circumstances absolutely require them to act.
In those instances when extant policies have become so incongruent with prevailing national interests that public pressure can no longer be ignored, the reform process has usually been preceded by the formation by Congress of a national commission or congressional panel to study the needs and to frame the appropriate policy responses before the professional politicians will touch the subject. Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to find another policy issue where the use of special commissions or committees has been so frequently used to identify policy shortcomings and to offer policy changes [Briggs, pp.81-2; 110-13; 178-9; and 253-7].
Social security and welfare policies have sometimes relied on commissions to serve the same buffer role because they are also complex and controversial for politicians to address directly. But commissions were used to review immigration policy long before these other two public policies ever existed.
Thus, when Congress and President George Herbert Walker Bush created the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform as a provision in the Immigration Act of 1990, the move was not seen as an extraordinary event. Rather, it was viewed as but a normal part of the evolutionary process by which immigration policy is periodically reviewed and developed.
But when the Commission issued its final report on September 30, 1997, its findings and recommendations were anything but routine [Commission (1997)]. Indeed, the work of this
Commission was exceptional with respect to the bipartisan nature of its efforts; the virtual unanimity of the panel over what reforms were needed; the factual support it garnered to justify its findings; and the cogency and relevancy of its recommendations for the accomplishment of real immigration reform. It is surprising, therefore, that with all of these positive characteristics when it came to the next step -- the implementation phase of the reform process -- that Congress and President Bill Clinton fumbled the ball.
They ignored the signals given by the Commission about the vital importance of the subject matter and purposely chose not to act on the Commission’s major recommendations. Maintenance of the status quo, which is what the special interests wanted, was allowed to prevail over serving the national interest as manifested by enacting the changes proffered by the Commission. Immigration reform has languished in the years since that time. All of the problems identified by the Commission were left unaddressed and have been allowed to fester. But the blueprint for real reform is all there − just waiting for true political leadership or a coalition of dedicated citizens to pick it up and follow the instructions.
The major findings of the NRC panel were that the educational attainment levels of post-1965 immigrants had steadily declined over the ensuing years. Consequently, foreign-born workers, on average, earn less than native-born workers and the gap between them was widening. The wages of immigrant workers from Latin America -- who account for over half of the entire foreign-born population of the United States -- were the lowest wages of all immigrant groups. The study, however, found no evidence discriminatory wages being paid to immigrants. Rather, immigrant workers were paid less because they were considerably less skilled than were native-born workers.
The decline in both the skills and wages of the foreign-born population were attributed to the fact that most immigrants are coming from the poorer nations of the world where on average educational attainment levels, wages, and skill levels are far below those of the United States. Hence, as a consequence, the post-1965 immigrants have caused the low skilled segment of the nation’s labor supply to swell. That is to say, immigrant workers on average are lowering the wages of all workers, with wages of low skilled workers -- citizen and non-citizen alike -- being lowered the most.
The chief beneficiaries of immigration, on the other hand, are the immigrants themselves whose wages are still higher in the United States than they are in their homelands and the U.S. employers who are able to hire them at depressed wage levels. The greatest losers are the native-born workers who are low skilled and the American taxpayers since the study also found that the fiscal costs of immigration (i.e., the public costs of health care, welfare, incarceration, and education) far exceed the amount of taxes paid by the foreign-born population, leaving the native-born population to pick up the considerable deficit.
The NRC study is without question the most comprehensive and the best documented study ever conducted of the impact of immigration on the U.S. economy and labor force. Although the Jordan Commission relied on the use of multiple sources of information, the detailed findings of the NRC study heavily influenced its conclusions and recommendations.
The Commission concluded that the present legal admission system be “shifted away from the extended family and toward the nuclear family and away from the unskilled and toward the higher-skilled immigrant” [Commission (1997), p. XVII]. To accomplish these changes, the Commission recommended the elimination of the existing family based admission categories for adult unmarried sons and daughters of U.S. citizens; for adult sons and daughters of U.S. citizens; for adult, unmarried sons and daughters of legal permanent aliens; and for adult brothers and sisters of U.S. citizens.
As for the employment-based admissions, the Commission recommended “the elimination of the admission category of unskilled workers” because the country already has a vast surplus of unskilled workers. In the same vein, the Commission also recommended the elimination of the diversity admission category (which only requires that the 50,000 persons who are selected each year by a lottery application process be chosen from a list of foreign countries with a low level of immigration to the United States in the preceding 5 years and that the applicant have at least a high school diploma).
As a consequence of all of these proposed changes, the Commission recommended that a “modest reduction in the level of immigration” be made to “about 550,000 per year” (or by about 30 percent below the then-existing ceiling in 1997 which remains the current ceiling in 2009) [Commission (1997, p. XIX].
With respect to illegal immigration, the Commission acknowledged that “illegal immigration continues to be a problem.” It recommended the enactment of a “comprehensive strategy” based on enhanced border management to prevent illegal entries; improved worksite enforcement of the ban on employment of illegal immigrants; and speedy removal of those illegal immigrants apprehended within the country [Commission (1997), p.103].
Social security and welfare policies have sometimes relied on commissions to serve the same buffer role because they are also complex and controversial for politicians to address directly. But commissions were used to review immigration policy long before these other two public policies ever existed.
Thus, when Congress and President George Herbert Walker Bush created the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform as a provision in the Immigration Act of 1990, the move was not seen as an extraordinary event. Rather, it was viewed as but a normal part of the evolutionary process by which immigration policy is periodically reviewed and developed.
But when the Commission issued its final report on September 30, 1997, its findings and recommendations were anything but routine [Commission (1997)]. Indeed, the work of this
Commission was exceptional with respect to the bipartisan nature of its efforts; the virtual unanimity of the panel over what reforms were needed; the factual support it garnered to justify its findings; and the cogency and relevancy of its recommendations for the accomplishment of real immigration reform. It is surprising, therefore, that with all of these positive characteristics when it came to the next step -- the implementation phase of the reform process -- that Congress and President Bill Clinton fumbled the ball.
They ignored the signals given by the Commission about the vital importance of the subject matter and purposely chose not to act on the Commission’s major recommendations. Maintenance of the status quo, which is what the special interests wanted, was allowed to prevail over serving the national interest as manifested by enacting the changes proffered by the Commission. Immigration reform has languished in the years since that time. All of the problems identified by the Commission were left unaddressed and have been allowed to fester. But the blueprint for real reform is all there − just waiting for true political leadership or a coalition of dedicated citizens to pick it up and follow the instructions.
The major findings of the NRC panel were that the educational attainment levels of post-1965 immigrants had steadily declined over the ensuing years. Consequently, foreign-born workers, on average, earn less than native-born workers and the gap between them was widening. The wages of immigrant workers from Latin America -- who account for over half of the entire foreign-born population of the United States -- were the lowest wages of all immigrant groups. The study, however, found no evidence discriminatory wages being paid to immigrants. Rather, immigrant workers were paid less because they were considerably less skilled than were native-born workers.
The decline in both the skills and wages of the foreign-born population were attributed to the fact that most immigrants are coming from the poorer nations of the world where on average educational attainment levels, wages, and skill levels are far below those of the United States. Hence, as a consequence, the post-1965 immigrants have caused the low skilled segment of the nation’s labor supply to swell. That is to say, immigrant workers on average are lowering the wages of all workers, with wages of low skilled workers -- citizen and non-citizen alike -- being lowered the most.
The chief beneficiaries of immigration, on the other hand, are the immigrants themselves whose wages are still higher in the United States than they are in their homelands and the U.S. employers who are able to hire them at depressed wage levels. The greatest losers are the native-born workers who are low skilled and the American taxpayers since the study also found that the fiscal costs of immigration (i.e., the public costs of health care, welfare, incarceration, and education) far exceed the amount of taxes paid by the foreign-born population, leaving the native-born population to pick up the considerable deficit.
The NRC study is without question the most comprehensive and the best documented study ever conducted of the impact of immigration on the U.S. economy and labor force. Although the Jordan Commission relied on the use of multiple sources of information, the detailed findings of the NRC study heavily influenced its conclusions and recommendations.
The Commission concluded that the present legal admission system be “shifted away from the extended family and toward the nuclear family and away from the unskilled and toward the higher-skilled immigrant” [Commission (1997), p. XVII]. To accomplish these changes, the Commission recommended the elimination of the existing family based admission categories for adult unmarried sons and daughters of U.S. citizens; for adult sons and daughters of U.S. citizens; for adult, unmarried sons and daughters of legal permanent aliens; and for adult brothers and sisters of U.S. citizens.
As for the employment-based admissions, the Commission recommended “the elimination of the admission category of unskilled workers” because the country already has a vast surplus of unskilled workers. In the same vein, the Commission also recommended the elimination of the diversity admission category (which only requires that the 50,000 persons who are selected each year by a lottery application process be chosen from a list of foreign countries with a low level of immigration to the United States in the preceding 5 years and that the applicant have at least a high school diploma).
As a consequence of all of these proposed changes, the Commission recommended that a “modest reduction in the level of immigration” be made to “about 550,000 per year” (or by about 30 percent below the then-existing ceiling in 1997 which remains the current ceiling in 2009) [Commission (1997, p. XIX].
With respect to illegal immigration, the Commission acknowledged that “illegal immigration continues to be a problem.” It recommended the enactment of a “comprehensive strategy” based on enhanced border management to prevent illegal entries; improved worksite enforcement of the ban on employment of illegal immigrants; and speedy removal of those illegal immigrants apprehended within the country [Commission (1997), p.103].
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