Will foreign temporary workers depress wages?

Adjust number of workers to demand
A leading Republican supporter of the bill, Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona, tried to rebut the Dorgan-Sanders arguments.

“With an adjustable temporary worker visa, you adjust it to the needs at the moment — to the demand for labor. As your construction boom goes up and you need more labor, you have more visas,” Kyl told reporters. “As you go down and don’t need as many homes to be constructed, you don’t issue as many visas. So you have the market being able to work and the wages rising and falling based on market conditions, rather than an artificial glut of labor.”

But what if the foreign workers decide to stay in the United States at the end of their two-year legal stint and melt into the U.S. population?

Kyl answered that question with a question of his own: “Could somebody survive in this country by always being able to find day labor or be employed by somebody out in the middle of Montana with the government never auditing the employer? That’s theoretically possible, but very difficult.”

Kyl contends that the federal government’s new process of checking on employers and their workers’ legal status will be thorough enough to catch illegal workers and punish those who hire them.

Dorgan’s bid to kill the guest worker program lost on a vote of 31-64, with 18 of his fellow Democrats voting against him.

Only two Republicans, Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana and Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, voted with Dorgan.

With safe seats in the Senate, Dorgan and Sanders can afford to raise the awkward guest worker issue. Sanders, just elected last November with 65 percent of the vote, will probably hold his seat until he chooses to retire. Dorgan, in his third term as a senator, has never been defeated since he won a seat in the House in 1980.

On Thursday, by a vote of 74 to 24, the Senate approved an amendment offered by Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D- N.M., to cut the annual guest worker number to 200,000.

Effect of legalizing the illegal workers
If guest workers depress wages of Americans, as Sanders and Dorgan contend, does the same logic also apply to the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants now in the United States who’ll become legalized members of the labor force if the bill becomes law?

In an interview after Tuesday night’s vote, Sanders took an equivocal position on the potential wage-lowering effect of legalizing the 12 million.

“They are part of the labor force now, that’s why they’re here. The question is whether we want to make a difficult situation even worse.”

He added, “I am concerned in general that wages in the United are going down for millions of workers… illegal immigration has a lot to do with it, the decline of unions has a lot to do with it and a number of other factors.”

He would not say whether he’d vote for the immigration bill, once the Senate finishes amending it.

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