amnesty

 RICHMOND, Va. — GOP Rep. Steve King blasted his party's House leaders Monday for allowing an immigration vote that would "benefit the elitists, political power brokers, employers of illegals.”

 Sen. Jeff Sessions tells Newsmax that the immigration reform bill passed by the Senate would pull down wages and increase unemployment — and he predicts it "cannot be passed."

The Alabama Republican also warns that Republicans should not buckle to "big donors" who want to increase immigration to boost the supply of cheap labor.

Sen. Sessions was first elected in 1996 and is the ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee. He also serves on the Judiciary and Armed Services Committees.

In an exclusive interview with Newsmax TV, Sessions has this advice for GOP legislators on immigration reform: "My message is if you do the right thing not only will it be the right thing for America but it will also be good politics, because what's happening today is – and it's been going on since at least 1999 – wages of working Americans have been eroding every year.
 

 Editor’s note: David Stoll teaches at Middlebury College.  He is the author of “El Norte or Bust!  How Migration Fever and Microcredit Produced a Financial Crash in a Latin American Town” (https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781442220683).

After many ups and downs, comprehensive immigration reform is the grand bargain showing that Democrats and Republicans can still compromise to solve a big national issue.  In exchange for tighter border controls, an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants will receive a path to citizenship.  The biggest players in the U.S. immigration debate will get more legal immigrants, more family reunification, more guestworkers and more sophisticated enforcement.

So will the rest of us – including the 22 million Americans who, according to the Labor Department’s U6 category, are unemployed, underemployed or too discouraged to even look for work. What are the implications for them?  If you believe American capitalism is a rising tide that lifts all boats, there’s nothing to worry about in the long run.  Immigrants are good for business and good for economic growth.

If you look at the U.S. labor force, there is plenty to worry about. The sociologist William Julius Wilson calls it “the disappearance of work,” visible first in inner-cities and now elsewhere. Declining youth employment, declining participation in the workforce, more off-the-books employment, stagnant or declining wages for most Americans – all have multiple causes, but the causes include the preference of American employers for foreign workers.