Month: August 2008

This editorial from the Washington Post sounds sane and reasonable regarding a realistic approach to illegal immigration. In addition to understanding immigration within our own borders, we need a comprehensive approach to improve the economic opportunities for our southern neighbors within their own country. NAFTA is creating very negative consequences in some regions to our south and those adverse effects must be addressed.

CONGRESS’S FAILURE to enact a workable immigration system last year prompted the Bush administration to redouble its previously lethargic efforts at enforcing existing immigration laws. The get-tough campaign — more workplace raids and arrests along the Mexican border, plus a smattering of criminal cases against employers — has two goals. One is to show a doubting public that the feds mean business. The other is to make things so miserable for businesses that corporate lobbyists join in the fight for meaningful immigration reform.

But the basic legal and economic dynamics that created the nation’s dysfunctional immigration system remain largely unchanged. Despite the economic dip, there is still demand for unskilled labor that native-born Americans cannot supply. That demand will perk up when the economy does. The number of visas available for unskilled workers — 66,000 per year — is laughably inadequate. Many thousands of workers continue to enter the country illegally or enter legally and then overstay their visas. A practical approach would acknowledge both the demand for unskilled labor and the fact that 5 percent of the American workforce consists of undocumented workers. It would raise the quota of temporary employment visas, establish a better system for employers to verify the legal status of job applicants and offer undocumented workers a way to register themselves and eventually earn citizenship. Critics will howl about an amnesty, but realists will see it is the way to address the reality of immigration and labor in a globalized marketplace.

Unity in the Community in collaboration with George Mason University, Prince William Campus
University Life presents – Crossing the Line: An Immigration Film Series at the Verizon Auditorium at George Mason University’s Prince William Campus

Saturday, August 16 at 7:30 pm – a double feature
“Alienated: Undocumented Immigrant Youth”
This film is about undocumented immigrant youth facing the challenges of life after high school without options for legalized work or college
“Beyond the Border”
Latinos seeking a better life have migrated to Kentucky, for low-paying jobs in the tobacco, manufacturing and horse racing industries. As Latino communities swell, so does the xenophobia and discrimination they face.

Sunday, August 17 at 2:30 pm
“Under the Same Moon”
The reunion of 9-year-old Carlitos and his mother Rosario, Who works as an illegal domestic in Los Angeles.

To Elena, I’d suggest you go back to your history a bit more to discover the role many labor unions and related American-worker interests had in demanding limits to immigration in the 1920s. What labor wanted was a need to limit immigration in order to obtain bargaining leverage. How can any union successfully strike for lower wages without limits to the labor supply? Check out the ILGWU resolutions dating back as early as 1905.

Dan Stein

I think it is imperative, for all who discuss immigration, to understand its origins. I may not be an expert on unions, but I do understand the fear and anxiety that lives in all of us when we encounter people that are different from own small world experiences. The original, over-reaching 1924 Johnson-Reed act was in response to a changing face of America. What I found interesting was that “The 1924 Immigration Act also included a provision excluding from entry any alien who by virtue of race or nationality was ineligible for citizenship. Existing nationality laws dating from 1790 and 1870 excluded people of Asian lineage from naturalizing. As a result, the 1924 Act meant that even Asians not previously prevented from immigrating – the Japanese in particular – would no longer be admitted to the United States.” Now Really Mr. Stein, does this sound like unbiased labor union concerns, or just simply racism codified within the immigration legislation?

It is also extremely noteworthy that the KKK had great influence in working towards passage of the 1924 Johnson Reed Act. The eugenics movement was integral to the passage of the immigration act.

Local eugenics societies and groups sprang up around the United States after World War I, with names like the Race Betterment Foundation. The war had given many Americans a greater fear of foreigners, and immigration to the United States was still increasing. In 1923, organizers founded the American Eugenics Society, and it quickly grew to 29 chapters around the country. At fairs and exhibitions, eugenicists spread the word and hosted “fitter family” and “better baby” competitions to award blue ribbons to the finest human stock — not unlike the awards for prize bull and biggest pumpkin. Not only did eugenicists promote better breeding, they wanted to prevent poor breeding or the risk of it. That meant keeping people with undesireable traits in their heritage (including alcoholism, pauperism, or epilepsy) separate from others or, where law allowed, preventing them from reproducing.

These vocal groups advocated laws to attain their aims, and in 1924, the Immigration Act was passed by majorities in the U.S. House and Senate. It set up strict quotas limiting immigrants from countries believed by eugenicists to have “inferior” stock, particularly Southern Europe and Asia. President Coolidge, who signed the bill into law, had stated when he was vice president, “America should be kept American. . . . Biological laws show that Nordics deteriorate when mixed with other races.”

 

An “Un-American Bill”: A Congressman Denounces Immigration Quotas

At the turn of the 20th century, unprecedented levels of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe to the United States aroused public support for restrictive immigration laws. After World War I, which temporarily slowed immigration levels, anti-immigration sentiment rose again. Congress passed the Quota Act of 1921, limiting entrants from each nation to 3 percent of that nationality’s presence in the U.S. population as recorded by the 1910 census. As a result, immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe dropped to less than one-quarter of pre-World War I levels. Even more restrictive was the Immigration Act of 1924 (Johnson-Reed Act) that shaped American immigration policy until the 1960s. While it passed with only six dissenting votes, congressional debates over the Johnson-Reed Act revealed arguments on both sides of this question of American policy and national identity. For example, on April 8, 1924, Robert H. Clancy, a Republican congressman from Detroit with a large immigrant constituency, defended the “Americanism” of Jewish, Italian, and Polish immigrants and attacked the quota provisions of the bill as racially discriminatory and “un-American.”

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Since the foundations of the American commonwealth were laid in colonial times over 300 years ago, vigorous complaint and more or less bitter persecution have been aimed at newcomers to our shores. Also the congressional reports of about 1840 are full of abuse of English, Scotch, Welsh immigrants as paupers, criminals, and so forth.

Old citizens in Detroit of Irish and German descent have told me of the fierce tirades and propaganda directed against the great waves of Irish and Germans who came over from 1840 on for a few decades to escape civil, racial, and religious persecution in their native lands.

The “Know-Nothings,” lineal ancestors of the Ku-Klux Klan, bitterly denounced the Irish and Germans as mongrels, scum, foreigners, and a menace to our institutions, much as other great branches of the Caucasian race of glorious history and antecedents are berated to-day. All are riff-raff, unassimilables, “foreign devils,” swine not fit to associate with the great chosen people—a form of national pride and hallucination as old as the division of races and nations.

But to-day it is the Italians, Spanish, Poles, Jews, Greeks, Russians, Balkanians, and so forth, who are the racial lepers. And it is eminently fitting and proper that so many Members of this House with names as Irish as Paddy’s pig, are taking the floor these days to attack once more as their kind has attacked for seven bloody centuries the fearful fallacy of chosen peoples and inferior peoples. The fearful fallacy is that one is made to rule and the other to be abominated. . . .

It must never be forgotten also that the Johnson bill, although it claims to favor the northern and western European peoples only, does so on a basis of comparison with the southern and western European peoples. The Johnson bill cuts down materially the number of immigrants allowed to come from northern and western Europe, the so-called Nordic peoples. . . .

Then I would be true to the principles for which my forefathers fought and true to the real spirit of the magnificent United States of to-day. I can not stultify myself by voting for the present bill and overwhelm my country with racial hatreds and racial lines and antagonisms drawn even tighter than they are to-day. [Applause.]

Source: Speech by Robert H. Clancy, April 8, 1924, Congressional Record, 68th Congress, 1st Session (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1924), vol. 65, 5929–5932.

Another thing to remember is that all this anti-immigrant ferver of the 1920’s was needed to distract voters from the Teapot Dome Scandal. For those who aren’t familiar, this was an instance where Big Oil worked in cahoots with the White House to defraud the American people of our natural resources, namely the oil reserves that belonged to the U.S. Navy, one of which was named after a teapot shaped mountain in Wyoming. By bribing Warren G. Harding during the Republican National Convention (this is where the term “smoked filled room” comes from), America’s two biggest oil barons, Doheny and Sinclaire, were granted leases to the Navy oil reserves. As the scandal was beginning to break, anti-immigrant legislation was being crafted.

Another case of the eighth amendment of the constitution being thwarted. The New York Times brings us a tale of cruelty that one could never imagine happening to THIER loved one. How is it, in this great nation, that illegal immigration has turned into our own human rights crisis. Just because you are this country, lacking proper documentation, does not absolve you of your human rights endowed upon us by our Creator. I have posted only a small portion, I really urge everyone to read the entire story.

He was 17 when he came to New York from Hong Kong in 1992 with his parents and younger sister, eyeing the skyline like any newcomer. Fifteen years later, Hiu Lui Ng was a New Yorker: a computer engineer with a job in the Empire State Building, a house in Queens, a wife who is a United States citizen and two American-born sons.

But when Mr. Ng, who had overstayed a visa years earlier, went to immigration headquarters in Manhattan last summer for his final interview for a green card, he was swept into immigration detention and shuttled through jails and detention centers in three New England states.

In April, Mr. Ng began complaining of excruciating back pain. By mid-July, he could no longer walk or stand. And last Wednesday, two days after his 34th birthday, he died in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a Rhode Island hospital, his spine fractured and his body riddled with cancer that had gone undiagnosed and untreated for months.

Mr. Ng’s death follows a succession of cases that have drawn Congressional scrutiny to complaints of inadequate medical care, human rights violations and a lack of oversight in immigration detention, a rapidly growing network of publicly and privately run jails where the government held more than 300,000 people in the last year while deciding whether to deport them.

In federal court affidavits, Mr. Ng’s lawyers contend that when he complained of severe pain that did not respond to analgesics, and grew too weak to walk or even stand to call his family from a detention pay phone, officials accused him of faking his condition. They denied him a wheelchair and refused pleas for an independent medical evaluation.

Instead, the affidavits say, guards at the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls, R.I., dragged him from his bed on July 30, carried him in shackles to a car, bruising his arms and legs, and drove him two hours to a federal lockup in Hartford, where an immigration officer pressured him to withdraw all pending appeals of his case and accept deportation.

“For this desperately sick, vulnerable person, this was torture,” said Theodore N. Cox, one of Mr. Ng’s lawyers, adding that they want to see a videotape of the transport made by guards.

Immigration and detention officials would not discuss the case, saying the matter was under internal investigation. But in response to a relative of Mr. Ng’s who had begged that he be checked for a spinal injury or fractures, the Wyatt detention center’s director of nursing, Ben Candelaria, replied in a July 16 e-mail message that Mr. Ng was receiving appropriate care for “chronic back pain.” He added, “We treat each and every detainee in our custody with the same high level of quality, professional care possible.”

Officials have given no explanation why they took Mr. Ng to Hartford and back on the same day. But the lawyers say the grueling July 30 trip appeared to be an effort to prove that Mr. Ng was faking illness, and possibly to thwart the habeas corpus petition they had filed in Rhode Island the day before, seeking his release for medical treatment.

The federal judge who heard that petition on July 31 did not make a ruling, but in an unusual move insisted that Mr. Ng get the care he needed. On Aug. 1, Mr. Ng was taken to a hospital, where doctors found he had terminal cancer and a fractured spine. He died five days later.

The accounts of Mr. Ng’s treatment echo other cases that have prompted legislation, now before the House Judiciary Committee, to set mandatory standards for care in immigration detention.

I have to eat my words, there WERE workers that had access to secured areas of the airport. I would agree that when there are locations that require security clearances, we should absolutely know the backgrounds of those people. Once again, this just amplifies that we need to fix our broken immigration system. We need to have a credible way of knowing who is here in our country.  I recognize, that many families, caught up in this raid, will be in heartache tonight.

I will be posting a story, very soon, about another detainee death, where the  man suffered horribly. 

DULLES, Va. — An immigration raid at Dulles International Airport resulted in 55 arrests on Wednesday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement says.
The people were doing contract work at a construction site, inside a secure area, where they would potentially have access to runways and airplanes.

ICE agents made their move as the workers were being bused to the site, checking work and immigration papers.

The agency says one of the workers had an airport security badge, that grants unescorted access to the airport tarmac.

ICE says allowing unauthorized workers into sensitive sites puts the nation’s infranstructure at risk.

Most of the people arrested will be flown an ICE detention facility in El Paso, Texas to begin removal proceedings.

Officials say this operation and others like it aim to guard infrastructure. The agency says it’s important to make sure people who work at airports are in the United States legally.

Investigation into the workers’ immigration status has been going on for a while, leading up to the raid.

The arrests did not affect flights or travel to and from the airport

Ask yourself, what should Americans be more incensed about, day laborers who don’t pay income taxes, or untold millions or billions in lost income taxes due to corporations not paying?  I mean really, shouldn’t we focus on the “big fish” as opposed to the “little fish”!  There are already billions that illegal immigrants pay into social security, money they will never collect because the number they are using is bogus.  No, NOT a stolen number, simply one that doesn’t exist, except that it affords them the ability to work and pay taxes like the rest of us.

WASHINGTON – Unlike the rest of us, most U.S. corporations and foreign companies doing business in the United States pay no federal income tax, according to a new report from Congress.

The study by the Government Accountability Office released Tuesday said two-thirds of U.S. corporations paid no federal income taxes between 1998 and 2005, and about 68 percent of foreign companies doing business in the U.S. avoided corporate taxes over the same period.

Collectively, the companies reported trillions of dollars in sales, according to GAO’s estimate.

“It’s shameful that so many corporations make big profits and pay nothing to support our country,” said Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., who asked for the GAO study with Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich.

An outside tax expert, Chris Edwards of the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, said increasing numbers of limited liability corporations and so-called “S” corporations pay taxes under individual tax codes.

“Half of all business income in the United States now ends up going through the individual tax code,” Edwards said.

The GAO study did not investigate why corporations weren’t paying federal income taxes or corporate taxes and it did not identify any corporations by name. It said companies may escape paying such taxes due to operating losses or because of tax credits.

More than 38,000 foreign corporations had no tax liability in 2005 and 1.2 million U.S. companies paid no income tax, the GAO said. Combined, the companies had $2.5 trillion in sales. About 25 percent of the U.S. corporations not paying corporate taxes were considered large corporations, meaning they had at least $250 million in assets or $50 million in receipts.

The GAO said it analyzed data from the Internal Revenue Service, examining samples of corporate returns for the years 1998 through 2005. For 2005, for example, it reviewed 110,003 tax returns from among more than 1.2 million corporations doing business in the U.S.

Dorgan and Levin have complained about companies abusing transfer prices — amounts charged on transactions between companies in a group, such as a parent and subsidiary. In some cases, multinational companies can manipulate transfer prices to shift income from higher to lower tax jurisdictions, cutting their tax liabilities. The GAO did not suggest which companies might be doing this.

“It’s time for the big corporations to pay their fair share,” Dorgan said.

This is a great story in the Washington Post, postive proactive initiatives to combat the rising negative attitudes towards immigrants. This is an example of a strong coalition between government and business! Working towards positive solutions, too bad our local government didn’t have the fortitude to take this type of initiative. 

Amid increasing public hostility to immigrants and intensifying efforts by local and federal authorities to crack down on illegal immigration, these business leaders hope to counter criticism that immigrants steal jobs and burden public services by highlighting the contributions they make to the U.S. economy and improving their ability to integrate.

The initiative is supported by a bill recently introduced in Congress. Sponsored by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and three representatives from California, Florida and Texas, it would provide $350 million for immigrant family literacy programs, individual tax credits for teachers and corporate tax breaks for firms that offer educational workplace programs like “Thirst for Knowledge.”

In addition to support from private firms that employ thousands of immigrants from Latin America and elsewhere, the bill is backed by the Americas Society and Council of the Americas, which recently issued a report called “U.S. Business and Hispanic Integration: Expanding the Economic Contributions of Immigrants.”

The report points out that Hispanics make up more than 14 percent of the U.S. workforce, own more than 2 million businesses and have a collective purchasing power of more than $800 billion a year. It says foreign-born workers have much to offer but need more help to master English and become more invested in American society.

It concedes that many Hispanic immigrants arrive with limited educations and that the immigration wave of the past two decades has slightly depressed wages among unskilled American workers. It also argues that immigrants “complement” the overall labor force as more native-born Americans earn degrees and seek higher-level jobs.

The report also asserts that if immigrants are given more opportunities to learn, earn and engage, they will repay the investment as better workers, parents, consumers and participants in public life. Although not endorsing illegal immigration, the report accepts it as a fact of life that needs to be addressed through legislative reforms.

Some companies that employ immigrants have been reluctant to associate themselves with the effort, however, citing fears of public criticism and government scrutiny amid increasingly aggressive federal efforts to track down illegal immigrants and punish their employers.

“Businesses feel cowed by the rhetoric,” said Christopher Sabatini, a policy director at the Americas Society and Council of the Americas. “There is a fear of being labeled as aiding and abetting undocumented immigrants.” He said some companies have curtailed programs aimed at helping immigrant workers because of community disapproval.

One company that has taken a strong public stance in favor of helping immigrant workers is Miller & Long. Myles Gladstone, the firm’s personnel director, said that it once hired mostly African Americans but that since the early 1990s, fewer U.S.-born workers have applied, and they have been largely replaced by immigrants. Today, the firm employs more than 2,000 Hispanics, mostly foreign-born.

Corey demonstrates, with no regrets, what kind of politican he has become.   Having no qualms about being labeled a bully, he says:

“I’m hard-charging. I don’t give ground. Once I set a course, I don’t fall back and I move ahead. You can call that bullying, but I call it effective leadership,” Stewart says.

Seriously, as the elected Chairman of a huge county in the Metro Region, you have no problem being recognized as a bully?

Is this what our democracy has been reduced to, bullying tactics, instead of thoughtful intelligent governance? I wonder how his fellow supervisors feel, being on the receiving end of a man bragging about pushing them around to meet his political needs? I feel especially angry right now because here I was, trying to give him the benefit of the doubt, pumping him up for his Rural Crescent vote, hoping he was refocusing on other pressing matters in the county, but I was wrong…..AGAIN.

I wonder, how exactly, as a local politician, will Corey “begin pushing for measures that make it easier for immigrants to come to the United States without breaking the law.”  Does this mean he will be spending even more time on Capitol Hill, focusing on immigration, instead of the myriad of serious issues facing our County? I for one am tired of being used as his stepping stone to bigger and better political offices.

I also noticed that an arm of FAIR, Center for Immigration Studies, is there to support Corey in his stance on illegal immigration, oh wait, that’s right, I mean immigration.  What an interesting contradiction, the people who provided most of the language template for our original immigration resolution, also want to cease ALL immigration, legal and otherwise while Corey supposedly wants to make legal immigration easier.  Poor Corey, he doesn’t even know how he has been duped by them. 

But supporters say Stewart is showing that local governments can do something about the issue.

“What Prince William County is doing is clearly registering at the national level,” says Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank promoting restrictions on illegal immigration. “You need to have somebody driving the bus, you need to have somebody leading on this issue, and that’s the role he’s playing. You have to have a catalyst.” 

AntiBVBL formed at the end of February 2008 as a counter movement to the tactics employed by Help Save Manassas & bvbl.net.  No longer will Prince William County be bullied by members of an organization recently designated a Nativistgroup. When voices arise, sounding off racial slurs, invoking language that dehumanizes our follow man, we will challenge the integrity of those words each and every time. We are a moderate voice in the immigration debate opposed to the vitriol anti-immigrant rhetoric that has been so prevalent in our community. AntiBVBL was designed to provide an uncensored place for respectful dialogue among opposing viewpoints. We do not presume to have all the answers, however, we do advocate a comprehensive immigration reform plan that should encompass the fiscal/economic realities of immigration, social impacts on communities and the human condition that compels people to flee their homeland.   There are no simple answers to the complicated issue of immigration.  Throughout our history, immigration has been contentious, and this modern era will wrestle with those same immigration questions.  However, the question remains, how will we, during these trying times, resolve these dilemmas?

I loved the title of this article. The author is Peter Rachleff, a Professor of History at Macalester College in St. Paul, and a specialist in labor and immigration history. I am not suggesting that we become uncaring to who is in our country, I believe we need to know, but we will have to become innovative and foward thinking if we want to find reasonable, humane, and fiscally sound solutions to comprehensive immigration reform.

In April 2006, hundreds of thousands of immigrant rights protestors marched in cities across the United States. They countered prolonged debates about the pros and cons of comprehensive immigration reform with a short but sweet affirmation, scrawled on placards: “No Human Being Is Illegal.” Their direct assertion challenged the deeply entrenched practices of our government and a deep wellspring of racism in our culture. Their actions also evoked traditions of protest, organization, and resistance.

Since the days of slavery – well before the establishment of the United States itself – the government, buttressed by popular culture, included some residents as citizens and excluded others as outsiders, as what historian Mae Ngai has called “impossible subjects.” Not only were slaves defined as outside the political and social community, but freed slaves and their children were typically excluded from citizenship. The federal constitution counted slaves as three-fifths of a person. The Naturalization Act of 1790 offered citizenship to “free white persons.” The Alien Act of 1798 authorized the president to order the deportation of any alien “dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States” during peacetime. Once the government began to regulate immigration, argues Professor Ngai, it had begun to create the “illegal” alien.

Race was the central criterion by which such decisions would be made, and thinking about race was shaped by popular prejudices, beliefs, and passions. A dual process cast the racially different as “other,” while securing a place on the inside for all of those accorded “white” status. The outsiders were vulnerable to the worst forms of economic exploitation, from slavery and servitude to sweatshops, in the most dangerous conditions at the lowest wages. Yet they enriched their employers. Just a step above these outsiders on the economic ladder, from their own position of insecurity, simultaneously threatened by the wealth and power of those above them and the lack of power manifested by those below them on the socio-economic ladder, working class whites struggled to hold on to what status and privilege they had. They practiced discrimination and even mob justice at times, and they sought laws, court orders, and enforcement from the state to shield them from competition with the outsiders. And hence a pattern took shape which would be seared into the American body politic. When insecurity spread among working class whites and popular discontent threatened to swell, the elite and the state responded by scapegoating and exorcising “the other,” both people of color and immigrants.

This pattern has dominated our society since its founding to the present day. When the industrial revolution undermined the independence of white artisans in the first half of the 19^th century, they began to organize unions and independent political parties. But one state after another revised its voting qualifications from property ownership to whiteness and maleness and the discontent subsided. The deep depression of the 1870s and the political turmoil it occasioned led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first law which proscribed a particular race. Amidst the economic and political turbulence after World War I, Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, the nation’s first comprehensive immigration restriction law. It established numerical quotas on immigration and a racial and national hierarchy that favored northern and western Europeans over southern, central, and eastern Europeans, most of whom at that time were not considered to be “white.” An enforcement bureaucracy blossomed, attentive not only to borders and ports, but also to cities, fields, factories, and mines throughout the country.

Ironically, the post-1965 era also marked the transformation of the global and American economies into the turbulence generated by neoliberalism and free market economics.

The very same economic shifts were sweeping the U.S. domestic economy, destabilizing manufacturing and undermining the economic security of American workers. They feared losing their jobs, while they were becoming increasingly aware of the presence of new non-white immigrants in their communities, many of whom were willing to work for longer hours and less pay than they were. Politicians, demagogues, radio talk show hosts, and the like found this to be fertile ground for the replaying of that historical nativist script. Scapegoating immigrants, especially non-white immigrants, was a path to fame, fortune, and political power.

So as I am surfing around, looking for a thread topic, I visit the blog citizen orange, and see this satire on Star Trek and immigration. 

According to News America Media,

Businesses rely on immigrant workers for their existence as viable enterprises, argues Jacoby. It is nearly impossible to hire U.S. workers for many jobs (as farmhands, meatpackers, dishwashers, etc.). Unlike in 1960, when about half of all American men dropped out of high school, today nine in 10 graduate. Without a critical mass of unskilled U.S.-born workers, there’s a labor shortage in many sectors of the economy.

In the introduction to her 2004 book, “Reinventing the Melting Pot: the New Immigrants and What It Means to Be American,” Jacoby refers to this problem with the same unsentimental pragmatism that characterizes her general approach to the debate.

“Of course, however hard they work, many poor, ill-educated immigrants who start at the bottom of the ladder remain there throughout their lives,” she writes. “This is not particularly surprising, and it may seem to vindicate those who claim that the United States today is importing a new lower class.

“But that’s part of the point of our immigration policy: America no longer has this kind of working class, and it turns out that we need one.” That’s why Jacoby says employers are passionate about this. “Who’s going to be telling their representative how to vote on this? The people who have a real stake in it, and that’s small and mid-sized business.”

Yet, as the current system works, American employers seem to be facing a choice between growing their business and obeying the law. According to Jacoby, the government issues about one million work visas a year, when the market’s real need is probably closer to 1.5 million.

Her organization calls for tougher enforcement at the workplace and along the border. Jacoby is against the border wall, calling it “ridiculous” but adds, “I think we need a virtual wall, we need to know who’s crossing the border.”