Of all the feuds that derailed immigration reform the last time Congress debated it in 2007, the one between Big Business and Big Labor was arguably the most bitter. Unions and business groups were deeply divided over how employers should obtain visas for foreign workers to fill low-skilled jobs.
So it was surprising to see U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue and AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka send out identical e-mails, entitled “Joint Statement of Shared Principles,” one afternoon last week. Some newspapers jumped on the announcement, declaring that business and labor had struck a compromise on immigration reform. But that’s overstating it. In reality, after several months of negotiations, the Chamber and the AFL-CIO now see eye to eye on three issues—which they outline only vaguely.
The first “shared principle” says that both the AFL-CIO and the business community are willing to improve the process by which companies promote job openings to U.S. workers before trying to procure visas for foreigners. How? Ana Avendaño, Trumka’s top immigration adviser, says updating the rules for the Internet era might be one place to start. Under the current guest-worker program, if a company wants to hire a low-skilled foreigner to do a job that isn’t on a farm (farm laborers are a separate visa category because they’re seasonal), the company must show the federal government that it made a good-faith effort to find a capable U.S. worker but came up short. Within 10 days of posting a job, businesses must place two newspaper ads—a Department of Labor standard that was put in place more than a decade ago. No Web ad is required, even though many unemployed workers search the Internet for jobs. “If a landscaping job becomes available in Fairfax, Va., but I live in Baltimore, that job should be advertised to me,” Avendaño says. “Workers would be willing to take a job in Fairfax if they lived in Baltimore.”
The second point proposes that the U.S. create a new visa category for foreign guest workers—“a mechanism,” according to the groups’ statement, “that responds to the needs of business in a market-driven way, while also fully protecting the wages and working conditions of U.S. and immigrant workers.” The new visa category, says Avendaño, would be called a Dual Intent visa. This one is a gain for the labor movement, she says, because it would allow temporary workers to apply for green cards and not have their visas tied to a single employer. In general, unions would prefer that guest workers have a path to citizenship so U.S. workers aren’t undercut by illegal immigrants willing to work for less money. Another benefit the unions see in extending legal status to foreign workers: They could pick up new members.
Finally, the groups say the new visa program must be “market-driven.” Both sides agree that current visa caps are arbitrary, politically based, and don’t correspond to employers’ needs. How will policymakers go about assessing how many workers the market demands? The business and labor groups recommend creating a new government office “with political independence” to give Congress data about labor shortages around the country. If a hospital in Chicago wanted to hire foreign nurses, the hospital could appeal to the federal government for permission to do so. Washington would use some yet-to-be-determined metric to decide whether there really is a shortage of domestic labor in the Chicago area, and would then tell the hospital whether and how many people it could recruit. (The U.K. has a similar bureau, called the Migration Advisory Committee.)
As both groups acknowledge, they still have a lot of details to sew up. But when you consider that the biggest lobbying groups for business and labor weren’t even talking back in 2007, it’s a promising start.
