How does this work with a population of roughly 12 million illegal immigrants?
It doesn’t work. It’s very difficult to meet the economy’s needs through legal immigration, because flows are constrained by quotas and bureaucracy. The 66,000 or so job-based visas for temporary low-skilled workers are nowhere near enough to fill the demand in a 150 million-worker labor force. And it’s precisely why we need some type of temporary worker program – to fill the demand legally instead of illegally. But don’t we hear a lot of objections to temporary worker programs? Yes, we do. One argument says that we have to have enforcement first, but you can’t implement interior enforcement, employer verification, until you have regulation of workers here. What are you going to do with the 8 or 9 million workers who are already here? There’s just nowhere to put them without huge economic disruptions, especially in certain states. Plus, many have had children here and have mortgages, car loans and credit cards. This whole idea of internal enforcement first is just not practical. Reform
