Sessions: Immigration plan bad for U.S. workers

There is an unspoken question at the heart of the immigration debate: What is the loyalty a nation owes to its own citizens?

Business groups financing the push for comprehensive immigration reform [amnesty for illegal aliens] believe they have the right to demand from Congress as many workers as they want from abroad at the wages they prefer. How this affects the struggling U.S. citizen is not their concern.

But the costs -- human and financial -- would be enormous.

Drafters of the Senate immigration plan delivered spectacularly for these business groups' priorities: the Senate bill adds four times more guest workers than the rejected 2007 immigration proposal and, based on Congressional Budget Office data, adds 46 million mostly lower-skill legal immigrants and their relatives to the country by 2033. The result? CBO says average wages would fall for a dozen years, unemployment would rise, and the nation's per-person wealth would sink for the next quarter century...

In a free-market society, wages for workers are set by supply and demand. If a business is unable to attract the number of workers it needs, it must raise wages. Businesses no more have the right to demand central planners in Washington provide them with workers from around the world at desired wages than they have the right to demand a taxpayer bailout.

Would it not better serve the national interest to get our citizens off of welfare and into good jobs with rising pay? Labor force participation is at a 30-year low, welfare spending has eclipsed $1 trillion annually, and wages are now lower than they were in 1999.

Research from Harvard's George Borjas demonstrated that high levels of low-skill immigration from 1980–2000 resulted in a 7.4% wage drop for U.S. workers without a high school diploma. Today, one in three such Americans can't find a job...

The costs are not only economic -- including lower wages and higher unemployment -- but social. Consider a city such as Detroit. One in three Detroit households is on food stamps. The education system is failing, families are breaking apart and millions have been trapped in poverty for generations...

A nation does owe its fundamental loyalty to its own citizens, and that should be the guiding force in crafting a generous but responsible immigration plan. Businesses are free to ask for special treatment. But elected officials have an obligation to say no