A new bill aimed at reducing legal immigration has received the backing of President Trump. Senators Tom Cotton (R-AK) and David Perdue (R-GA) unveiled their RAISE Act at the White House alongside President Trump, and strangely enough, it has yet to receive any major grilling. There has, of course, been a raft of Tweets either advocating or opposing, but very little in the way of clinical dissection of the actual bill.
The “Reforming American Immigration for a Strong Economy Act” (RAISE) is based on two core concepts, improving the “quality of immigration” and enabling American working classes to stabilize (and build on) their income. It does this by setting out to do what many European nations (most especially the UK after Brexit) have been striving for…to take in only migrants who are highly skilled, can support themselves, and speak English.
Two parts of the RAISE Act that are being studiously ignored by the Leftist media are:
‘MAXIMUM NUMBER OF ADMISSIONS.—
- ‘(1) IN GENERAL.—The number of refugees who may be admitted under this section in any fiscal year may not exceed 50,000.
- ‘‘(2) ASYLEES.—The President shall annually enumerate the number of aliens who were granted asylum in the previous fiscal year.’’
The number of refugees permitted into the US each year is set by the President in consultation with Congress. For 2017 fiscal year, President Obama set the target at 110,000 admittances (this is unlikely to be achieved). But what many people either don’t know or willfully ignore is that the number of Asylees has “no legal upper limit.”
The very definition of uncontrolled immigration is that a nation cannot control the number of new people it has arriving (or becoming resident) each year. Under the present system, theoretically, a million people could claim Asylum every year (of course, that number is not realistic, but the system actually allows for that…and more). In 2015 FY, the number of folks granted Asylum was 26,124.
The RAISE Act seeks not to set a limit on Asylees, but rather to make the public aware that on top of refugees, there are ALSO Asylees. Asking the president to “enumerate” the previous year’s figures seems a little odd until you realize that it is likely that the 2016 figures have been buried.
But the real meat of the Act is to limit the number of people who are low-skilled applicants. During the Brexit campaign, Stuart Rose, the head of the Remain Campaign, said that if a British exit led to a cap on unskilled migration, then the price of labor would go up. That the low-skilled in Britain would end up with higher wages once a “cheap supply” of low-skilled immigrant labor dried up has never been disputed. It is taken as economic fact, and the same would be equally true in America.
The RAISE Act (if it succeeds in limiting low-skilled immigration) would achieve exactly what it aims to: raise up the working classes and those with a low skills base. The emotive argument will be presented by the Left, but it is an argument they’ll likely lose. There are a lot of low-skilled workers in the US, and if they can improve the quality of life for them and their family with a single vote…Watch out, Democrats.
