"Current immigration policies are rigid, cumbersome and inefficient"
Joint Statement of Shared Principles by U.S. Chamber of
Commerce President and CEO Thomas J. Donohue & AFL-CIO President Richard
Trumka February 21, 2013
The United States will always be a nation of
immigrants who have contributed greatly to the vitality, diversity, and
creativity of American life. Yet, like the rest of America’s immigration
system, the mechanisms for evaluating our labor market needs and admitting
foreign workers – as well as recruiting US workers – for temporary and
permanent jobs are broken or non-existent.
Current immigration policies
are rigid, cumbersome and inefficient. What is needed is the
creation of a professional bureau in a federal executive agency to inform
Congress and the public about these issues together with a system that
provides for lesser-skilled visas that respond to employers’ needs while
protecting the wages and working conditions of lesser-skilled workers – foreign
or domestic. Current efforts at comprehensive immigration reform present
a unique and historic opportunity for American workers and businesses to work
together to fix this aspect of the badly broken system.
Over the last months, representatives of business
and labor have been engaged in serious discussions about how to fix the system
in a way that benefits both workers and employers, with a focus on
lesser-skilled occupations. We have found common ground in several
important areas, and have committed to continue to work together and with
Members of Congress to enact legislation that will solve our current problems
in a lasting manner.
Specifically, we agree that the following
principles should guide legislation in the complicated and important area of
addressing lesser-skilled immigration to our country:
First, American workers should have a first crack
at available jobs. To that end, business and labor are committed to
improving the way that information about job openings in lesser-skilled
occupations reaches the maximum number of workers, particularly those in
disadvantaged communities.
Second, there are instances – even during tough
economic times – when employers are not able to fill job openings with American
workers. Those instances will surely increase as the economy improves,
and when they occur, it is important that our laws permit businesses to hire
foreign workers without having to go through a cumbersome and inefficient
process. Our challenge is to create a mechanism 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. Among other things, this
requires a new kind of worker visa program that does not keep all workers in a
permanent temporary status, provides labor mobility in a way that still gives
American workers a first shot at available jobs, and that automatically adjusts
as the American economy expands and contracts.
Third, we need to fix the system so that it is
much more transparent, which requires that we build a base of knowledge using
real-world data about labor markets and demographics. The power of
today’s technology enables us to use that knowledge to craft a workable demand-driven
process fed by data that will inform how America addresses future labor
shortages. We recognize that there is no simple solution to this
issue. We agree that a professional bureau in a federal executive agency,
with political independence analogous to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, should
be established to inform Congress and the public about these
issues.
We are now in the middle – not the end – of this process,
and we pledge to continue to work together and with our allies and our representatives
on Capitol Hill to finalize a solution that is in the interest of this country
we all love.
