Business-Labor Accord Clears Major Hurdle to Immigration Rewrite

By Kathleen Hunter & Heidi Przybyla 

A deal between business and labor leaders on allocating visas to low-skilled foreign workers sidesteps what probably will be one of many divisions that risk scuttling efforts to rewrite U.S. immigration law.

The agreement is designed to resolve a long-simmering dispute over a proposed guest-worker program that had been impeding Senate efforts to spearhead the broadest changes in immigration-law in almost 30 years. The heads of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the nation’s largest business lobbying group, and the AFL-CIO, the biggest labor federation, reached the accord late on March 29. The plan is “just a first step” on what will be a long and rocky road toward revamping U.S. immigration law, said Tamar Jacoby, president of ImmigrationWorks USA, a nationwide federation of state-based business groups that advocate rewriting immigration laws.

If history is any guide, “battles will be fierce” and immigration-law proposals will face additional obstacles as they work through Congress, Jacoby said yesterday in a telephone interview.

Aides to lawmakers and the Chamber of Commerce stressed that the tentative deal hasn’t been approved by an eight-member bipartisan Senate group working on immigration legislation.

“The senators will make the decisions about any final agreements and what makes the best public policy overall,” Blair Latoff Holmes, spokeswoman for the U.S. Chamber, said in an e-mailed statement.

Republican Challenge

Democrats who control the Senate will have difficulty garnering the 60 votes needed for passage in that chamber, and the Republican-controlled House poses an even greater challenge.

President George W. Bush, a Republican, tried unsuccessfully from 2005 to 2007 to get immigration legislation through Congress. President Barack Obama’s push for a smaller- scale immigration law in 2010 similarly failed.

Florida Senator Marco, a Republican member of the Senate group, said yesterday in a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, that “a rush to legislate, without fully considering all views and input from all senators, could be fatal to the effort of earning the public’s confidence.”

The effort’s centerpiece would establish a 13-year path to citizenship for the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S., which Obama has made a priority for his second term.

Hispanic Vote

Republican opposition to providing a citizenship path, a major stumbling block in past efforts, has lessened since the November election, in which Obama won 71 percent of Hispanic votes cast. Republican leaders have said the party needs to do more to court the fast-growing voter bloc.

U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue and Richard Trumka, head of the AFL-CIO, reached a verbal agreement during a conference call with Senator Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat involved in the talks, according to a person familiar with the discussion, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a private call. Schumer called White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough to alert him to the deal, the person said.

“This issue has always been the deal-breaker on immigration reform, but not this time,” Schumer said yesterday in an e-mailed statement.

The agreement “seems like a fair compromise,” said Marshall Fitz, head of immigration policy at the Democratic- aligned Center for American Progress. “The two sides have been looking at this through the prism of what they were losing. Appears they have reached a point where they both understand that they are getting a lot of what they wanted.”

Senate Compromise

“I think this agreement will seal the deal” for a Senate compromise, he said. “Labor gets more data-driven accountability in the system; business gets a new worker program that is more flexible than the current patchwork of temporary visas.”

The agreement would establish a federal bureau called the “Bureau of Immigration and Labor Market Research,” and a visa program called the “W Visa Program,” according to the AFL-CIO. The bureau would use labor market and demographic information to identify labor shortages and to help set an annual visa cap. It would be funded through registered employer fees.

Employers seeking workers in lesser-skilled fields including hospitality, janitorial services, retail and construction could apply through the new visa program, which also would allow workers to petition for permanent status after working for one year.

Visa Cap

The program would start with 20,000 visas in the first year, 35,000 in the second, 55,000 in the third and 75,000 in the fourth. On year five the number would grow or shrink based on a formula that takes into account the unemployment rate, the number of job openings and other factors.

The number of visas awarded annually could never exceed 200,000, and one-third of all visas would go only to businesses with under 25 employees, according to the AFL-CIO. Construction visas would be capped at 15,000 per year, addressing Trumka’s concern about a potentially adverse impact on that industry.

“Each day we have become more encouraged that our goal is in reach, and quickly,” Trumka said yesterday in a statement. “We have created a new model, a modern visa system that includes both a bureau to collect and analyze labor market data, as well as significant worker protections.”

The proposal also borrows language from a current law requiring employers to offer visa holders wages and working conditions that wouldn’t adversely affect the wages and working conditions of U.S. workers. That means wages must be equal to the actual level paid by the employer to other workers with similar experience or the prevailing wage for the job at issue, whichever is greater.

The measure will probably include a better system for companies to verify the immigration status of job applicants and new rules that would prioritize the family members who can immigrate to the U.S. legally.

To contact the reporters on this story: Kathleen Hunter in Washington atkhunter9@bloomberg.net; Heidi Przybyla in Washington at hprzybyla@bloomberg.net

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