Immigration Laws: April, 1995 - Number #6

At a CIR hearing February 23, a Department of Labor representative urged the CIR to reduce employment-based immigration in order to balance employers' needs for international labor market access with the need to invest in education and job training for US workers. Several CIR commissioners argued that more rather than fewer immigrants should be selected on the basis of US employer needs, but DOL argued that, if the US continues to admit large numbers of foreign scientists and engineers, 20 years from now even more will be needed because the US will have given up on ways to interest young people in these careers.

Also on February 23, the CIR heard George Borjas, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, argue that 20 percent of the wage gap between less-skilled and more skilled workers in the United States is due to the presence of the most recent wave of immigrants, legal and illegal, who have fewer skills than previous generations of immigrants. Vernon Briggs of Cornell University argued that the labor market is being buffeted by changes such as defense cutbacks, echo baby boomers entering the labor market, and more women working for wages, and that, immigration today is "far too high for labor market needs."

Harriet Orcutt Duleep of the Urban Institute argued that only illegal immigrants and refugees have low levels of education, although her analysis excluded all Mexican immigrants because it was hard to separate legal and illegal Mexican immigrants in the data used. Markley Roberts of the AFL-CIO argued that DOL should do an even better job of labor certification--determining that American workers were truly not available before allowing US employers to hire foreign workers. DOL finds that employers are often employing the same foreign workers illegally that they are requesting DOL to certify that they need.

Representatives of US engineers and computer programmers argued that the US is permitting the entry of foreigners to fill jobs even though there are large numbers of unemployed American engineers and programmers. US employers, they argued, use temporary foreign workers because they are cheaper and easier to recruit. It was noted that entry-level engineering salaries have fallen three percent between 1974 and 1994, from $35,700 to $34,700 in 1994 dollars. The real wages of more experienced engineers fell even more. An engineer with a Master's degree and 25 years experience made $78,600 in 1974 (in 1994 dollars), and $71, 400 in 1994.

In a critical review of DOL labor certification procedures, a Boston firm attempting to hire a British alien who did not have a BA degree, and thus did qualify for a professional employment visa, reportedly spent $10,000 and six months before securing a temporary visa for the British worker. As the story makes clear, US employers think that the tough part is finding the ideal foreign candidate for a vacant job; US labor certification procedures, they feel, are simply a bureaucratic obstacle to getting the foreign worker they feel is needed.

A US employer who wants to bring into the US temporary foreign workers must file two applications for alien labor certification with the Department of Labor. The first, labeled an ETA-750A, specifies the terms and salary of the particular job; the second, called an ETA-750B and filled out by the would-be recruit, lists the applicant's qualifications. The local Employment Service (ES) office where the employer files the application then does a prevailing wage survey to ensure that the employer is offering the going wage.

After the ES approves the wage offer, the employer is required to do three kinds of recruiting: The employer has to place an ad for the job with the employment department for 30 days, within its own offices for 10 days, and in an "appropriate publication" for no less than three consecutive days. When US citizens and legal immigrants respond to the ads, the employer is required to provide the employment department with "lawful, job-related reasons" for not choosing them.

Janitors are the largest single occupation in the US in which a majority of the workers are probably immigrants, and the 10-year Justice for Janitors campaign of the Service Employees International Union is moving from cities such as Los Angeles, New York, San Jose, and San Francisco, where a majority of the janitors are SEIO members, to smaller cities such as Sacramento. Non-union janitors typically earn about $5 per hour and have few benefits; unionized janitors earn $7 to $8 and have benefits such as health insurance and pensions. Justice for Janitors typically targets corporations with household names that hire their janitors through contractors.

The US Information Agency modified on February 14, 1995 regulations under which 10,000 European au pairs enter the US each year. USIA had proposed requiring that the weekly stipend be raised from $100 to $155, but reduced the stipend to $115. USIA dropped the proposed requirement that au pairs be at least 21 to care for children under two, and the proposed requirement that they be limited to nine hours of work daily (the limit is 45 hours weekly). The au pair program is scheduled to expire on September 30, 1995.