Dear Readers: 

Depending on your perspective, this past week represents a very positive week when it comes to immigration or an ominous sign of the future. Congress passed health care legislation opening up the children’s health care program in the US to legal immigrant children previously excluded.  The House of Representatives also passed a bill mandating the reporting of deaths by the nation’s immigrant detention centers. But this week also marked the passage of legislation in the House stimulus package that would mandate use of the flawed E-Verify system by employers around the nation who receive stimulus money (without any reciprocal provision dealing with the millions of illegally present immigrants).  

And the Senate passed an amendment to its stimulus bill barring banks receiving bailout money that would require them to operate under the H-1B dependent employer rules. The amendment originally barred the banks from even using the H-1B program, but someone apparently reminded the sponsoring Senators that the US is legally bound by the General Agreement on Trade and Services and that version of the amendment would likely land the country in court and potentially set off retaliatory measures by other countries.  

There is reason to be optimistic that we’ll see positive immigration legislation this year. But there will be a lot of temptation to enact protectionist measures that allow members of Congress to tell constituents that they’re helping preserve their jobs. But despite the fact that jobs seem different than traded goods, make no mistake about the fact that trade in services is still a form of trade and that protectionism in that arena has the same results as protectionism in the trade of goods. History tells us that protectionism didn’t cause the Great Depression. But we also know that the Smoot-Hawley tariffs bill passed after the Depression started by a Congress feeling the same pressures as today, set off a global trade war that ended up sinking the world economy in to a deeper downturn. We need to be careful not to repeat history’s mistakes. 

Congress will be tested again in a few weeks when it must deal with the extension of three important employment immigration programs. Parts of the investor visa and religious worker visa programs will expire. And a critical physician immigration program that sends American-trained international physicians to medically underserved communities around the US expires as well. Anti-immigrant groups will be hard at work as usual to demonize the programs. But whether Congress remembers that the message of these groups was thoroughly rejected at the polls last November is not yet clear.  

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I’ll be speaking on a national teleconference entitled “Immigration Compliance Update 2009: I-9s, E-Verify, Crackdowns and the “Obama Effect” at 1 pm central time on Thursday, February 12^th. The program is being presented by HRTrainingCenter.com and registration details can be found at http://hrtrainingcenter.com/showWCDetails.asp?TCID=1005106. 

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Kind regards,