Cotton Urges Trump: Slow Immigration to Boost Wages

GOP Sen. Tom Cotton says President-elect Donald Trump should quickly use his electoral mandate to raise Americans’ wages by reducing the supply of wage-cutting, low-skilled legal immigrants.

“For too long, our immigration policy has skewed toward the interests of the wealthy and powerful: Employers get cheaper labor, and professionals get cheaper personal services like housekeeping,” Cotton writes in the New York Times. “We now need an immigration policy that focuses less on the most powerful and more on everyone else.”

“In this election, Americans finally demanded an end to this unthinking immigration system. President-elect Trump and Congress should take that mandate and act on it promptly in the new year,” Cotton wrote, adding that “higher wages, better benefits and more security for American workers are features, not bugs, of sound immigration reform.”

Each year, roughly 4 million young Americans enter the job market — and the federal government provides work permits to roughly 1 million new legal immigrants and to almost 1 million temporary contract-workers.

There are some 42.4 million legal and illegal immigrants, aliens, contract workers, students, refugees, and more residing in the U.S. as of 2014, comprising 13.3 percent of the population. Since the housing recession began in 2007, 8.7 million additional migrants have arrived and settled in the U.S.

More