Immigration Bill Divides Administration, Businesses White House
Favors Curbs on Foreign Workers.

The Washington Post, March 13, 1996, FINAL Edition

By: William Branigin, Washington Post Staff Writer

Section: A SECTION, p. A02

As a national debate over immigration intensifies, the Clinton
administration is taking on the American business community in an effort to
preserve protections for American workers in legislation currently before
Congress.

"Our nation's immigration policy has reached a crossroads," Labor Secretary
Robert B. Reich said yesterday. "We have to decide whether we want to help
American workers, or protect unfair employers."

The comments, in a joint news conference with Sen. Edward M. Kennedy
(D-Mass.), signaled a concerted attempt to keep provisions restricting
employment-based immigration in a controversial bill being debated in the
Senate Judiciary Committee. The bill's sponsor, Sen. Alan K. Simpson
(R-Wyo.), announced last week that he would drop the provisions under
intense pressure from business leaders, who had joined an unusual coalition
of liberal, conservative, religious, ethnic and civil rights groups in
opposition to the bill.

The proposed legislation aims to crack down on illegal aliens and pare
legal immigration from its current level of about 775,000 a year. It would
reduce the annual influx of legal immigrants, including those admitted for
employment and family reunification, by 24 percent for the first five years
and up to 43 percent after that. A similar bill scheduled for debate in the
House next week calls for somewhat lower reductions.

Simpson's move to delete all provisions of concern to the business
community -- including a 36 percent reduction in the availability of
employment-based immigrant visas and restrictions on the hiring of
temporary foreign workers -- was intended to head off a bid to split the
bill so that it would deal only with illegal immigration. Simpson charges
that this would kill the bill's sections on legal immigration, including
his proposals to sharply reduce family immigration.

Simpson's chief critic in the Judiciary Committee, freshman Sen. Spencer
Abraham (R-Mich.), says he intends to try to split the bill when debate
resumes today. Simpson has said he will counter by invoking "personal
privilege" to delay such a vote.

Expressing support for the bill's "worker protection provisions," Reich
said reforms are especially needed in a program that allows admission of as
many as 65,000 skilled foreign workers for up to six years under "H1B"
visas. Too often, he said, the program has been "abused" by employers to
bring in workers whose chief qualification is not that they have unique
skills, but that they work cheaper than Americans.

He called for changes in the law, which he said permits companies to
fire their U.S. employees and replace them with "temporary" H1B workers.
"We're not advocating a ban on employment-based immigration," Reich
said. "We're not bashing immigrants or employers. We're not advocating a
`Fortress America.' What we are talking about here is giving American
workers a fair chance to get good jobs."

"At stake are hundreds of thousands of good jobs that should be
available to Americans," Kennedy said. He said he would offer amendments to
prohibit employers from replacing qualified U.S. workers with foreigners,
require firms to "recruit U.S. workers first," reduce the stay of temporary
foreign workers from six to three years and make employers contribute to a
training fund for American workers.

Business leaders insist the current system of employment-based
immigration brings in the world's "best and brightest" and helps America
keep its technological edge in an increasingly competitive global market.
But the Labor Department yesterday produced figures showing that 74
percent of H1B workers earn less than $50,000 a year and that 73 percent
are physical therapists or computer programmers. These are not the
"cream-of-the-crop, rare-to-find engineers" that business leaders often
invoke in defending the program, Reich said.

"It's like a guest-worker program for white-collar workers," said Rahm
Emanuel, a presidential aide on immigration policy.

Saying her story was "not unique," former computer programmer Julie
Cairns-Rubin told the news conference she was fired last year by SeaLand
Corp. in New Jersey after 18 years on the job and was required to train her
foreign replacement. "Pure greed is what's driving this practice," she
said.