08/02/2017
CONTACT: Taylor Keeney • 804-543-7053 • taylor.keeney@navigatorsglobal.com
WASHINGTON – Compete America, a coalition dedicated to ensuring that the United States has the highly educated and innovative workforce necessary to grow the economy and create American jobs, issued the following statement today regarding the introduction of Senators Tom Cotton and David Perdue’s immigration legislation, the “RAISE Act.”
“We appreciate the focus Senators Cotton and Perdue are placing on the need to reform the country’s broken immigration system,” said Scott Corley, executive director of Compete America. “Unfortunately, the RAISE Act in its current form falls short of meeting the interests of U.S. employers, U.S. workers, and highly skilled immigrants. The RAISE Act is not a pro-highly skilled bill but rather an indictment of the family-based immigration system.”
“This legislation fails on two fronts,” Corley continued. “First, the RAISE Act doesn’t ‘raise’ the number of highly skilled-worker green cards necessary to ensure that the U.S. can in fact compete in a global economy. It doesn’t take into account the shortages businesses are currently facing and will lead to unfair competition and downward pressure on wages for US workers.”
“Second, this legislation shifts our immigration system to a big government, top-down, bureaucrats-know-best approach, with Washington, D.C. telling American employers who they should hire,” Corley added. “This act will increase, not decrease, the number of skilled immigrants competing with Americans for jobs.”
“Compete America is in favor of balanced reforms to high-skilled immigration programs,” concluded Corley. “These reforms should ensure that all employers are using these visas in the spirit Congress intended – to fill jobs requiring highly skilled professionals in fields where qualified US workers are harder to find – while also eliminating abuses in the system. We will continue to work with Congress to create a highly skilled immigration system that encourages economic growth and jobs in the U.S.”
To learn more about the benefits of highly educated foreign-born professionals to the U.S. economy, visit www.competeamerica.org.
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