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Friday, August 11, 2006
Hearings hold the key to laws for immigrants
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Plain-spoken Republican U.S. Rep. Charlie Norwood of Augusta pulls no punches.
About the immigration bill passed by the Senate, he has these observations:
• “That bill is absolutely terrible. It’s the worst piece of legislation I have seen in the 12 years I have been in Congress.”
• “This bill in the Senate is a joke. It is a Democratic bill sponsored by rogue Republicans like McCain” that being, of course, the rogue Republican U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). “It is a Kennedy bill that McCain has got Republicans to vote for.” That being Ted Kennedy, the Democratic senior senator from Massachusetts, who joined with McCain and U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) in writing the Senate bill.
• “They passed a bill so bad that you could throw out half of it, and you still couldn’t go to conference with it.” Conference will be the House-Senate meeting to resolve differences between the two bills.
When might that be? “We usually need to have a cleansing and that usually occurs in November,” says Norwood. Agreement could come before then, but only about 15 working days exist before the elections. Norwood’s prediction is that the lame-duck Congress, meeting between Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve, with voters having just spoken, may be when the gaping differences between the secure-borders-first House bill and the more comprehensive Senate bill are resolved.
On Monday in Gainesville and Tuesday in Dalton, House members will hold public hearings to examine consequential and under-publicized provisions of the Senate bill.
The hearings are “to shed greater light on as many of the provisions of the Senate bill as possible and to provide some background as to the consequences if we were to move forward with it in any serious way,” says U.S. Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), speaking Friday from El Paso, Texas, where he had gone with other members of the House to inspect border security.
Price is convinced that “once the American public appreciates and understands what is in the Senate bill, they will speak even louder than they have about their desire to have the House version.”
Monday’s hearing will focus on a provision that Price and Norwood say came late to the Senate bill. It’s one of those Big Labor provisions that inflates the cost to taxpayers of all federal buildings and other construction projects.
At issue in Gainesville, says Price, is the Davis-Bacon language inserted in the Senate bill “which states that illegals will be required to be paid more than legal U.S. citizens in the State of Georgia for any job they do. It’s so confounding because if they’re illegal, they should not be getting any benefits at all. Anybody hired could tell their employer that they are here illegally, and the employer would be required to pay them the highest prevailing wage.”
The U.S. Labor Department determines the prevailing wage, not the labor market in any state or community. It is, therefore, considerably higher than local wage rates. “These prevailing wage rates are usually equivalent to union wages and are typically well above market rates,” writes Heritage Foundation policy analyst James Sherk. “In California, for example, prevailing wages are 35 [percent] to 55 percent above market rates. Carpenters in Los Angeles earn $21.56 an hour in the market but $31.71 an hour under Davis-Bacon.”
Davis-Bacon is a Depression-era law written initially to protect unionists from cheap black labor. As revised over the years, it also includes fringe benefits to be calculated into prevailing wage. The GOP has long opposed Davis-Bacon as a cost-padder on federal contracts.
The difference between Davis-Bacon as it exists, and as written into the Senate version of the immigration bill, as Price notes, is that in one instance the higher costs are borne by taxpayers across the country. In the other, in ordering coverage for illegals, the higher costs are passed through to individuals, home-buyers for example.
What’s more, illegal immigrants would be paid government-set wages while the native-born carpenter or plumber next to them could be paid real market-rate wages.
The hearings, while dismissed by some critics as a House publicity stunt, have real merit. Because some of a bill’s most consequential provisions slide in at the last minute, a breather that allows both sides an opportunity to argue specifics should be a requirement before final language is drafted.
There should be no surprises, no phony promises. Bring ‘em on. Explain it all. Plain, clear and open.
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