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seasonal agricultural workforce;34 both parties hesitate to upset the economy by
attempting to send them home.35
Only about 66,000 unskilled immigrants are permitted to enter the country legally to seek
work each year. Businesses seeking unskilled labor say that native-born Americans will not
take such jobs and that 66,000 is not enough. They also object to being tasked with
worker verification, saying it amounts to a law enforcement function.36 On the other hand,
the workplace is the most likely place to identify those who enter the country legally but
overstay their visas. That group makes up an estimated 40 percent of the country’s 12
million illegal immigrants.37
Under current law, companies are required to review two forms of government-issued
identification to verify employees’ legality. Employers are likely to take immigrant workers
at their word, however, because the alternative is to hire American-born workers who
would demand higher pay. The government, for its part, has been inclined to look the
other way because such wage hikes would raise the cost of living for everyone. Workplace
enforcement has thus been infrequent at best, and declined further in the aftermath of
9/11 as the government diverted its resources to fighting terrorism. The Washington
Post reported that the government scaled back workplace enforcement operations by 95
percent between 1999 and 2003, while the number of employers prosecuted each year
for unlawfully hiring immigrants dropped from 182 to four.38
U.S. policymakers and especially the Republican Party have been sharply divided on
whether immigration reform should include a guest-worker program and a path toward
citizenship for illegal aliens. The 2006 House and Senate bills largely reflected the two
approaches to this issue. The House version represented the “enforcement first” camp,
which supports—in addition to the border fence and increased penalties for employers of
illegal immigrants—making it a crime to assist illegal immigrants and raising illegal
immigration from a civil violation to a felony. An “earned citizenship” approach, supported
by the 2006 Senate bill, would have instituted a guest-worker program and a path to
citizenship for many illegal immigrants already living in the country.

Various proposed guest-worker programs would allow businesses to give temporary work
visas to resident illegal immigrants or new migrants if the employers can document that
American workers will not take the jobs they are seeking to fill. The president and many
Democrats insist that such a program would provide a legal way to fill these jobs while
encouraging the undocumented to “come out of the shadows” and helping to win Mexico’s
cooperation in securing the southern border.39Current temporary-worker programs admit
only 250,000 to 300,000 individuals annually, with most slots reserved for highly skilled,
specialized workers.40
Opponents argue that guest-worker programs would only aggravate the current problem
of immigrants taking jobs from low-skilled American workers and depressing wages. Labor
economist George Borjas has lent support to this point of view. Backing his arguments is a
recent report from the Center for Immigration Studies, which asserts that only 9 percent of
the net increase in jobs for adults between March 2000 and March 2005 went to people
born in the United States.41 Moreover, immigrants comprise more than 40 percent of
adults in the labor force without high school diplomas, as opposed to 15 percent of the
total adult workforce.42 However, other economists have conducted studies showing that
native-born Americans with less education are not significantly harmed by immigration.
David Card, an influential member of this camp, argues that the price paid by native

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