MONTGOMERY — High levels of immigration into the United States lowers the wages of American workers, according to former U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions.
Sessions told Thursday's attendees of a meeting of the Federalist Society at Faulkner University’s Jones School of Law that high immigration levels can be destabilizing.
“If you don’t have open borders, you have to decide who gets in and how many. If you believe in that, well what do you do if people just walk across the line in huge numbers? I was in Peru and I saw with an ambassador and it was like 60% of the people of Peru said they’d go to the United States if they could. Nicaragua was about 50 or 40%. Billions of people would like to come to the United States,” Sessions said.
Sessions spoke to the group about his career in public service as an Alabama and U.S. Attorney General and former U.S. Senator. He was one of the first Republicans to discuss the negative consequences of America’s illegal and legal immigration systems on American workers.
“We admit a million people a year to permanent legal residence with a guaranteed pathway to citizenship. It becomes destabilizing and it absolutely pulls down wages of American workers. This is not a debate. You can flood any field with low-income foreign workers and the wages come down. I just think that we have every right as a nation, as a matter of fact every nation in the world to my knowledge has some limit on it. The challenge of today is: are we just going to not enforce it or are we going to enforce it? I think we should enforce it,” he added.
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