Nixonian Wage Controls

I have not been following immigration "reform" closely, but I am aware that there is talk of the Senate voting on it without bothering to read it. After reading Mona Charen's piece about the immigration bill, I have a pretty good idea about why that might happen.

I also see lots of reasons to oppose the bill, which are related to why the Senate is so keen on delegating so much responsibility (read: blame) to bureaucrats:

It should be axiomatic that if a bill is 1,190 pages long, it is full of mischief, and this one is. Just as Obamacare hands lots of discretion about everything from medical school admissions to antibiotic ointments to the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the immigration law hands many crucial decisions to the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Labor. Labor would be empowered to question the personnel decisions of any firm that hired even one high skilled immigrant. The law further requires that immigrants be paid significantly more than native-born hires -- supposedly to prevent companies from replacing Americans with foreigners. But as Shikha Dalmia notes in Reason magazine, the more likely result will be that firms will choose to locate abroad.

Byron York reports that the bill sets pay scales for "Animal Breeders; Graders and Sorters; Farmworkers and Laborers, Crop, Nursery, and Greenhouse; and Farmworkers, Farm, Ranch and Aquacultural Animals." There are probably more wage controls in this bill than we've seen since the Nixon administration. [format edits, bold added]

We need a bill that removes illegitimate roadblocks to immigration, and we need to reform the process of acquiring citizenship. We don't need to merely tweak illegitimate controls, or dump enormous numbers of voters onto the rolls, or have the government running even more of the economy.

-- CAV