WASHINGTON — The lead Democrat steering an immigration overhaul through the Senate said Wednesday that he expects to have a bill ready by Labor Day that is more generous to highly skilled immigrant workers than those who are lower skilled and is tough on future waves of illegal immigration.
In an interview, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said an immigration bill can be done by the end of the year or early next year that works out disagreements between labor and business interests on the flow of legal foreign workers.
“I think we’ll have a good bill by Labor Day,” he said. “I think the fundamental building blocks are in place to do comprehensive immigration reform.”
Schumer said the way to get the bill done is to be very tough on future waves of illegal immigration. He said the U.S. should encourage legal immigration and find some kind of path for people now here to find a way to legal citizenship.
“We have a shortage maybe of engineers here or Ph.D.’s in physics, but we probably don’t have a shortage of people who can do construction work,” Schumer said.
The AFL-CIO and the Change to Win unions announced their support this year for immigration reform.
But the unions’ continued opposition to increases in visas for foreign workers is at odds with the demand by business for legal foreign workers in industries ranging from high technology to agriculture.
“I think one of the ways to bridge it is to look at the different areas of labor and where there are shortages and where there are not and where just workers are being brought in for exploitive purposes — broadly put meaning just get lower wages — rather than having a shortage,” Schumer said. “I think if you look at each broad field you can see that one size does not fit all.”
Ana Avendano, the AFL-CIO’s director of immigration policy, said the “one size doesn’t fit all” view is shared by labor.
