Wall Streets role in the immigration debate

President Bush, with Wall Street backing, is pushing hard for a policy that would legalize undocumented workers but keep them in a subservient status for more than a decade. His proposals would also relegate future lower-skilled status workers to perpetual servitude.

Hes using the righteous demand of legalization as a lever to move through what his administration and finance capital wanted all along. And finance capital wants it done this year, well before Bush leaves office.

The Wall Street Journal is supporting the passage of just such a business-friendly bill. Former Federal Reserve Bank chair Alan Greenspan and current chair Ben Bernanke have called for a flexible policy of increasing immigration for a higher labor force growth rate to increase investment and productivity, and lower unit labor costs and entitlement spending.

In January 2000, Greenspan concluded immigration was a key to the economic growth of the nineties. Bush made it a policy and was negotiating a temporary worker program with then Mexican President Fox until Sept. 11, 2001.

In November 2003, the Dallas Federal Reserve concluded in its paper U.S. Immigrant and Economic Growth: Putting Policy on Hold that the 9/11 adjustments had put potentially beneficial reforms such as a guest worker program on hold. A few weeks later, on Jan. 7, 2004, Bush called for a large new temporary worker program.

The paper argued that immigration was economically beneficial by providing workers when and where they are needed, adding, Immigration raises the speed limit of the economy by keeping wage and price pressures at bay.

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