From the article:
Republican Senators Tom Cotton (AR) and David Perdue (GA) are unveiling a bill today at the White House that would slash the number of legal immigrants by about 50 percent over the next decade. This bill will be very similar to the RAISE Act that both Senators introduced in February, which I criticized here. Their new bill, if it is similar to RAISE, would cut legal immigration by about 50 percent by reducing family reunification, eliminating the diversity visa, and statutorily limiting refugees without increasing skilled-worker immigration. So much for the talking point that immigration hawks are “only against illegal immigration.”...
Congress’ 1964 cancellation of the Bracero program is most instructive. Bracero was a guest worker visa that allowed Mexican workers to migrate to American farms. Congress canceled it after intensive lobbying by labor unions and bad publicity due to flaws in the program. Economists Michael Clemens, Ethan Lewis, and Hannah Postel took advantage of this natural experiment that was “designed to raise domestic wages and employment by reducing the total size of the workforce” to see how American farm wages adjusted. Their superb paper found that canceling Bracero had little measurable effect on wages.
Figure 2 from their paper compares the quarterly average real farm wages by states where Braceros made up more than 20 percent of seasonal agricultural labor (black line), states where Braceros were fewer than 20 percent of the workforce (gray line), and states where there were no Braceros at all or only negligible numbers (dashed line). Clemens et al. write that “[t]he figure shows that pre- and post-exclusion trends in real farm wages are similar in high exposure states and low-exposure states. It also shows that wages in both of those groups rose more slowly after bracero exclusion than wages in states with no exposure to exclusion.” The farmers did not adapt to the decline in legal migrants by raising wages. Instead, they mechanized and planted less labor-intensive crops.
The similarities between Bracero’s cancellation and the Cotton-Perdue bill are enough to make this new research a compelling reason to reject the bill out of hand.