From the article:
In President Trump's America, anti-immigration animus is fast becoming the main organizing principle of the Grand Old Party. Not fiscal responsibility. Not the free market. Anti-immigrant fever.
For proof, look no further than the recent antics of two prominent Republicans: Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), both of whom have worked with the White House and floated plans to sacrifice traditional conservative economic principles to promote a harsh immigration agenda...
And the claim that a smaller workforce means more plentiful and higher-paying jobs for native workers is laughable on its face. Women's participation in the labor market doubled in the latter half of the 20th century, massively expanding the American workforce. By Cotton's logic, that should have produced rampant unemployment among American men and cratered male wages. But America's long bouts of full employment, including the one it is experiencing right now when we are in an alleged age of "mass immigration," offer ample proof against that thesis. That's because women didn't steal men's jobs, they created their own opportunities as America's dynamic market economy deployed their talents and skills to deliver new goods and services to consumers.
The same is true for foreign workers. Studies have repeatedly shown that even a sudden and large influx of poor foreign laborers has no big long-term negative impact on native wages. Even the short-term affect is often mild to negligible. Indeed, after the Mariel boatlift crisis in 1980, when Fidel Castro allowed 125,000 Cubans to flee to Florida, the wages of low-skilled Florida workers, with the possible exception of high-school dropouts, actually went up.
If expanding the workforce doesn't diminish American wages or job prospects, shrinking it, as the RAISE Act would, won't boost them either. Indeed, the Center for Global Development's Michael Clemens has found that the termination of the Barcero guest worker program with Mexico in 1964 shrank the seasonal agricultural labor force by up to 20 percent. However, the wages of American workers in affected states went up not one bit.