A bipartisan group of six senators unveiled a framework for immigration reform on Wednesday that gets one thing right: mandatory E-Verify for all employers, with real penalties for companies that hire unauthorized workers. Everything else in the proposal amounts to an expansion of immigration dressed up in the language of economic competitiveness.

The proposal, led by Senators Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Mark Warner of Virginia, would roughly double the number of employment-based green cards from 140,000 per year, expand temporary work visas, and create a new category of "innovation visas" for foreign entrepreneurs. It frames these increases as necessary for American competitiveness. They are not. They are necessary for employers who prefer cheaper foreign labor to investing in the American workforce.

The Labor Shortage Myth

The framework rests on the premise that the United States faces crippling labor shortages that only immigration can solve. "Every farmer in North Carolina will tell you the same thing: they cannot find workers," Tillis said at a press conference.

What Tillis did not say is why farmers cannot find workers. They cannot find workers at the wages they are willing to pay. There is a difference between a labor shortage and a wage shortage, and American immigration policy has spent decades pretending otherwise.

When employers cannot fill positions, economic theory offers two responses: raise wages to attract domestic workers, or import foreign workers willing to accept lower pay. The first option benefits American workers. The second benefits employers and shareholders. The Senate framework chooses the second option and calls it reform.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics data the framework cites to justify its "labor market responsiveness" mechanism tells a more complicated story than its authors acknowledge. In sectors where wages have risen meaningfully, worker supply has followed. The construction industry, facing a widely reported labor shortage, has seen employment rise steadily in regions where wages have increased by 15 to 20 percent. The shortage is not absolute. It is a function of price.

What the Framework Actually Does

The key provisions reveal the framework's priorities. A points-based system for permanent residency would weight education, language proficiency, age, and job offers, modeled on the Canadian and Australian systems. This sounds meritocratic. In practice, it would create a pipeline of credentialed foreign workers who compete directly with American college graduates for professional positions in technology, healthcare, finance, and engineering.

The proposed reduction in family-based immigration categories is the framework's one concession to the restrictionist position. But the net effect of the proposal is a significant increase in total immigration. Doubling employment-based green cards while modestly reducing family-based admissions does not produce a smaller immigration system. It produces a larger one with a different composition.

The "innovation visa" for foreign entrepreneurs is the most transparent giveaway. It allows foreign nationals to obtain residency by committing to create jobs in the United States, with no requirement that those jobs go to American workers. Silicon Valley has lobbied for this provision for years, and its inclusion tells you exactly whose interests the framework serves.

What Actual Reform Would Look Like

Immigration reform that prioritizes American workers would start from a different premise: the total number of immigrants admitted annually should decrease, not increase, until the domestic labor market tightens enough to produce meaningful wage growth for American workers across all skill levels.

This means reducing overall visa numbers, not reshuffling categories. It means enforcing E-Verify universally, as the framework proposes, but pairing it with lower caps rather than higher ones. It means ending the Optional Practical Training program that allows companies to hire foreign graduates of American universities at a tax advantage over American citizens. It means requiring employers to demonstrate, credibly, that they have exhausted the domestic labor pool before turning to foreign workers, and setting the wage floor for sponsored positions well above the prevailing rate.

The United States admits more than one million legal permanent residents per year, plus hundreds of thousands of temporary workers on H-1B, H-2A, H-2B, and other visa categories. This level of immigration depresses wages at the bottom of the labor market, increases housing costs in already-strained markets, and strains public services in the communities that absorb the largest inflows.

These are not nativist arguments. They are economic ones. Every serious labor economist, from George Borjas at Harvard to the National Academy of Sciences, has acknowledged that immigration at current levels produces modest aggregate gains that are captured almost entirely by employers and immigrants themselves, while imposing costs on native-born workers who compete for the same jobs.

The Political Reality

The framework's authors are betting that by making immigration about "economic competitiveness" rather than border security, they can build a coalition that avoids the culture war. This is clever politics but bad policy. Immigration is not primarily a competitiveness question. It is a question of whose interests the government serves: those of American workers and their families, or those of employers seeking to hold down labor costs.

The answer should not be difficult. The government of the United States exists to serve the people of the United States. Immigration policy should be designed to benefit Americans first, with the interests of potential immigrants and their prospective employers as secondary considerations. The Senate framework inverts this priority, and no amount of competitiveness rhetoric changes that fundamental fact.

Mandatory E-Verify is worth passing on its own. The rest of this framework should be scrapped and replaced with legislation that actually reduces immigration levels, raises wages for American workers, and puts the interests of citizens ahead of corporate labor arbitrage.