The Cotton-Romney Deal: $10 Minimum Wage for Immigration Enforcement
NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLESenators Tom Cotton and Mitt Romney are offering a compromise. Under their new proposal, the minimum wage would rise to $10 by 2025, phasing in gradually once the pandemic ended. In addition, businesses would be required to use the “E-Verify” system to ensure their workers were in the country legally and eligible to work.
It’s something that should resonate with the public. Minimum-wage hikes, including big ones, are unfailingly popular; E-Verify has lopsided support in opinion polls as well. And it’s a good deal for immigration-restrictionist conservatives, because the wage hike is relatively modest while the immigration reform is substantial. The haunting questions are how many Democrats could support this without major changes and just how furious the business wing of the GOP will be.
On the minimum-wage side of the equation, $10 by 2025 is a decent-sized hike, but it’s not too ambitious. Indeed, it would be historically typical. The last time we hiked the minimum wage, we gradually phased it up to $7.25 in 2009, from $5.15; if that had been pegged to inflation, it likely would have ended up somewhere around $9.50 to $10 after 16 years. Ten dollars is also about half the nationwide median wage ($19.14 in 2019), a level at which job losses should be minimal or even nonexistent, depending on which academic studies you believe. And if nothing else, $10 is much less crazy than $15.
Further, the new wage would phase in more slowly for small businesses, and there would still be a lower “youth” minimum wage. The latter would be $6 when the overall minimum rose to $10, and employers could pay it for a young worker’s first 180 days. Unlike the current minimum wage, these numbers would automatically rise with inflation, specifically the “chained” version of the Consumer Price Index.
Now, any minimum-wage hike interferes with economic freedom and has the potential to destroy some jobs. It’s not something conservatives should take lightly. But if we’re going to have a minimum wage, $10 in 2025 is a fairly reasonable place to put it. Indexing the wage to inflation is the smart thing to do as well, both because it doesn’t make sense to have a minimum wage that declines in value every year and because automatic increases should blunt some of the energy for hiking it dramatically all at once.
Overall, this is not too big of a concession for the Right — and if it stops a later hike to $15 an hour, it might be an outright win.
The E-Verify side of the ledger is where things get interesting. E-Verify is a computer system that employers may use, voluntarily, to confirm applicants’ eligibility to work. Conservatives have long thought the program shouldn’t be voluntary. Jobs are the “magnet” that brings illegal immigrants to the U.S., and the work site is the best place inside the border to enforce immigration law. Something like 40 percent of illegal immigrants come legally but overstay their visas, so border enforcement cannot be the only way we address the problem.
Romney would make the program mandatory and take steps to improve it. Adult workers would have to provide a photo ID, states would be incentivized to share driver’s-license data with the system, and the government would make more of an effort to block or suspend Social Security numbers that are being misused.
There’s a risk the system wouldn’t work. In states that already have mandated E-Verify, employers have often ignored or evaded it. But having this requirement in place would be a win for conservatives and a chance to finally enforce immigration law.
Which makes it a huge concession for Democrats, unless they feel comfortable betting nothing will really change. Democrats don’t necessarily mind using E-Verify as a bargaining chip, but they typically want any mandate to go into effect after the illegal immigrants already in the country have been legalized. In the absence of a mass legalization, E-Verify would make it difficult for illegal immigrants, including those who’ve lived here for decades, to continue their lives in America. How many Democrats will sell out illegal immigrants for a minimum-wage hike that falls well short of $15?
The compromise also bodes poorly for the business wing of the GOP. Businesses would have to pay Americans more and stop hiring illegal immigrants.
There are ways to make the compromise more attractive to the Left and/or Big Business, but they’d cost conservative support. For example, the minimum-wage hike could go all the way to $15, perhaps with a tax credit to businesses to offset the job-killing costs. Or legalization could be folded in, though that might turn the talks into the usual immigration-reform debate and leave the minimum-wage hike in the background.
Cotton and Romney have suggested a policy combination that the public will love, and that could stop American businesses from exploiting illegal labor. The question is whether D.C. could learn to love it too.
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