The late Sen. J.W. Fulbright of Arkansas warned 40 years ago about the "arrogance of power," but it is alive and well in the U.S. Senate today. The world's greatest deliberative body has devolved to an order run by self-appointed "gangs" who seek to run the country without the nuisance of committees, other less important senators, or public input.
The latest Gang of Eight senators have proposed an immigration reform bill that could only have been drafted in secret, because anyone else could have told them their plan would never work.
The 867-page bill would create another new government bureaucracy, the Immigration and Labor Market Research Bureau, headed by a political appointee and charged with determining the number of workers needed by a wide range of businesses in future years — as if any government agency could ever know that.
And just to be sure the Gang of Eight pleased all its favorite interest groups, it didn't leave those decisions entirely to the new bureau, but instead wrote specific quotas into the law itself: Agriculture gets 337,000 visas; construction gets 15,000; high-tech industries get 115,000; other specifically named industries get 200,000. Small businesses that don't fit into these defined categories get none.
Now the Gang of Eight is busily trying to silence opposition, declaring that skeptics will be left behind as this freight train leaves the station. Its members are working hard to defeat the dozens of amendments the bill was sure to face once others finally started reading it.
A system in which government determines what types of businesses are eligible for visas, and how many workers they all need, cannot work. The current system — which nearly everyone agrees is badly broken — is based on that same flawed premise.
That's why the number of H-2B seasonable workers is capped at 66,000, even though there are several million such workers in the U.S. (which is why most are working illegally). That's why the alphabet soup of visa programs includes A-3 visas for foreign diplomats, B-1 for nannies, H-1A for agricultural workers, P for athletes, and dozens of others. It's why we have F-1 visas for students, but J-1 for professors. It's a mess, and it's why we have more than 12 million people in the U.S. illegally.
Why shouldn't all businesses, big and small, have a level playing field where employers and the free market — not government bureaucracy &mdsash; determine how many guest workers are needed?
Even the all-powerful Gang of Eight can never repeal the law of supply and demand. If they only allow 200,000 guest workers and the economy needs 250,000, the rest will come illegally — perpetuating the very problem Congress is trying to solve.
New polling shows a 2-1 majority of Americans say the number of guest worker permits must be based on employer demand, not government quotas. They apparently understand our economy better than some senators.
This gangland approach is not new. The last immigration reform effort in 2007 was hatched by what was then called the Gang of 12, and it failed spectacularly. So did a 1990 Gang of 7, which tried to end congressional perks; a 2008 Gang of 10 that proposed an energy independence bill; 2009's Gang of 6 Senate Finance Committee members who tried to negotiate a compromise on health care reform; and a 2011 Gang of 6 that led an effort to solve the debt ceiling crisis.
They all failed because America is not ruled by gangs, or by any eight senators who appoint themselves to make decisions for everyone. The 535 members of Congress represent over 300 million people. And our economy is powered by the creative ideas and productivity of those individuals and businesses, not by government categories or bureaucratic quotas dictating how many workers can have which type of jobs.
Helen E. Krieble chairs the Center for Opportunity, Protection, and Fairness. She runs an equestrian events center in Parker, Colo.