Senators close in on immigration deal

WASHINGTON — Senators working on a sweeping immigration bill scrambled Friday to sketch out a deal before Congress takes a two-week recess, even as a last-minute dispute over wages for lower-skilled workers flared between business and labor groups.

The public clash between the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO over wages for lower-skilled workers underscored the high stakes involved in legislation that would dramatically reshape the U.S. immigration and employment landscape, putting 11 million illegal immigrants on a path to citizenship while allowing tens of thousands of new high- and low-skilled workers into the country.

The chamber and AFL-CIO, negotiating through the so-called Gang of Eight senators, had reached significant agreement on a new visa program to bring up to 200,000 lower-skilled workers a year to the country. The number of visas would fluctuate according to demand, and the workers would be able to change jobs and could seek permanent residency.

But the AFL-CIO was pushing for higher wages for the workers than the chamber had agreed to so far.

The dispute remained unsettled into the evening, but appeared unlikely to seriously derail work on the bill. The eight senators in the negotiating group, including Sens. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and John McCain, R-Ariz., were aiming to finalize as many details as possible before leaving town so that the recess could be devoted to drafting the legislation, which would then be made public when the lawmakers return in April.

“We’re close,” Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., another member of the group, said after one round of meetings Friday. “The biggest issue has always been the future flow” of workers. Flake said there were only “a few minor items” left to deal with apart from the Chamber of Commerce-AFL-CIO matter.

The AFL-CIO argued that the Chamber of Commerce was trying to pay below median wage for any given group of workers, but the chamber said it would pay about the same as American workers get.

In the case of housekeepers, for example, the chamber proposal would mean $8.44 per hour, which falls below the federal poverty level for a family of four, while the AFL-CIO position was $11.39 per hour, according to one official familiar with the labor perspective. The new visas would cover dozens of professions such as long-term care workers and hotel and hospitality employees.

As the day wore on, senators met hour after hour in a private chamber just off the Senate floor, and the chamber and AFL-CIO traded jabs, each accusing the other side of imperiling negotiations.

A proposal from the Gang of Eight that would divide the workers into three wage categories – two of them beneath median wage – was rejected by the AFL as insufficient, said Ana Avendano, assistant to the AFL-CIO president for immigration and community action. Avendano said the AFL proposed language stipulating that the new visas only should be used when employing foreign workers would not hurt wages and working conditions of U.S. workers, but that Republicans rejected that.

“It’s shocking to us that the Republicans are willing to hold up the bill and they’re saying that this bill is not moving forward without poverty level wages,” Avendano said. “So we’re hopeful that they will see the light and recognize how important this issue is and agree to move forward.”

Randy Johnson, the chamber’s senior vice president for labor, immigration and employee benefits, said the chamber simply wanted to stick with current law requiring that temporary workers be paid whichever is greater: what comparable American workers make or the prevailing wage as determined by the Labor Department.

“We’re puzzled as to why the unions would risk jeopardizing the negotiations by pushing for a provision that would drive up wages for immigrant workers above American workers,” Johnson said in a statement.

Senators seemed to take the last-minute jockeying in stride.

“People have a lot at stake here, this is a huge deal. We’re talking about the lives of 11 million people just to start with, so I understand why passions are high and sentiments are high,” McCain told reporters Friday.

“We just make steady progress,” he said. “We take two steps forward, and then we take a step back.”

McCain and Flake plan to visit the Arizona border next Wednesday with Schumer and Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., another Gang of Eight member, to inspect conditions there as they finalize their bill. The legislation would impose new border security requirements before any path to citizenship could begin, which is critical to Republicans in the group.