I'd be 100 percent supportive of a minimum wage - kind of industry specific, maybe regionally specific - for guest workers, so that we're not creating incentives for employers to bring in immigrants to lower the price of labor.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The only area that I would agree with minimum wage is in immigration reform, the guest worker program.
On balance, I am a supporter of the minimum wage going up. We've got to be very careful what we wish for because some employers - and there could be a lot of them - will be scared away from hiring new people or creating incremental hours for part-time people as a result of that wage going up.
Raising the minimum wage seems to all economists to, at the very least, fail to 'raise' employment, and we'd all like to see better inclusion of low-skilled workers into good-paying jobs.
I for one believe that we absolutely need an improved guest worker program, one that holds immigrants and employers accountable and yet still enables us to get a crop out of the ground in south Georgia.
The minimum wage now in our country, I think we've set that, so there are a lot of people have benefited from it in our country, but I think we ought to review how much it ought to be, and whether or not we ought to have increases in the minimum wage.
I would be open to a proposal that would have some minimum tax level for everyone.
I do favor guest workers, H1B visas and student visas.
Improving the outlook for U.S workers isn't about creating millions of minimum-wage jobs. It is about creating sustainable, skilled employment that allows Americans to earn a fair wage with benefits that allows them to pay for housing and food on the table and sustain a middle-class lifestyle.
Mr. Speaker, our Nation depends on immigrants' labor, and I hope we can create an immigration system as dependable as they are.
Literally, if we took away the minimum wage - if conceivably it was gone - we could potentially virtually wipe out unemployment completely because we would be able to offer jobs at whatever level.