They’re tying any Republican wage efforts to immigration enforcement.
As the future of Democrats’ plans to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour hangs in the balance — procedurally and politically — in the Senate, two Republican senators have an idea to tie the issue to another sensitive one: immigration enforcement. Sens. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Mitt Romney (R-UT) unveiled proposed legislation Tuesday that would gradually raise the minimum wage to $10 per hour by 2025. But it would also require all employers to use the federal government’s E-Verify program to screen out undocumented workers. The “Higher Wages for American Workers Act” is a messaging bill — unlikely to be adopted, but a direct counterproposal to a Democratic effort, spearheaded in the Senate by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), to include a phased-in minimum wage hike in the Covid-19 relief bill. The Democrats’ proposal would, over five years, more than double the current hourly federal minimum wage of $7.25, which has not been increased since 2009. Republicans have traditionally been opposed to efforts to increase the minimum wage. They have pointed to a Congressional Budget Office report, which presented mixed findings, as evidence that a minimum wage increase would hurt small businesses and the deficit, despite the CBO’s estimate that a $15 minimum wage would lift 900,000 people out of poverty. The CBO’s report projects the Democrats’ bill would raise wages for at least 17 million people. In a fact sheet, Romney and Cotton say their proposal would affect 3.5 million workers. (Some states, including Cotton’s own, already have minimum wages above $10 per hour.) The Romney-Cotton bill directly addresses the CBO’s finding that a $15 minimum wage would cost 1.4 million jobs, saying a smaller wage hike would drive wages up without facilitating as much job loss. Other studies suggest that a $15 minimum wage would have minimal to no effect on job loss.
