Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) said during an interview over the weekend that the U.S. needs to crack down on illegal immigration but also needs to have legal immigration.
Lawler’s remarks, which he made during a Sunday interview on ABC News, come after intense debate erupted on social media about legal immigration, specifically surrounding high-skilled foreign labor.
“Number one, we all agree we need to secure the border,” Lawler said on “This Week.” “We’ve had a disaster under Joe Biden, 10.5 million migrants flood into the country. Billions of dollars wasted of taxpayer money in New York, for instance, on free housing, clothing, food, education and healthcare for illegal immigrants. So the current system is broken. We need to secure the border. We all agree with that. That has to be priority number one.”
“But here’s a reality that we have to deal with. By the end of the century, we’re projected to have a population decline,” he continued. “Our birthrate in the last 15 years has dropped from two children per woman to 1.66 per woman. So the reality is we have a long-term population decline. We have a workforce shortage of doctors, nurses, engineers, home health aides, ad workers, construction workers, hospitality workers.”
“We need immigration. We need an immigration system that works, that is legal, and I fundamentally believe that you need to have a system that is focused on our economic needs as a country and a more merit-based immigration system than anything else,” he added. “My wife is an immigrant. I have been through this process with her. It is a fundamentally broken system.”
He said that it was critical for the growth of the U.S. economy to have the H-1B visa program.
“There’s no question we want an America in which Americans are employed, in which they are able to fill the needs of our workforce, which means we need to revamp our education system, our K-12 system,” he said. “We need vocational schools. We need to get kids on an earlier STEM trajectory so that they are becoming the engineers of tomorrow. But the fact is, India is producing a significant number more of engineers than we are. So it’s both a function of fixing our education system and having a legal immigration system that works.”
WATCH:
As Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy spar with some Trump supporters over support for H-1B work visas, GOP Rep. Mike Lawler tells @JonKarl that the visa program is “something that has obviously been beneficial to our economy.” https://t.co/6h9W3NP2Po pic.twitter.com/BtORRmCvO0
— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) December 29, 2024
