Immigration Bill Incentivizes Employers To Fire Americans and Hire Amnestied Immigrants; Immigration and Obamacare’s Employer Mandate

Mish's by noreply@blogger.com (Mike Mish Shedlock)  /  1h  //  keep unread  //  preview Immigration Bill Incentivizes Employers To Fire Americans and Hire Amnestied Immigrants; Immigration and Obamacare’s Employer Mandate +TAG Obamacare is bad enough in and of itself. An immigration bill in the Senate is about to compound the problem.  Brietbart reports Senate Bill Incentivizes Employers To Fire Americans and Hire Amnestied Immigrants.  Under the Gang of 8’s backroom immigration deal with Senators Schumer, Corker and Hoeven, formerly illegal immigrants who are amnestied will be eligible to work, but will not be eligible for ObamaCare. Employers who would be required to pay as much as a $3,000 penalty for most employees who receive an ObamaCare healthcare “exchange” subsidy, would not have to pay the penalty if they hire amnestied immigrants.  Consequently, employers would have a significant incentive to hire or retain amnestied immigrants, rather than current citizens, including those who have recently achieved citizenship via the current naturalization process. Following a link from the above article, Phil Klein at the Washington Examiner explains further in Immigration and Obamacare’s employer mandate  As the implementation of Obamacare approaches, there have been many news reports about companies considering cutting back full-time workers to part-time, or taking other actions to get around the mandate penalties. The immigration bill would offer employers another way out –hiring fewer American citizens and more immigrants with provisional legal status. It’s not surprising that this unintended consequence hasn’t yet been resolved, because there’s no easy fix. One way of eliminating the problem would be to get rid of the employer mandate in Obamacare altogether – which would be a non-starter for Democrats. The other way would be to give noncitizen immigrants with provisional status access to Obamacare’s benefits – which would destroy any hopes of garnering Republican votes. The issue was never addressed in any of the more than 200 amendments proposed when the immigration legislation made its way through the Senate Judiciary Committee. And so here we are. Obamacare encourages hiring part-time workers over full-time workers and an immigration bill, if passed as it currently sits, would encourage hiring of amnestied immigrants over US citizens.