The following post has been revised and updated as of 3:45 pm on January 5:

For an article citing three economic studies by reputable research organizations, American Enterprise Institute, George Mason University and Cato Institute, rebutting Sessions' claims in his "Handbook" (see below) that legal immigrants take away jobs from American workers or lower their living standards, see:

http://reason.com/blog/2015/01/13/je...immigration-li

My revised original post follows:

Will legal employment-based immigration as we know know it continue in America without major negative changes if, as expected, Jeff Sessions is confirmed for the post of Attorney General in the Trump administration? If one takes a close look at his record and statements on this issue, the answer would have to be: don't count on it.

Two actions by Sessions, dating from around a year ago namely a bill that he sponsored in Congress which would have effectively gutted the entire H-1B program by making the eligibility requirements impossible for all but a very few people to meet, imposing high salary requirements well above usual prevailing wages, requiring hiring American workers first and imposing enormous employer fines for violations - see:

https://www.americanactionforum.org/...st-340000-jobs


and a January, 2015 "Handbook" that Sessions wrote for his fellow Congressional Republicans which advocated eliminating or vastly reducing most, if not all, other legal employment-based immigration, showed such bitter hostility to both skilled and less skilled employment-based immigration, that one can only wonder if there will be anything left of this category once Sessions assumes his new office. For a link to the "Handbook", see:

http://www.sessions.senate.gov/publi...h-congress.pdf

Most disturbing of all, on page 10 of the Handbook, Sessions has lavish praise for the notorious "Nordics"-only 1924 Coolidge era immigration law which virtually closed America's doors, not only to Asian, Middle Eastern and African immigrants, but also to Jewish and Catholic immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe.

Sessions, so far as I am aware, has never voted for union rights, minimum wage increases, equal pay legislation or other measures that would really benefit American workers. What is his real reason for wanting to reduce legal immigration levels in general?

Why did Trump support this same objective of reducing legal immigration to "historical levels" in his August 31, 2016 immigration address?

Writer and commentator Michael Arnovitz provides a profound an incisive answer to this question in his carefully researched and brilliantly argued article in medium.com

Donald Trump and the Politics of Race

https://medium.com/@michaelarnovitz/...a7d#.u7u3oc4ry

As Arnovitz shows, and as I will be discussing in more detail in future posts, the real issue in Trump's immigration policies will be whether he (and other opponents of the 1965 immigration reform law which did away with 40 years of whites only immigration quotas under the previous 1924 Coolidge-era law that Sessions has such high praise for) will try to overturn that reform, which has been the foundation of America's immigration policy for the past half century, and take the country back to the overtly racially restrictive immigration policies of a century ago.

In this light, we may be seeing major changes, not only in H-1B visas, but in many other employment-based immigration programs, after January 20. How secure will employers and employees alike be in relying on the integrity of these programs if they are being administered by a president and attorney general who may have other employment-based immigration policy goals, not just those of purportedly raising the living standards of American workers?
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Roger Algase is a New York immigration lawyer and a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School. For more than 35 years, Roger has been helping mainly skilled and professional immigrants obtain work visas and green cards.

Roger's practice is focused in H-1B specialty worker and O-1 extraordinary ability work visas, and green cards through labor certification and opposite sex or same sex marriage. His email address is algaselex@gmail.com