The Republican and Democratic Parties have both released their draft 2024 party platforms this month. So it’s an opportune time for US businesses currently planning their 2025 hiring, international personnel transfers and global mobility budgets to consider the impact of the major parties’ platforms on business immigration after the election in November.
The Democratic Platform
The draft 2024 Democratic platform identifies four immigration goals, the first two of which are, at least in broad strokes, shared by Republicans:
- Secure the border;
- Reform the asylum system;
- Expand legal immigration;
- Support long-term undocumented individuals in order to keep families together.
Acknowledging that “lasting, comprehensive reforms require congressional action,” the draft platform states that President Biden “will push Congress to pass legislation” to achieve these goals. Securing the border was not part of the 2020 platform and is presumably a nod to widespread concern about the integrity of our land borders, in particular, our border with Mexico. The other goals are consistent with the 2020 platform, even if the draft 2024 platform lacks the detail and perhaps some of the ambition of the 2020 platform.
While US businesses would certainly benefit from an expansion of legal immigration, the Biden Administration can’t deliver on that without Congressional action.
The GOP Platform
The 2024 GOP platform explicitly seeks to restrict business immigration in the following ways:
- “Protect American Workers,” “Put American Workers First,” and “Hire American.”
- In the name of protecting US workers, the 2017-2021 Trump Administration made multiple attempts to issue regulations that, among other things, change how the prevailing wage was calculated in order to increase minimum compensation levels for the H1B and E3 (specialty occupation) temporary work visa and the PERM green card process. It’s reasonable to assume that these efforts would resume in a second Trump Administration.