Effects of President George W. Bush’s proposed changes to border control in Texas and Arizona will be felt all the way in Iowa, one ISU professor said.

The president made visits last week to Texas and Arizona, which may lead to changes in border patrol. Peter Orazem, university professor of economics, said the border controls could greatly impact the low-skill job market in Iowa.

“Most of the illegal workers here are doing low-skill jobs for which language is not an issue,” Orazem said. “They are not going to be doing sales- or service-type jobs.”

There are between 10 million and 12 million illegal immigrants living the United States as of 2004, according to the Federation for American Immigration Reform Web site. The illegal resident population in Iowa was 24,000 in 2003, according to the Office of Policy Planning of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Orazem said he supports a guest worker program like the one the United States had until 1965, in which Mexican nationals could come and work with temporary work passes where they could be monitored by the government.

“I think it can work, in part; It’s obvious the current system hasn’t had much of an impact whatsoever,” he said. “The current efforts to patrol the borders are largely ineffective.”

In his weekly radio address Saturday, Bush outlined a comprehensive strategy to overhaul border security. He said he wanted to fix unnecessary provisions in immigration laws while at the same time increasing the number of border patrol agents in order to return most of the illegal immigrants caught trying to cross the border. Bush claimed to have increased border security funding by 60 percent since he took office, and in that time, agents have caught 4.5 million illegal immigrants.

U.S. Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, is another force on illegal immigration who is pushing for changes to the system. Summer Johnson, King’s press secretary, said he is serving on the House Judiciary Committee’s immigration subcommittee and Immigration Reform Caucus to facilitate the changes.

Johnson said King wrote a bill designed to reduce tax deductions for companies that pay benefits to illegal workers and essentially reduce jobs for illegal immigrants.

Flavia Jimenez, immigration policy analyst for the National Council of La Raza, the largest Hispanic civil rights and advocacy group in the United States, said her group would be in favor of any bill that would deter an employer from employing undocumented immigrants. She said these undocumented workers are at a disadvantage in this country because they are paying millions of dollars in local, state and federal taxes into programs such as Social Security but cannot claim their benefits.

“What we are currently in favor of is a program that would allow undocumented immigrants to achieve legal status through a series of steps proving they have been working in the United States, paying taxes, have not committed crimes and are willing to pay a fine,” she said.

Many companies in the United States depend on sources of low-skilled labor to stay in business, Orazem said. He said there are economic benefits to having access to this type of labor in the country, and could potentially prevent outsourcing of jobs to Mexico. He also said making this type of labor legal could lower the cost of border surveillance.

“One of the concerns of border security after Sept. 11 is that if you have a large number of people in the country illegally and have a vested interest in trying to remain out of the eye of the government, it’s a potential threat to national security,” Orazem said.