The pandemic has permanently shuttered businesses, destroying millions of jobs. Economists are warning that massive job losses from automation are coming soon; even workers with college degrees are vulnerable.

Yet President Biden’s immigration bill will hugely expand our future labor force, forcing even more competition for jobs and reducing wages. Big money loves Biden’s bill.

Here’s the plan: 11 million citizens of foreign countries, illegally residing here, and anyone who arrived by January 2021 will be rewarded for breaking our laws with a path to citizenship. Amnesty number eight: almost no prosecutions for identity theft, document fraud, or penalties and interest for unpaid taxes. Almost no punishment for employers who knowingly hire illegal workers, and almost nothing about asylum fraud. In short, there is little in this bill to discourage the next group from coming.

Although many undocumented  immigrants are willing to work at low wages, they didn’t come to America expecting their children to do these jobs. They do these jobs to get here, and with citizenship, they take better paying jobs in trades and manufacturing, expanding middle class labor markets, and stagnating wages. Rewarding the illegal pipeline with multiple legalization schemes is a race to the bottom for all Americans, immigrant and native born, and a slap in the face to those employers and legal immigrants who played by the rules. And thanks to the wage-depressing impacts of illegal workers, one Harvard economist estimates Americans lose up to $118 billion per year in potential earnings.

Hundreds of thousands of people from Honduras, Liberia, Sudan, Nicaragua, etc., were given temporary protected status when their countries had problems. But when the State Department decided their countries were safe, they didn’t go home, and we didn’t enforce the law. Under Biden’s plan, everyone gets a path to citizenship.

There’s a simple solution to illegal immigration and visa overstays: make E-Verify mandatory, requiring all employers to verify work authorization. States with mandatory E-Verify laws saw a 40% drop  in new undocumented immigrants one year after enactment. President Obama required all federal contractors to use E-Verify. Ignoring the fact that E-Verify is already used in 57% of all new hires nationwide, is endorsed by the US Chamber of Commerce and other business groups, is used by Hannaford and over 2,000 other Maine employers, the Biden bill merely establishes a commission to search for improvements to workplace verification.

The Biden proposal also massively increases legal immigration, allowing 4 million foreign nationals currently waiting for family-based visas to enter immediately, along with raising the caps for non-nuclear family, exploding chain migration numbers. Chain migration is the main reason immigration numbers have quadrupled since 1960. Is chain migration necessary to “keep families together” as Democrats claim? Many American families travel to visit each other at holidays. We could expand travel visas for extended family without creating endless chains of people seeking citizenship and jobs.

The Biden proposal also calls for providing green cards to all foreign STEM graduates. Universities facing shrinking enrollments have aggressively recruited foreign students, and lobbied for the “staple a green card” benefit, along with tech companies; two powerful lobbies working to give away our best jobs. And that’s why 71% of tech workers in Silicon Valley are foreign born. People  largely voted for Trump because he promised to protect our jobs. Do we want him back?

America has a choice: High immigration and stagnant wages, or less immigration, tighter labor markets and higher wages. We can’t have both. Sens. King and Collins, and Reps. Pingree and Golden will be voting on Biden’s bill. Let’s see where their priorities lie.

Jonette Christian of Holden is a founder of Mainers for Sensible Immigration Policy. Her website is mainesensibleimmigration.org.