We continue to play these little games with immigration reform. Today the news reported “More than 1,600 illegal immigrants who are not considered security threats will be allowed to stay in the U.S. after a review by the Obama administration…. But the administration is not offering any positive legal status to illegal immigrants permitted to stay.”
Although I support offering legal status to people who are here and follow the rules, I think it’s smart to not offer legal status to only those who got caught or else it would encourage people to report themselves to authorities to get legal status. It would be chaotic and the government wouldn’t have the resources ready to process correctly. We need an intentional and strategic system.
The AP quoted House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith as calling the policy "backdoor amnesty."
What is the only thing that anti-immigrants call any reasonable initiative that attempts to take a step forward in regards to reform? Amnesty! It’ll encourage more people to come! If you grant in-state tuition or legal status to kids who graduate from high school so that they can go to college, then drones of people will start crossing the border!
I don’t think so, and even if it did encourage a few more people to pay the $5K+ a person and risk their lives to cross the border, it’d be attracting the type of people we want here – people who value and are willing to sacrifice for education. We‘d attract more people who risk their lives so that their children can have the educational opportunities that they themselves were never provided.
Amnesty isn’t a bad word, especially if it’s done in a smart and strategic way that is as fair as possible for everyone. Whatever the word, an effort to do something is called a solution to a challenge. The other “solution” will never fly because a majority of this country will never support kicking out people who have established their lives here, work hard, follow the rules, and are willing to pay a reasonable fine for breaking a law that just a few years ago wasn’t as talked about or enforced. Would a majority support deporting those who commit crimes? Yes, because deportation for breaking serious laws in many cases is a reasonable consequence. Would a majority agree that we should make it harder for people to come in following an amnesty? Yes, because we can’t just have open borders. But should we kick out good people who have been here since before we cracked down on immigration and are trying to do things right? I have faith that more than 50% of our country has too much heart to say yes.
What happened to 4 years ago when a Republican senator, who was later chosen as the Republican presidential nominee, co-proposed a bill that would have that would have provided legal status and a path to citizenship for the 12 to 20 million illegal immigrants? That was in 2007, not too long ago.
What the Republican presidential candidates are saying now is quite different, with the exception of Newt, who I’m still not a fan of. But the reasons for these changes aren’t there. Not many people can say that illegals have taken away their jobs because many of those jobs aren’t being taken by U.S. Americans when they leave, as evidenced recently in Alabama. Yes they have pushed down wages but simple wage laws could solve that. And crime rates for immigrants are not higher than that of U.S. citizens. I actually tried really hard to find statistics that say that immigrants commit crimes at a higher rate because I thought that it would be good statistic to use to promote my book “What Every Immigrant Needs to Know”. Immigrants commit more crimes because they don’t know the laws, right? I couldn’t find that evidence anywhere. Yes immigrants still commit crimes and my book will still reduce crime rates because the crimes that immigrants often do get in trouble for are laws they don’t fully understand.
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