Obstruction: Path to Citizenship

Hundreds of business leaders, agriculture experts and farmers and clergy flooded the Halls of Congress to press for immigration reform this last week — for over a hundred Republican congress people — like it or not — immigration reform will become a hot topic again in coming weeks.
These hundred congress men and women hold the key to the entire country’s future as immigration reform is the key to a resurrected Republican Party that is all that stands between the country and an Obama-created monster Nanny State, as President Obama would say, PERIOD! A Nanny state run by broken promises and regulations written by faceless bureaucrats.
The business and agriculture people will be pressing “congresistas” hard because they want more and better visas for foreign college graduates who are educated here but can’t stay to work when they graduate from the world’s finest universities.
Agriculture people want mass work visas that don’t exist today but are needed in the hundreds of thousands to provide a stable and steady work force of the finest farm workers in the world, the Mexican young male.
The Clergy wants Congress to vote for an immigration reform that at its base is morally good and reflects a moral nation that needs immigrants and wants those immigrants treated with graciousness, appreciation and with an attitude of BIENVENIDOS, welcome.
All these items are part of the Senate bill S744 that passed the Senate months ago with a truly bi-partisan vote of 68 to 29.
Critical to the Senate bill’s passage was a monstrous budget addition for thousands of Border Patrol and technological toys for them to use and hundreds of miles of fencing. None of these three budget items are necessary for these reasons:
1. The traditional Mexican young male surplus labor pool is rapidly disappearing in most of Mexico as government birth control educational programs have cut the Mexican woman’s birth rate from seven (7) 20 years ago to less than three (3) today. There simply aren’t as many 20 year old young Mexican men as there were five or ten years ago to jump the border.
2. With legal work permits available to the newly legalized workers, who would pay smugglers to sneak them into the U.S. for thousands of dollars when the work permit would cost but a handful of dollars?
3. The E-verify feature of the Senate Bill will survive the House bill (s) and slam the door shut on most illegal alien hiring.
Experts, congressmen and immigration advocates can agree that these items are acceptable to almost all except hard core opponents.
Where they – Hard Core opponents — flex their muscles is, on two critical elements of the Senate bill:
(A) A path to citizenship for illegal aliens who came voluntarily as adults and knew they were breaking various U.S. laws;
(B) Legalization of those here now (It should be noted that those brought here illegally as children are generally accepted by most congressmen as to be handled differently including legalization and a path to citizenship).
The “path to citizenship” is critical for Democrat support, we are told by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and others, but is it?
Isn’t bringing millions (11 million) illegally present people here “out of the shadows” and checking their backgrounds for criminal activity as well as collecting fees and some taxes worthwhile? Most congressmen can agree to that for there aren’t enough buses to fill with people being arrested, fed and deported, nor are there enough cops, jails and court houses to process 11 million people.
That is not a very acceptable photo op either except for hard core anti-immigrant voices like Pat Buchanan and his ilk.
So, there are a number of provisions in the Senate bill that most can agree are acceptable. There are problems with a legalization program and a path to citizenship.
To the rescue is California Republican Congressman Darrell Issa with a realistic compromise bill that will legalize qualified men and women who are here illegally if they have no criminal records and meet other conditions. The legalization would be for 6 years during which the people could apply for a regular Permanent Resident Card (Green Card) and stay thereafter if their application is approved.
There would be no “path to citizenship.”
Suggestion: The 6 year period be lengthened to 10 years (that approaches the 13 year period before a path to citizenship in the Senate bill).
As to no “path to citizenship” that Democrats insist on, drop it and let some future congress tackle it.
Legalization, work permits, E-verify, more Border Patrol/enforcement and the changing demographics of the Mexican labor market all combine to cut illegal immigration to negligible numbers that 40,000 Border Patrol Agents can chase all over the desert.
As Congressman Issa has said many times, the “Border Patrol should be chasing criminals, not bus boys. ###

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