The editors of Bloomberg attempt to outline the contours of a comprehensive immigration reform package that they think might actually get enacted into law. After praising President Biden’s early rescinding of President Trump’s executive orders related to immigration, they’re more critical of his views on comprehensive reform:
Long-term immigration reform is a different matter. The challenge here is to strike a difficult balance — one that resolves the status of the millions of people living in the country illegally, builds a system to promote the additional immigration the country needs, and ensures that future illegal immigration is kept under control. Biden’s proposal rightly provides an eight-year pathway to citizenship for most of the 11 million people thought to be living in the U.S. without legal status, but it lacks an effective plan to strengthen immigration enforcement alongside. Critics who deride the plan as “amnesty first, enforcement never†have a point. As it stands, the proposal risks aggravating the problem of illegal immigration. Its prospects of becoming law look minimal.
Biden and his team need to start over.
The components they propose include:
- Obligatory universal E-Verify
- Complete an entry-exit system for travel and student visa holders as was mandated by Congress decades ago
I agree with both of those but I would add the following:
- Add a guest worker program, with particular expansion for Mexican workers
- Substantial penalties on employers for violating the E-Verify requirements
- Abolish the lottery
- Abolish the family ties and sponsorship program
- Establish requirements for legalization of the status of individuals brought to the U. S. illegally as children, potentially including a path to citizenship for them. Enforce them.
- Impose penalties on public officials who do not show due diligence in enforcing immigration laws
- Greatly curtailed or abolished H1-B and L1 visa programs. They absolutely, positively should not be stalking horses for driving wages lower as is the case now.
Contrary to what some believe I think that a comprehensive immigration reform bill that included substantial provisions for enforcement could gain bipartisan support. I also think that activists who will accept nothing less than open borders are as much an impediment to immigration reform as those who don’t want any immigration at all. The preponderance of the evidence suggests that most Americans are somewhere in between and that’s what the contours of the reform should be, too.
Sure, compromise. But enforcement? We don’t have thee stomach for it.
If immigrants are willing to drag their infants and toddlers hundreds of miles in the open air relying on the kindness of strangers for sustenance, show up dirty, hungry, bedraggled at the border, they’ve got us, they know that and we know that.
While you may be right about reluctance to enforce our immigration laws on individual immigrants, there would be no such reluctance to enforce them against employers, particularly small employers who employ many of the illegal immigrants.