In a commentary released yesterday, titled, Immigration Reform is Everyone’s Business, Thomas Donahue, President and CEO of the US Chamber, talks sense about immigration:
The Chamber supports immigration because immigrants have always been a key to the success of our economy. Immigrants fill jobs that Americans don’t want or refuse to take, and will play a key role in alleviating inevitable worker shortages that will be created as aging Baby Boomers start retiring.
Here’s the Chamber’s plan: penalize undocumented workers with fines, extend permanent legal status to many immigrants after a long test period, allow employers to keep an essential part of their current workforce, and require that immigrants pass additional security checks and pay their taxes.
It’s important to ensure that American workers have a fair shot at job openings before they’re open to immigrant workers, and that’s a key part of our plan. We also need a fast and reliable way to match willing employers and willing employees, combined with visa limitations that fluctuate according to market needs. Finally, a reliable employment eligibility confirmation system that is easy to use will aid small businesses with deciphering federal immigration relations so that they can avoid having to hire expensive lawyers.
One thing is clear, however: we can’t simply round up every illegal immigrant and ship them back. There are an estimated 10.2 million undocumented workers in the United States. Their families include another 3 million children who are U.S. citizens. Aside from the inhumanity of separating children from their parents, it would take about 200,000 buses to carry these workers to our borders. Lined up, bumper to bumper, the bus convoy would extend over 1,700 miles and carry a population the size of Ohio. The results would paralyze our economy. That’s not going to happen.
Taken together, these proposals can help fix our broken immigration system and return business owners to doing what they do best: creating jobs.
So, unless you’re in the busing business or you’re a baby boomer who wants to be making beds in hotels or picking fruit in the Valley in your retirement years, enlightened self-interest should have you urging your reps in Congress to do something that makes sense regarding immigration ….
something that doesn’t further devolve federal responsibilities to state and local governments with no money attached;
something that doesn’t assume that closing our borders to all immigration is either desirable or possible;
something that realistically secures our borders against those who seek to harm us rather than serve or work with us;
something that isn’t so fraught with bureaucratic excess that the paperwork kills whole forests and small businesses;
something that doesn’t reflect or serve the protectionist, isolationist, nativist, jingoistic rhetoric too often infecting the current immmigration debate;
something that sounds like common sense and works in the real world.
Virginia Chamber? You’re next…
