I hear you Chrish, as a independent who voted Dem across the board in the last election. I will vote Rep across the board in the next election because of this mainly Dem amnesty bill, even though Im much closer to the Dems on most issues. The Dems turned their back on those of us at the low end who have to compete with Illegals for jobs. They depress wages now, do the Dems believe that giving them amnesty is going to raise wages. Give me a break. What a disgrace we just saw. Harry Reed and Ted (the amnesty king) Kennedy saying this is a good bill and its the best we can do. The CBO put out #s on this bill last week. It would only decrease Illegal Imm. by 25% for border crossing and when you figure in Visa overstays it went down to around 13%. WHAT A JOKE? + it would cost 30 billion dollars not to mention the heritage foundations report that just the socialSec,medicare,medicaid would cost 2.6 Trillion dollars. This was nothing but amnesty and at a cost that could devastate our country.
I was so dissappointed in the Dems, I never heard HReed,HClinton,BObama,TKennedy or any other supporters of this amnesty talk about making sure 1st that we make sure that we are looking out for and taking care of AMERICAN CITIZEN workers and that this amnesty will not hurt them by costing them jobs or depressing their wages. Very sad that us working class people no longer matter to them.
If the Dems really cared about this country and AMERICAN CITIZEN WORKERS they would have proposed something like this.
This whole debate is such a shame. Immigration is so easy to fix they just dont want to do it. 3 or 4 phases.
Phase 1. Legislate all the money.
New border patrol agents, Interior enforcment agents, Border fence and new technology for virtual fence, computer system for tracking everyone who enters and leaves the country, employment verification system, imigration judges. End the anchor baby program and Amend the constitution stating for birthright citizenship 1 parent must be a US citizen. Birthright citizenship had to do with slavery it wasnt meant for this. Pass a law making fines 1 million dollars for each Illegal you hire + 1 million a day for every day it can be proved the Illegal worked for you + revoke your business lic. and never allow you to get another.
After all this is done and operational were ready to move to phase 2.
Phase 2.
Give business community amnesty from this point until Phase 3 is finished so they can comply. The new fines are meant for after this whole process is set up anyway. However it doesnt give them amnesty from any investigation that was going on before this time.
Require all Illegals to register so we can find out the true # here, ( I bet if the estimate is 10-20 million there is somewhere between 25-35 million.) also all employers must verify all their workers. Let it be know that any Illegal who doesnt register if caught in the country after the registation process is done you will deported within 24 hours and put on a banned for life list from ever entering the country again.
Once employers know how many Illegals they have, make them list all the jobs on a goverment Immigration website where it must stay for 5 business days so that any American citizen who wants one of those jobs can have them. Get every community organization involved especially in inner cities where their is high unemployment. The goverment can offer small relocation loans and for low income people grants to anyone who wants to take one of these jobs but maybe doesnt have any money to go to them. Just talking like a couple hundred dollars enough to get them their and keep them fed until they get a check. (Gas money,food stamps for a 2 weeks) somethng like that.
Phase 3
Now with any job left the companies can apply for temp workers to fill those postions, but every 6 months they must relist any job held by a temp worker. Now that we see what this countries worker needs are now we could look at whether we need to keep the temp workers just that, temp or are these permenant jobs where we need to put more people on a path to become citizens. Temp workers should be temp, I like the work 2 years them go home for 1 thats not to bad an idea. Also we need to go to the point based system where the countries needs come before family ties.
I know there might be a few other things we need to do also but this plan would protect American workers and give American citizens the 1st chance at any job in this country. We do need some workers and I am totally for legal immigration but instead of blanket amnesty for everyone the countries needs should drive the Immigration process.
We also have to start enforcing the 7-8 temp worker programs we already have which are currently being abused. I saw a report that most of the Hib visa were going to India companies. Whats up with that? All those temp programs need to be looked at for abuse.
For all those that favor amnesty and Mexican and other foreign citizens over American citizens, are all the 20+ million Illegals in this country right now working? The answer is NO. Go to any day labor gathering spot any day of the week and when you add them all up there are millions of Illegals just standing around with no job hoping someone might hire them for the day. But even those peolpe under the amnesty plan get to stay. Thats for only 1 reason, more cheap labor to lower American citizens wages.
