Introduction: My background with immigration is working with construction, agricultural and fisheries businesses in New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland and Pennsylvania that use immigrants for the majority of their work force. I know dozens of these workers who came here legally on work visas and are still waiting for their extension paperwork. Ironically, some of them I met at Trump construction sites in Atlantic City years ago. Since then, some have become friends. They work hard, pay taxes, pay for all their health insurance and get no government benefits. They are conservative Christians from South America who feel integrated with our country and supportive of our government. When immigration paperwork is stalled, their visas run out, and employers can’t get enough work visas to continue their businesses at full capacity, These people then become undocumented illegal immigrants.
President Trump and some Republicans are lying to the American people. Democrats in Congress do not want open borders. Large numbers of terrorists are not crossing the southern border. A wall won’t stop drugs or end human trafficking. Most immigrants are productive peaceful people. We already have physical barriers in place where it makes sense. Now Trump is manufacturing a crisis to keep the government closed. Federal workers and many more other Americans are affected by these lies.
The American people voted clearly during the last election. The clear majority of voters do not want Congress to vote to pay for a wall. The majority of Congress wants to invest more in monitoring our borders through advanced security and more personnel, not with a wall.
The real problem with illegal immigration isn’t the wall, the immigrants, drugs, or crime. The real problem is that the legal immigration paperwork system for millions of mixed citizenship households is broken and dysfunctional. The process to get a work visa often takes many years and costs more than $5,000. A wall certainly won’t solve that problem. We can fix the system by offering visas to the majority of hardworking law abiding immigrants, then that would fixed the illegal immigration problem. We absolutely should invest in making sure that good people are coming into this country and make sure they get jobs, pay taxes and follow the law.
The Republican-led Senate has already passed increased secure border funding and money to fix the immigration system with S.744. It is a sane and logical approach to the immigration issue. The House and the President just need to support some refreshed version of that bill. This is a very solvable problem if Trump would just stop lying about the issues!
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