Immigration - by Vic Meyers The Immigration issue is yet - TopicsExpress



          

Immigration - by Vic Meyers The Immigration issue is yet another that politicians use to divide and distract so that we don’t pay attention to what they are really doing, or not doing, in Washington. Immigration is a complicated issue but is not the kind of issue that Americans should be allowing themselves to be divided over. All of us are paying for illegal immigration in various ways but the solutions are nothing like what politicians would have us believe. In the first two years of the Obama administration more undocumented immigrants were deported than in the previous eight years of the Bush administration. Yet somehow the politicians want us to believe that illegal immigration is getting worse and costing us more. As your congressman I will work three fronts on the illegal immigration issue. The first front will be to discourage illegal immigration by cracking down on those who hire illegal immigrants. If you take away the incentive for people to come here illegally then fewer people will come here illegally. I will work for legislation that will force employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants to pay for the cost of incarcerating and deporting those illegal immigrants when caught. They will also have to pay double any payroll taxes that they otherwise would have paid had they hired citizens or documented immigrants instead. This won’t end undocumented immigration but it will go a long way towards discouraging it and paying for the consequences of it. Why should you and I have to pay the costs of a corporation or an individual who is escaping the costs of doing business in a way that hurts us? Another front I would work on is those who pay ‘under-the-table’ to migrant workers. Working fifteen years in a state prison has brought me into contact with a lot of migrant workers, both documented and undocumented, who are in prison because they turned to crime to support their families when they were being paid off the books and had no recourse when their employers either failed to pay them or weren’t paying them enough. These inmates are costing you and me money, money that would be better spent on schools and roads and bridges and health care and colleges. The third front I’ll work on will be to modernize our immigration system. How we issue and track visas accounts for a great deal of the so-called illegal immigration problem. Fixing this will go a long way toward improving the costs of illegal immigration. This is actually being worked on now and might be done before the 2014 election. Immigration is an important issue but it shouldn’t be at the top of issues being worked on by Congress. Not when the solutions are so simple. Our nation was founded by immigrants and has always been strengthened by immigration. In 2011 a crackdown on undocumented workers in Georgia left that state scrambling for people willing to work on farms. The same thing happened in Colorado. Immigration, as an issue, is not the devil politicians would have us believe it is and we need to be smart and measured about how we deal with it, instead of being emotional about it.
Posted on: Sat, 06 Jul 2013 06:25:14 +0000

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