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We need to change the limits on how many immigrants are coming in and from which countries. We obviously need immigrants who are willing to come do the jobs that we are not willing to do for the wages being offered.
Immigration policy should be linked to economic policy. What does our labor force need to look like over the next 50 years, and how can immigration augment that.
We need a better method of protecting the border, while allowing more opportunities to citizenship. I think we should use the razor-wire technique which is cheaper and apparently more effective. There should be several arrow signs pointing to multiple entries along the border which will have processing centers or “waystations”. This will create a ton more jobs for Americans and help to guide or funnel the immigrants to the right locations. If we created the sleeping hotels that the Japanese use “basic tubes to sleep in”, the immigrants could pay for their accommodations on their own, essentially renting space while awaiting their turn for legal review.
From what I understand domestic demand has influenced inflation. This would suggest that reducing immigration is a viable way of reducing market prices.
There needs to be some balance and recognition of the fact that immigrants, regardless of status, contribute a lot to our society economically and otherwise and also generally have lower crime rates than the native-born population. Do not demonize immigrants or use them as scapegoats. Make the path to entry and to various visa types clear with straightforward procedures and communicate them clearly. Deport actual criminals not political protestors. Provide a path toward citizenship for those who have shown their worth through hard work. Re-affirm birthright citizenship.
Our immigration system is an illusion. R’s have had ample chance to fix it but it is more value to whine about it at election time. And the whiners have no problem reaping the benefits of cheap food and cheap labor
Rfk’s general idea of “Big walls, wide gates” (paraphrasing, something like that). We should support Trump’s wall and efforts to get dangerous criminals and gang-members out of our country. We should continue to oppose the “catch and release” policy.
We could do a better job supporting a path to legal residency/citizenship, especially for people working here. It’s very difficult to gain citizenship.
Here’s another idea no one thinks of. We should invest in infrastructure and anti-crime efforts in Northern Mexico… to help stop the pressure of people invading our borders. What if more Americans/people wanted to cross downwards. Help fight the gangs in Mexico and South America, then we can improve things for the entire continent and ease the illegal immigration into ours.
Please recruit all the other resistance sites that are asking for donations. We really need a new party!
I would like to see the top issues we all want progress on, such as:
1. Big money out of politics
2. Term limits for Congress and Judges
3. simplify the tax code
Arresting these grad students without explanation or evidence is wrong. Deporting criminals is fine but we need to find a reasonable path to citizenship for those that have been in the country following our laws and paying taxes for years.
We need immigrants, but they need to be fully vetted, and no anchor babies. No sanctuary cities, follow the rules, if you have to wait, then wait, if not face the consequences
We need immigrants to continue to grow as a country. Yes, we need a system. At the moment our leaders are deconstructing our systems. This is the time for the majority, not red or blue to come forward with solutions. We are all immigrants. I wouldn’t be an American without my grandparents and great grandparents who came to this country.
The US needs to increase legal immigration. We are one of the most desirable places to live on earth, and we need to capitalize on this. The Gold Card program is a good start, but we need to allow many more of the best and the brightest — not just the richest — to immigrate to the U.S. We should seek to eliminate any illegal immigration. It’s not good for the immigrant or the US. Once that is under control, we can increase the number of economic migrants we can admit legally. All immigrants should be carefully vetted before they are allowed to set foot in the US.
The United States has plenty of room to welcome immigrants. Immigrants are much more likely to be ambitious and hardworking than to be “Bad Hombres”. Both businesses and consumers benefit from the cheap labor supplied by undocumented workers afraid to question workplace hardships. This is unfair and immoral. We need a clear and generous legal pathway. It’s been discussed into the ground…time to do something! It may have flaws at first, but the problems can be remedied.
For decades now we have heard from legislators and presidents on both sides of the aisle that we should create an efficient, legal path for workers and/or citizens. I do not agree that our feeble legal immigration system gives a pass to illegal immigration. If we continue to allow that to be the default, we will never arrive at a better path. This includes the “anchor babies” whose parents use that relationship to skip the line. Certainly don’t separate your family if you are forced to leave. Bring your children with you! I also support strong enforcement against human trafficking, drugs, and gangs at the border as well as at the docks. A better pathway for legal immigration would allow greater allocation of resources for curtailing illegal activity at our borders.
My grandparents came to this country (legally) as impoverished immigrants. They waited for years to enter through legal channels. They raised 8 children with no government assistance programs. All their children were born in the US, and attended public schools. They were proud of this country and its opportunities. This family is one of thousands who have contributed to a great country with a diverse culture.
It just isn’t that difficult to give others the same chance I was fortunate to inherit by birth.
I am satisfied with immigration that are legal, but no so much with illegal ones. This is especially with the so called sanctuary states or cities that encourage illegal entry into America including but not limited to economic refugees.
Secure the border, grant citizenship to law-abiding “dreamers”, make it easier and faster for immigrants with skills we need to get work permits and eventually earn citizenship.
System has been broken for years. I don’t know all the history. But, it is clear Trump wanted to keep it broken to run on and now use for performative cruelty to show his toughness, while not really changing anything substantive.
The immigration law as it stands makes no sense. Why can you only seek asylum if you are physically in the US? Why can’t that process start sooner? Why can’t we have an easy legal pathway to citizenship for those who are contributing and don’t commit crimes? Why do we have for-profit detention centers that earn government money based on transfers and number of days detained?
The immigration system has been broken for decades, because it makes it easy to hire exploitable labor, jack with people’s lives and then complain about “those people”. It’s been an easy rile-them-up issue for Republicans for years and years, all the while they take campaign funds from any industry that prefers cheap labor. The Democrats at least try to treat immigrants like people, but they’ve never been invested enough to fix the problem when they have had power.
The Republicans may have discovered they’re now the dog that caught the car, because Trump has taken the dogwhistles and replaced them with airhorns. We’ll see how happy the agribusiness, hospitality, medical and construction industries are when the real racists decide to get rid of the subhumans for good, and we find out exactly how much of our prosperity has been dependent on exploiting immigrants.
Having lived on the border 25 years and employed in public health as a Texas regional physician administrator, as well as worshipping in bilingual and Spanish speaking churches, the immigrants are real people to me. I have lived as a physician in the jungle of Guatemala with neighbors in danger from guerrillas and government troops. I know people whose father was shot to steal their farm, who were forced on the floor of their cafe for a day with an American military-style weapon in their back until they gave up their cafe and livelihood. Their stories of perseverance, hope, and trial are compelling. I know those who deserve DACA, local prisoners and detainees chained together for TB screening who call me Santa CLOWse because of the white beard, cheerful cartel murderers on TB treatment, undocumented persons who became preachers and college administrators and medical university chancellors. I knew a steady stream of ICE supervisors and legally present neighbors in the cartels who had papers and money. The second generation, the ones denied education and jobs and hope, are the ones who are pressed to join the drug runners. The problem is the need to confront the complex web of crime with the best equipped surveillance tools and identification technology to sort the cartel members (with money and legal papers) from those whose crime is poverty, loss of income from property seizure, and genuine risk of losing their children by age 12 to be infantry and sex workers for the cartels. The poor are the victims, and they are not coming voluntarily with drugs in their pockets, except when forced to swallow or carry narcotics at gunpoint. As Christians or Americans, we must insist on following due process of our own constitution. “I desire justice and mercy, not sacrifice”? The Alien Enemies Act, if one studies the history, has been a travesty since inception and every time it was employed. The narrative of all immigrants as a wall of criminals is a marketing campaign, often revisited in our history. Bipartisan immigration reform that treats the guilty and the innocent with justice. Worrying about carpenters, roofers, and maids is a sidetrack that avoids the difficult problems of guns and money going south, a culture of drug use and drug sales, and poverty.
The legal immigration system doesn’t work well for anyone right now.
For immigrants of all kinds, the system is slow and confusing. People who try to do things the right way get stuck in limbo… stuff like your visa is expiring, you request renewal, and the government doesn’t respond before time runs out. How is anyone supposed to make good plans in that situation?
We should invest significant resources into streamlining the immigration system. Focus on making good decisions about individual situations faster. That probably means way more immigration judges. It probably means simplifying the legal immigration pathways. It definitely involves thinking of immigrants as customers. When the system makes quick, high quality decisions, then we can have quick, high quality enforcement. Remove the people who don’t quality to be here. Certify the people who do qualify.
It’s important that we outcompete the rest of the world in attracting the most productive people. With the boomers retiring and birth rates below replacement level, we absolutely need immigration to keep the economy going. The United States is unique in history in our willingness to welcome people from all over the world and give them a shot to contribute. We need to preserve and grow that unique advantage.
Then there’s the immigration of the popular imagination: mostly Spanish speaking, mostly male, mostly laborers. That end of the system needs serious work too.
US Citizens deserve the first shot at US jobs. Black market labor is bad for everyone – it suppresses wages for citizens, weakens the rule of law, and leaves migrants vulnerable to abuse. Simultaneously, there are a lot of jobs that are difficult to staff from the domestic labor pool. Creative solutions are needed!
It would be ideal to bring all the black market labor into the open. Make it easy for businesses to use migrant labor when they need it. Ensure that citizens have the right to those jobs. Enforce minimum wages and labor conditions for everyone. Crack down on businesses that flaunt the law by relying on black market labor.
Of course we’ve tried something like this with the H1B process. That system has been seriously abused by employers, who commit significant wage theft (harming the immigrant workers) and wage suppression (harming citizen workers). We should audit and reform the H1B process, then apply those lessons to other kinds of labor.
1. I am an immigrant and a naturalized citizen. I came to the United States with my family when I was six years old. I am now 74. Secondhand, it was an orderly process. You didn’t just walk or sneak across the border. I am not in favor of porous borders. Why should somebody in the Philippines have to wait years for their number to come up and other people just walk across the border?
2. You don’t have to be a genius, to read a chart, and see that our birth rate is decreasing. Nor do you have to be a genius to see what type of work immigrants tend to do. My father dug basements, sold Fuller Brush, was a carnival barker, before we became citizens and he was able to use his college degrees to find a super grade civil service job that he eventually retired from. We need immigrants to do the jobs, such as farm labor, construction, janitorial work, that we are unable to find other people to do.
I have always felt that I won the lottery by being born an American! I have lived in six different countries outside the US and I have realized how fortunate I am. Having this perspective along with the fact that we are a nation built by immigrants makes the idea of shutting our borders and building a wall around us, very hard to accept. I understand there are problems and difficulties to overcome, but I truly hope we can work together as a nation and with other countries to find a compassionate and viable solution.
The immigration system is too difficult creating the very problem it is designed to solve. Immigrants should be able to get work visas through the U.S. embassy in their own country and the U.S. must stop providing benefits to illegal immigrants essentially paying them to break our laws.
Increasing LEGAL immigration, increases our tax base, and supports social security, etc. I’d like to see increased support for people coming across our borders. Yes, we should do background checks to ensure they are not criminals. For those legitimately fleeing oppression, the US should return to being a sanctuary. Immigration benefits our nation economically and enriches our nation culturally.
I am stunned by the lack of understanding of how critical immigration is to our country’s success…absolutely stunned. Not only are the racist implications overt but for many years actual legal immigration is so difficult that our own policies drive those who would immigrate legally underground. You can’t have corporations and private businesses offering job to illegal immigrants on one hand while the other drives them underground. I know a lot of immigrants and 100% of those that I know, legal or not, just want to build a better life,participate in our society and live integrate into our society without giving up their own heritage. I also know several who, following legal work status are scared of ICE invasion or just plain being told to “go home”. And yet…it seems one side doesn’t want to make a single move to improve the system. So yeah… it’s broken!
Congress has abdicated their role in developing a comprehensive, modern, fair immigration policy. What has been going on in recent years is ridiculous and allowed the issue of immigration to be a campaign hot button and worse, to divide Americans against each other. We need proper border control and simple, fair paths to citizenship.
Congress is sitting on their hands and doing nothing! They could have passed something on immigration before the election but didn’t because the man in Mar-a-Largo told them not to pass it. It was kind of hard to get anything done when we had “two” presidents. Now our current president doesn’t seem to need legislation; he’s doing everything by knee-jerk executive order. The law doesn’t appear to mean anything to the current congress or Supreme Court.
That said, we do need legal immigration. We need a path to citizenship for those who’ve been here since children. We need a method for those who’ve choose to move here, for those who marry one of our citizens, for those who’ve put their lives on the line for us in war zones, and for those who are looking for safe harbor from a violent society. Every one deserves due process before being deported, including those students from other countries who exercise rights that are protected for our own citizens.
Our immigration system is incoherent and unfair, both to those wanting to immigrate to the United States and to multi-generational Americans who are left to cope with the chaos that our roller coaster of open borders, closed borders, no punishment and cruel punishment that varies from administration to administration. An immigration system that is run by Presidential executive orders rather than well-considered processes is really no system at all, just a hot mess.
Illegal immigration has traditionally been concentrated along our southern border. The first step in mitigating it would be to make it easier for our neighbors in Mexico, Central and South America to immigrate into the United States rather than harder. They share the core cultural values of the Western Europeans who founded and built America through the mid-19th Century and their assimilation into our country must be far easier than immigrants from elsewhere. I believe we need to dramatically expand our legal immigration quotas for our closest neighbors, even if it requires reducing them for other countries.
Meeting America’s economic and job skill needs should become the most important standards for immigration. Family reunification should be last on the list of qualifiers and then only for those new immigrants who have proved themselves serious about having a stake in the United States by multiple standards of assimilation, including basic competency in English, establishing careers, serving in Americas military, owning property, or building verifiable tax-paying businesses. Some variation of these standards are already the priorities in Canada, Australia and other developed countries.
And, for God’s sake, stop with the cruelty in enforcing immigration laws. Recent news of a the deportation of a Colombian couple who have been in the United States for more than 30 years, albeit without proper documentation, is ridiculously cruel. If we can have statutes of limitations on prosecution of violent crimes, there can be a statute of limitations on deportations of illegal immigrants who have lived in this country 7-10 or more years ago without criminal arrests or dependency on public assistance.
Ditto with penalizing the children of illegal immigrants who had no say in being brought here, make DACA permanent.
Continued focus on limiting who can enter the US and deporting recent illegal entrants and those who commit crimes in the US or enter under false pretenses is enough on the enforcement side. Welcoming more of our neighbors from the Western Hemisphere while turning away all but a handful of the most needed professional and skilled workers from outside the Western Hemisphere is how we continue growing as a diverse nation and meeting our economic growth needs.
Immigration Policy Feedback
Immigration Policy Feedback
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