Reforms to our complex and dysfunctional immigration system should not in any way favor those who came here illegally over the millions of applicants who seek to come here lawfully. Additionally, the framework carves out a special exception for agricultural workers that has little justification.
A guest worker program should help farmers who are willing to pay a fair wage for law-abiding, dependable workers - not punish them ... And for this reason I support replacing the H-2A program and implementing new policies that will bring our illegal agricultural workers out of the shadows, as a first step in the process of overhauling our nation's immigration system.
I appreciate the good work that senators in both parties have put into trying to fix our broken immigration system. There are some good elements in this proposal, especially increasing the resources and manpower to secure our border and also improving and streamlining legal immigration. However, I have deep concerns with the proposed path to citizenship. To allow those who came here illegally to be placed on such a path is both inconsistent with rule of law and profoundly unfair to the millions of legal immigrants who waited years, if not decades, to come to America legally.
If we can find a way to enforce our laws and keep people from coming into our country illegally while maintaining a strong legal immigration system, I think that's going to benefit everyone. If you come here illegally, and you commit a crime, you're not going to be able to stay in our country.
When you're not recruiting effectively you're not recruiting properly through a certain channel, like a job board, then what's left of you? I don't believe HR's been able to figure that out. They need to go back to the way they used to do it. They complained that they got so many millions of applicants, they couldn't possibly spend the amount of human time on all those applicants. But they could solve the problem tomorrow if they stopped soliciting millions of applicants through job boards.
My message on immigration is that the people who want to come to this country, by and large, even those who have done it illegally, are coming for the right reasons, not to take advantage of our welfare system.
Within just a few years immigration as a share of national population is set to break all historical records. The time has come for a new immigration commission to develop a new set of reforms to our legal immigration system in order to achieve the following goals.
The time has come for a new immigration commission to develop a new set of reforms to our legal immigration system in order to achieve the following goals. To keep immigration levels measured by population share within historical norms, to select immigrants based on their likelihood of success in U.S. society and their ability to be financially self-sufficient.
We should strengthen our immigration laws to prevent the importation of foreign wages and working conditions. We should make it illegal for employers to lay off Americans and then fill their jobs by bringing in workers from overseas. Any U.S. employer who wishes to hire from abroad - even for temporary jobs - should have to recruit U.S. workers first. And we should end the unskilled immigration that competes with young Americans just entering the job market.
I try and make it to the word exactly what I said four years ago and what I said was that those who've come here illegally should not be given a special pathway, a favored pathway to become permanent residents merely by virtue of having come here illegally. That they should be in line with everybody - they should be given the opportunity to get in line with everybody else but they go to the back of the line.
To the extent that our workers compete with low-paid Mexicans, it is as much through undocumented immigration as trade. This pattern threatens low-paid, low-skill U.S. workers. The combination of domestic reforms and NAFTA-related growth in Mexico will keep more Mexicans at home. It is likely that a reduction in immigration will increase the real wages of low-skilled urban and rural workers in the United States.
I very firmly believe that we have to make sure that we enforce our borders, that we have an employment verification system, and that those people who have come here illegally do not get an advantage to become permanent residents, they do not get a special pathway.
Besides taking jobs from American workers, illegal immigration creates huge economic burdens on our health care system, our education system, our criminal justice system, our environment, our infrastructure and our public safety.
One of the major conclusions of the 9/11 Commission is that there were enormous security vulnerabilities in our immigration system. 9/11, in that sense, really begins the effort of our country to try to shore up our immigration system to deal with this very complex and very far-reaching threat.
Rancher Bundy should've told the feds that those were Mexican cows - who came across the border illegally to seek better grazing opportunities. It was an act of love.
Immigration reform is important in our country. We have a lot of employers over on the beaches that rely upon workers and especially in this high-growth environment, where are you going to get people to work to clean our hotel rooms or do our landscaping? We don't need to put those employers in a position of hiring undocumented and illegal workers.
If we have system in which government is in a position to give large favor - it's human nature to try to get this favor - whether those people are large enterprises, or whether they're small businesses like farmers, or whether they're representatives of any other special group. The only way to prevent that is to force them to engage in competition one with the other.