As the Gang of Eight's massive immigration bill is in the spotlight, I have a sense of deja vu. It's just like Obamacare all over again. Again, we have to pass it to
see what's in it? 867 pages? Please stop playing the liberal game of
"comprehensive" solutions with hundreds or thousands of pages,
developed by small groups and passed in the dead of night. I think a lot of the
illegal immigration problem is that legal immigration is an extremely difficult
obstacle course. We need 2 simple bills.
First, provide expanded H1B visas for professionals with jobs who want to work here and pay taxes. Right now, the H1B program sells out in a few days for an entire year's allotment of visas. It's run as a lottery. Raise the price to companies and increase the numbers from 65,000 to 300,000 to 400,000. Make it easier for H1B holders to visit home and to get green cards. Eliminate any national origin limits. In my job I work with a lot of programmers who would like to stay here and work, if they could get a visa for longer than 6 months at a time. We need a lot of younger folks like these guys who will pay for my social security.
Second, we need a new guest worker program, so low skill workers and their families can come here and stay as long as they are not on welfare, food stamps, medicaid or any other government assistance. We had a guest worker program, the Bracero Program, from 1942 to 1964. During this time illegal immigration was minimal. Workers came for the harvest and went home. In 1964 the AFL-CIO had it killed because guest workers are hard to organize. We could expand the program from the previous program to include agricultural factory work like meat processing and service jobs like janitorial work. For both of these programs there should be provisions to allow illegal residents as well as those outside theUS
First, provide expanded H1B visas for professionals with jobs who want to work here and pay taxes. Right now, the H1B program sells out in a few days for an entire year's allotment of visas. It's run as a lottery. Raise the price to companies and increase the numbers from 65,000 to 300,000 to 400,000. Make it easier for H1B holders to visit home and to get green cards. Eliminate any national origin limits. In my job I work with a lot of programmers who would like to stay here and work, if they could get a visa for longer than 6 months at a time. We need a lot of younger folks like these guys who will pay for my social security.
Second, we need a new guest worker program, so low skill workers and their families can come here and stay as long as they are not on welfare, food stamps, medicaid or any other government assistance. We had a guest worker program, the Bracero Program, from 1942 to 1964. During this time illegal immigration was minimal. Workers came for the harvest and went home. In 1964 the AFL-CIO had it killed because guest workers are hard to organize. We could expand the program from the previous program to include agricultural factory work like meat processing and service jobs like janitorial work. For both of these programs there should be provisions to allow illegal residents as well as those outside the
Article on Immigration:
Bracero Program Information:
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