Looking forward on immigration

12/07/2012 10:10:00 AM
The Packer Editorial Board

Just because finding a solution to the problem of undocumented ag workers and a broken U.S. immigration policy makes sense to nearly everyone doesn’t make it certain our politicians will act on it.

In fact, it seems there has been a perpetual sense of crisis about labor for more than a decade now, with growers repeatedly arguing on Capitol Hill for a way to hire legal workers and pleading for meaningful reform to the H-2A agricultural guest-worker program.

Meanwhile, federal and state lawmakers — particularly Republicans — have been grandstanding over the issue, occasionally tightening immigration laws but giving no clear way ahead to legalize the existing farm labor work force or to make the H-2A program easier to use.

But there are growing hopes Congress will consider and pass meaningful immigration reform.

Republicans seem open to moving immigration reform as a way of mending fences with the growing Latino electorate that continues to ignore the GOP in national elections.

Sensing an opening, ag lobbyists want a guest-worker program as a part of any legislative package and want the new program to expand the definition of agriculture to include packinghouses and processors, which are excluded under the H-2A program.

While maintaining the requirement for a initial job offer before foreign workers come to the U.S., the desired solution also would remove mandatory transportation and housing provisions, remove the guaranteed work period and allow workers to follow jobs from farm to farm.

These specifics will be debated in 2013, but the important truth seems to be that Congress will take up immigration reform with an intent to accomplish it.

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Let the Liberal progressives do what they want in the next four years, such as tax and spend and whatever issue they have in mind? Then sit back and watch the raging Socialist agenda implode as the general population sees their country being taken over by bloated government, reducing energy supplies of oil, national gas and the closing of the coal industry. Then after this Liberal Socialist financial tidal wave, let the wrath of the average American tear through the ranks of these fools that run this country. Watch as the hard core Democrats cut funding to border enforcement, and instituting a new illegal alien amnesty and you paying for everything; educating their large family progeny, their medical care and treatment, their low cost government homes. After the stock markets shake with fear, more small businesses going broke and large corporations send out feelers for less taxed countries to set up shop. Even more involvement of government in influencing our freedoms, The joke will be on the American people, with even more unemployment, closing businesses and the distributing of even more entitlement; even more welfare for illegal migrants, even more grand “Rules and Regulations” to stifle the creation of small businesses and a sky rocketing deficit at state and federal level and this country on the edge of a even larger red ink abyss.

The American worker whether Democrat or Republican should do the right thing for the huge jobless population and demand that the temporary tenant in the Oval office, and all the sub tenants in Washington that thrive on the misery of citizens and honest green card holders pass “THE LEGAL WORKFORCE BILL”. E-Verify is not perfect, but it’s all we have to eject the millions of illegal lab