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Details Last Updated: Monday, 15 May 2017 06:12 May 15, 2017 - WASHINGTON Support is rapidly gaining for one of the most popular immigration reform bills in the 115th Congress, now at 200 co-sponsors.H.R. 60, the Encourage New Legalized Immigrants to Start Training Act (ENLIST Act), authored by U.S. Representative Jeff Denham (CA-10), has seen solid bi-partisan support since its introduction in January.

Ive met with DREAMers in our own community as well as from around the country who have gone to school with our own children and just want a chance to stay in the country they love the only country they know as their home, said Rep. Denham. The ENLIST Act would present one way that they could earn a pathway to citizenship, as generations of immigrants before them have also done. My colleagues on both sides of the aisle recognize that this is an issue that we must solve together, and this is a first step toward a broader discussion about immigration reform in our country.

The ENLIST Act would allow otherwise qualified undocumented immigrants brought to the United States by their parents, through no fault of their own, to enlist in the armed services and earn legal status upon honorable completion of their contracts.

Rep. Denham introduced the ENLIST Act last Congress, where it garnered bipartisan support, andin September, President-elect Donald Trump expressed support for such a measure.

Additional information about the ENLIST Act, including the full bill text and list of co-sponsors, is available onCongress.gov. Source: Congressman Jeff Denham

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Congressman Denham's ENLIST Act Reaches 200 Co-Sponsors - Immigration Reform Bill - Sierra Sun Times

Undocumented Rigo Espinoza, 26, hangs out with his family outside his trailer park home in west Phoenix. Espinoza is here illegally but is petitioning for his citizenship through his wife. His father, who is also here illegally, works in agriculture in Florence and is so afraid of being pulled over by police that he rarely comes to see his two grandchildren. Everybody is afraid, but they just got to get along with their lives, he said. less Undocumented Rigo Espinoza, 26, hangs out with his family outside his trailer park home in west Phoenix. Espinoza is here illegally but is petitioning for his citizenship through his wife. His father, who is ... more Photo: Nick Oza, STR

Tucson LPO (Lead Police Officer) Jose Flores, during his patrol at T1 South Tucson neighborhood which is densely populated by Latinos.

Tucson LPO (Lead Police Officer) Jose Flores, during his patrol at T1 South Tucson neighborhood which is densely populated by Latinos.

Oscar Aguirre of Phoenix did not join the exodus of immigrants after Arizona began its crackdown in 2010.

Oscar Aguirre of Phoenix did not join the exodus of immigrants after Arizona began its crackdown in 2010.

Tucson Police Officer helps one of drug addict during his patrol at T1 South Tucson neighborhood which is densely populated by Latinos.

Tucson Police Officer helps one of drug addict during his patrol at T1 South Tucson neighborhood which is densely populated by Latinos.

Tucson Police Officers tries to helps one of drug addict during his patrol at T1 South Tucson neighborhood which is densely populated by Latinos.

Tucson Police Officers tries to helps one of drug addict during his patrol at T1 South Tucson neighborhood which is densely populated by Latinos.

Arizona immigration bill still reverberates; holds clues for what's in store for Texas

PHOENIX - Friends and neighbors fled this city's mostly Hispanic southern and western enclaves in droves after the state Legislature approved a set of sweeping anti-immigrant laws in 2010. But Oscar Aguirre wasn't one of them.

This has been his home for more than 20 years, ever since he and his wife crossed the border illegally. He has two daughters who were born and raised here. A mechanic, he has grown a thriving business.

So, like many with deep roots in this city that is 40 percent Hispanic, the couple chose instead to make their lives smaller. They stopped calling the police or even accessing public health care, for which their kids qualified. Every time they get in the car they still view it as a game of Russian roulette.

"If I see the police, I take another route," said Aguirre, 43, as he checked a friend's engine in a mobile home park last week. "The truth is, if the police stop you, it's over. To Mexico, you go."

Within two years of the legislation, which was almost immediately embroiled in years of litigation, Arizona lost $490 million in tourism revenue as trade groups across the nation canceled scheduled conventions in protest. Agricultural and construction companies struggled to fill jobs.

To read this article in one of Houston's most-spoken languages, click on the button below.

The Supreme Court ultimately blocked many of the law's provisions but greenlighted its most controversial portion, allowing police to inquire about immigration status, which is similar to a provision in a Texas "sanctuary cities" bill signed a week ago by Gov. Greg Abbott.

The controversial Texas law permits officers, even those on college campuses, to question anyone they stop about their status and threatens police chiefs with jail time if they don't cooperate. After Arizona's bill in 2010, it is considered the harshest anti-immigrant legislation passed by any state since 2012.

Top metropolitan law enforcement leaders in Texas, including Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo and Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez, have said the bill would hammer community relations if Hispanics fear that reporting crime could lead to immigration checks. Since President Donald Trump's executive orders on immigration, such police calls have already plummeted. Last week the American Civil Liberties Union issued a travel alert for the state, warning that Senate Bill 4 would cause racial profiling and a violation of constitutional rights.

200,000 left

Seven years in, Arizona's experience hints at what Texas, with the nation's largest Hispanic population after California, might expect. Supporters of Arizona's legislation say it has worked, helping to reduce the number of immigrants illegally in the state by 40 percent between 2007 and 2012, according to the Pew Research Center, a think tank in Washington, D.C. More than 200,000 left. Since then, the population has stayed about the same.

"Enforcement does work and even the threat of enforcement makes a difference," said the bill's Republican sponsor, former state Sen. Russell Pearce, who became Arizona's first legislator to be removed from office in a 2011 recall election shortly after the passage of what's known as SB 1070. "As long as you got the bird feeder out, the birds are going to come and eat. You gotta take the bird feeder down."

Many of Trump's supporters see it the same way at a time when the issue has arguably never been more rancorous. But business leaders in Arizona warn that such a reduction came at a cost.

"No one stops to think that, when you eject people from an economy, you're not going to feel it," said Todd Landfried, executive director of Arizona Employers for Immigration Reform. "It's a dramatic impact. People aren't buying food, clothes, gas. They're not going to baseball games or buying soccer uniforms, they're not going out and socializing. Business owners have to cut back and lay people off. It's a snowball effect."

Some economists have found that the exodus reduced Arizona's gross domestic product by roughly 2 percent a year. Proponents of the law say that loss was bolstered by savings in education, medical care and the costs of incarceration. A 2004 study by the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a Washington, D.C., group seeking to reduce immigration, argued those services cost the state more than $1 billion annually.

But Landfried called that a red herring, noting that all of Arizona's residents, no matter their legal status, contribute to property taxes paying for education, whether they own homes or rent. Immigrants illegally in the state don't qualify for any public benefits, although their American children do.

The overall impact to the state's convention and tourism industry alone was $752 million in completed and potential cancellations and booking declines, Landfried testified to the U.S. Senate judiciary committee in 2012. That involved more than 4,200 lost jobs.

Industry leaders said they lost money when they couldn't complete jobs because they didn't have enough workers.

"Immigrant labor left the state. It was a ghost town," said Sheridan Bailey, president of Ironco Enterprises, a steel fabrication company in Arizona. "We had about 40 steel fabricators when (SB) 1070 came around, and now we have about eight."

Bailey helped found the employer immigration group more than a decade ago, years before Arizona's legislation, because he couldn't find the labor that he needed.

Today he said that problem is exacerbated. Though his business is currently in a lull, he's paying overtime to complete contracts. To prepare for several projects later this year, he's thinking about outsourcing to Tijuana, Mexico.

"It's very difficult to get steel fitters and welders," Bailey said. "There's just not enough to go around."

Perception problem

Some executives say that even the perception of the law as anti-Hispanic casts a shadow that they are still struggling to overcome. The city of Oakland, Calif., declined Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton's invitation to a Governing Magazine summit this month, reportedly citing an ongoing travel ban due to the 2010 legislation. Stanton's office, meanwhile, has been working to improve relations with the state's largest trading partner of Mexico, recently opening a second office there.

"This was a complete disaster for our state from an image perspective and from an economic perspective," said Lisa Urias, the president of a large advertising agency and a member of the boards of the Greater Phoenix Leadership Council and the Arizona Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. "There is still lingering damage that is there, and we are still a state that feels very raw about this issue."

Proponents, led by Pearce, the bill sponsor, say that the law reduced crime, helping Phoenix achieve the lowest crime rate in 30 years by 2012.

Criminologists say the state's crime was already falling, on par with national trends, and that there is little correlation. Nationally a strong body of research shows that immigrants tend to be incarcerated at about half the rate of those born in the United States.

Supporters of the legislation, however, argue that anyone here illegally is committing a crime simply by being here in violation of the law in the first place and should be immediately removed.

Big city police chiefs believe that requiring state law enforcement ask about a federal civil infraction hampers their ability to locate witnesses for serious felonies such as homicide and rape. A 2013 University of Chicago study found that Hispanics, regardless of their immigration status, were half as likely to report crimes if they suspected police would ask about their citizenship.

The Phoenix Police Department declined an interview request about the law's impact.

But Tucson Police Chief Chris Magnus, who took office nearly two years ago, said his department has struggled to battle the perception that police are doubling as immigration agents.

"There's no possible way that crime can go down," he said. "What you're really talking about is a dynamic that discourages a large segment of the population from reporting crime and working with police to solve crimes or even serve as witnesses to crimes."

Walking a fine line

What Arizona's legislation has done, Magnus said, is greatly complicate the jobs of officers who are required under the law to ask about immigration status but not permitted to racially profile or hold someone for longer than is constitutionally permissible - all amounting to a delicate balance in the day-to-day task of policing.

When the high court's justices allowed the state to implement the provision in 2012, they raised the prospect that it could invite racial profiling. Law enforcement agencies here have since struggled with training their police officers on how and when to ask about immigration status.

"The nuances of this law is so confusing that it took us a very long time," said Tucson's Assistant Police Chief Ramon Batista, who previously oversaw the patrol division. "You have to be very, very careful in how you apply this."

A recent ride-along with Tucson Police Officer Jose Flores hinted at the complexities. Working in the city's predominately Hispanic south side about an hour from the border, Flores was called to check on a woman wandering in and out of a major road. She appeared to be on drugs or suffering a mental imbalance, didn't have any identification, and couldn't provide her name.

The officers called the mental health unit. But had the woman carried a form of identification and if it was not issued by the U.S. government, Flores said that he would have had to alert his supervisors, who could contact Border Patrol and see if they were interested in detaining her for further questioning.

Last year, Arizona's attorney general agreed with advocacy groups on a narrow set of guidelines for how and when police should ask about immigration status. Tucson police chief of staff and former legal adviser, Michael Silva, said as a result, the department went from requiring officers to check status every time they issue someone with a criminal citation to a more nuanced version that takes into account a host of factors. The number of immigration checks went down from more than a thousand a month to less than a dozen, he said.

But the law allows each police department, indeed each officer, to interpret it as they see fit, said Carlos Garcia, executive director of the state immigrant advocacy group Puente Arizona.

"The overall problem is that because of a lack of structure or mechanism on how to implement it, you end up giving officers the personal discretion on whether they want to pursue deportation or not," he said. "It's basically a lottery for our community."

A 'tipping point'

It's unclear how this will play out in Texas, where no advisories have yet been issued on implementing the new law and where officers aren't required to ask about immigration status but are permitted to do so, giving them great latitude. Acevedo, Houston's police chief, has suggested it would be problematic.

"We cannot prohibit officers from doing what they want to do in regard to immigration enforcement, which means that a small percent of our officers who decide to become (immigration) agents and want to stop a jaywalker and they start asking for their papers, I as a chief can't do anything to explain to that officer, 'Hey, we've got calls for service backed up,'" he said at a news conference last month.

Immigrant advocates in Arizona say the state law was also greatly softened by deportation priorities set under the latter part of President Barack Obama's administration, which focused on removing violent offenders and recent arrivals. Under Trump, who has said anyone here illegally is a focus for deportation, that could change dramatically.

The legislation has had a surprisingly bright impact, however, said Ian Danley, executive director of One Arizona, an advocacy coalition. It has helped them register a quarter of a million new Latino voters since 2010, and elect 24 Latinos to the state Legislature and three to the Phoenix City Council.

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, seen as the face of anti-immigrant tactics for his use of aggressive workplace raids and what some called over-the-top publicity antics, lost his election last November and is facing a federal trial for defying a judge's order to stop immigration patrols.

Alejandra Gomez, executive director of the Arizona Center for Empowerment, an advocacy group, called the legislation a "tipping point," suggesting the same might come for Texas.

Urias, of the advertising agency, said the state's business groups have defeated dozens of anti-immigrant bills since 2010.

"In Arizona we have learned our lesson," she said.

Original post:
Arizona immigration bill still reverberates; holds clues for what's in store for Texas - Houston Chronicle

Published: Mon, May 15th 2017 @ 10:06 am EDT by Chris Chmielenski

This week's issue of the the Economist focuses on Pres. Donald Trump's outlook on the global economy, including his thoughts on legal immigration to the United States where he said that he doesn't want to cut immigration. The interview sounded alarm bells for those seeking to reduce existing immigration levels.

As with most things policy related that come from the President, his answer lacked detail, but that doesn't make it any less concerning. Trump reinforced his commitment to ending illegal immigration, but when asked if he's seeking to reduce overall numbers, his response was troubling, but vague.

And what about legal immigration? Do you want to cut the number of immigrants?

TRUMP: Oh legal, no, no, no. I want people to come into the country legally. No, legally? No. I want people to come in legally. But I want people to come in on merit. I want to go to a merit-based system.

He was then asked specifically about reducing overall legal immigration numbers.

But the numbers of those people could be as high as the numbers that are coming in legally now? You're not looking to reduce the numbers?

TRUMP: Oh yeah, no, no, no, no, we want people coming in legally. No, very strongly.

Trump spoke more in detail of his plan to replace the existing immigration system with a merit-based system like Canada's and Australia's. He said he wants "talented people" who are going to "love our country". He also said that they'd be ineligible for any sort of public assistance for at least 5 years.

It's not tough to meet those standards without reducing legal immigration numbers. The last two attempts by Congress to pass "comprehensive immigration reform" (2007 and 2013) included merit-based systems, but neither system would have limited immigration to only "talented people" nor would they reduce legal immigration. In fact, both proposals increased legal immigration by awarding points to foreign citizens who had previously done low-skilled work in the United States or had extended family connections to U.S. citizens and green card holders, regardless of their potential need to rely on public benefits.

So what does Trump mean when he says "talented people"? Does "talented people" include foreign citizens with truly extraordinary skills who would fill jobs where there's no qualified American worker available? Or, does "talented people" simply mean someone with a certain level of education, skills, or experience?

Each year, more than 800,000 U.S. citizens earn either a master's or doctorate degree. If Trump's merit-based system is based solely on educational attainment, those 800,000 U.S. citizens would be forced to compete for jobs with foreign citizens who have the same educational attainment without regard for the job market's needs for each field of study.

During his Joint Address to Congress back in February, Pres. Trump said:

Protecting our workers also means reforming our system of legal immigration. The current, outdated system depresses wages for our poorest workers, and puts great pressure on taxpayers. It'll be tough to keep legal immigration numbers at or above 1 million per year while also protecting wages for vulnerable workers and relieving the pressure on taxpayers.

It's entirely possible that Pres. Trump didn't want to come across in the interview as being against legal immigration, which would be consistent with some of his past statements on legal immigration. Mark Krikorian from the Center for Immigration Studies recalled some similar comments that Trump made during the campaign in his recent column in the National Review.

But it's also possible that Trump is being influenced by the same Big Business and establishment interests that seek increased immigration and have influenced every President for the last 50 years.

As Mark wrote in his column, Trump needs to listen less to Big Business and more to Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) who introduced the RAISE Act, which would reduce legal immigration by up to 50% by eliminating the visa lottery and ending chain migration. Sen. Cotton was the only Member of Congress to speak out on the Senate floor last week against the omnibus spending bill that doubled the number of H-2B guest worker visas. (You can watch Sen. Cotton's Senate floor speech here.)

CHRIS CHMIELENSKI is the Director of Content & Activism for NumbersUSA

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Does Trump Want to Increase Legal Immigration? - NumbersUSA (blog)

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In an interview with pro-globalist Economist magazine, Trump was asked: Do you want to curb legal immigration? Trump responded by saying he prefers merit-based immigration of skilled people. The interviewer pressed him again on the scale of legal immigration, asking [are you] not looking to reduce the numbers?

No, no, no, no, we want people coming in legally. No, very strongly, Trump replied, as two of his economic advisors sat beside him top economic staffer Gary Cohn, and Steve Mnuchin, the Secretary of the Treasury.

Trump also backed proposals to keep importing temporary contract workers for the agricultural sector, even though the cheap labor will retard farmers emerging interest in buying new machinery,such as robot apple-pickers and robot cow-milkers.Trump told the Economist:

We also want farm workers to be able to come in. You know, were going to have work visas for the farm workers. If you look, you know we have a lot of people coming through the border, theyre great people and they work on the farms and then they go back home. We like those people a lot and we want them to continue to come in.

Immigration reform advocates are not surprised at Trumps back-sliding, but they are confident that Trumpsdependence on his blue-collar base in the 2020 election is pressuring him to stick with his campaign promises, amid constant elite pressure for more legal immigration.

The president was unambiguous in his [2016] campaign one of the things he said was that he would support reductions in immigration, said Ira Mehlman, communications director at the Federation for American Immigration Reform. If he is backing off, we will fight to remind him that he did make this commitment during the campaign and we intended to hold him to it, he told Breitbart.

Anyone following Trumps primary campaign could have predicted this he repeatedly justified guestworker visas of various kinds and stressed the big beautiful door that would be built into his wall, wrote Mark Krikorian, the director of the Center for Immigration Studies. Both the anti-borders crowd and some starry-eyed immigration hawks mistook Trumps commitment to enforcement (which seems genuine) to mean he was also skeptical of the overall level of immigration, he said, adding that the next generation of populist GOP leaders such as Sen. Tom Cotton understandsthe many harms caused by mass immigration.

But Trumps backsliding isnt a done deal. Former President Barack Obama also backed off many of his promises, even while he was urging his supporters to publiccly protest his actions and to push back the lobbies that were blocking his agenda. Obama also adopted a gradualist stop-and-go political strategy which helped the GOP establishment ignore his gradual progress towards his big-government goals, and he achieved many goals for his supporters via little-noticed court decisions and agency regulations by allied appointees.

With constant pressure by Trumps supporters, Trump will be more willing and better able to ignore or overcome establishment opposition and gradually get his agenda implemented stage-by-stage.

In August 2015, Trump issued his very popular immigration planto raise wages by reducing legal and illegal immigration:

The influx of foreign workers holds down salaries, keeps unemployment high, andmakes it difficult for poor and working class Americans including immigrantsthemselves and their children to earn a middle class wage Every year, we voluntarily admitanother [1] million new immigrants, [plus 1 million] guest workers, refugees, and dependents,growing our existing all-time historic record population of 42 millionimmigrants. We need to control the admission of new low-earning workers inorder to: help wages grow, get teenagers back to work, aid minorities rise into themiddle class, help schools and communities falling behind, and to ensure ourimmigrant members of the national family become part of the American dream.

Requirement to hire American workers first. Too many [contract worker] visas, like the H-1B, have no such requirement. In the year 2015, with 92 million Americansoutside the workforce and incomes collapsing, we need companies to hire from thedomestic pool of unemployed. Petitions for workers should be mailed to theunemployment office, not USCIS.

Immigration moderation. Before any new green cards are issued to foreignworkers abroad, there will be a pause where employers will have to hire from thedomestic pool of unemployed immigrant and native workers. This will helpreverse womens plummeting workplace participation rate, grow wages, and allowrecord immigration levels to subside to more moderate historical averages.

Trump repeated those commitments in many subsequent speeches. For example, in March 2016,Trump called for a two-year pause in legal immigration, saying I think for a period of a year to two years we have to look back and we have to see, just to answer the second part of your question, where we are, where we stand, whats going on Id say a minimum of one year, maybe two years.

In his January 2017 inauguration speech, he described the theme of his administration as Buy American, Hire American.

Some polls showthat promise is extremely popular. For example, a November 2016 poll by Ipsos showed that only 12 percent of respondents strongly opposed plans to change the legal immigration system to limit legal immigration. Four times as many, or 57 percent, back reductions in legal immigration, while 13 percent did not take a position.

To a large extent, Trump has followed through on those promises. He has revived enforcement of immigration law, slashed the inflow of illegal immigrants, and he is pushing a popular merit-based reform that would likely reduce the inflow of unskilled legal immigrants. Trumps merit-based reform is also backed by some GOP legislators who want to increase Americans productivity, not just the number of American consumers.

But Trump is under constant pressure from business leaders including some of his advisors who have a huge incentive to boost legal immigration, no matter the cost to ordinary Americans.

In strictly economic terms, legal immigration is far more important than over-the-border illegal immigration, because it is far larger and has far greater impact on employees, companies, and investors, wages, housing prices, profits and stock prices. In fact, multiple economists including economists at Goldman Sachs say government should try to boost the size of the economy by importing more consumers and workers.

Federal immigration policy adds roughly 1 millionlegal people, workers, consumers and renters per year to the economy. This annual inflow is further expanded by the immigrants children, which now combine to create a population of roughly 63 millionconsumers and workers not counting roughly 21 million illegals and their U.S. children.

That means roughly one-quarter of the nations consumers have been imported into the 330 million-strong economy via legal or illegal immigration.

This legal inflow includes some very skilled workers and some people who become very successful entrepreneurs, but it also dumps a lot of unskilled workers into the country just as a new generation of technology is expected to eliminate many types of jobs. It also annuallyshifts $500 billion from employees to employers and Wall Street, and it forces state and local government to provide $60 billionin taxes to businesses via routine aid for immigrants, and it pushes millions of marginal U.S. workers out of the labor force andinto poverty, crime andopioid addiction.

High immigration also reduces employers need to recruit disengaged Americans, to build new facilities in high-unemployment areas, or tobuy productivity-boosting machineryor to demand that local schools rebuild high school vocational training departments for the millions of youth who dont gain much from four-year colleges.

The resulting poverty and civic conflicts increase ballot-box support for Democrats, ensuring that more states especially high-immigration California are dominated by the Democratic Partys big-government policies.

Under Obama, the annual inflow of legal immigrants was roughly twice the inflow of illegals. Roughly 550,000 illegals arrived in 2016, but fewer are expected in 2017, according to the Center for Immigration Studies.

Whenever the inflow of extra immigrant customers is threatened by public opposition, business groups say their companies and investors will be damaged.

For example, in July 2016, a Wall Street firm tried to help Hillary Clinton by declaring that Trumps opposition to illegal immigration would hurt companies and investors by forcing them to pay higher wages, and by reducing the cost of housing.

As the immigrants leave, the already tight labor market will get tighter, pushing up labor costs as employers struggle to fill the open job positions, the report declared. Mr. Trumps immigration policies will thus result in potentially severe labor shortages, and higher labor costs, the critical report promised.The formal unemployment rate would immediately drop by a third, from 5 percent in 2016 to 3.5 percent in 2017, the report predicts. Housing prices would drop by almost 4 percent in 2018 and 2019, says the Moodys report, which did not admit that higher wages and lower housing prices are popular throughout America.

Reduced immigration would result in slower labor force growth and therefore slower growth in potential GDP, or annual economic activity, according to a 2017 report by Goldman Sachs.

Similarly,Jamie Dimon, thechairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, recently called for an amnesty for illegals and a potentially huge increase in white-collar immigration to help stimulate the economy. I hope eventually we have proper immigration. Good people who have paid their taxes and havent broken the law, get them into citizenship at the back of the line [and] if people get educated here, and theyre foreign nationals, get them a green card, he said.

In the same interview, Dimon portrayed himself as concerned about the economic condition of ordinary Americans, saying:

Middle-class wages havent gone up. One is, lower-class wages havent gone up enough to create a living wage. One is, people losing jobs, more to automation than anything else. Theres some more terrible numbers men, age 25 to 55, the labor-force participation rate is down 10%. Thats unbelievable. There are 35,000 dying of opioids every year. Seventy percent of kids age 17 to 24 cant get into the US military because of health or education. Obesity, diabetes, reading and writing. Is that the society we wanted? No. We should be working on these things, acknowledge the flaws we have, and come up with solutions. Not Democrat. Not Republican. Not knee-jerk.

But the 2016 election showed that Trump and centrist Americans recognize that higher immigration means reduced wages, more unemployment, more drug addition, higher housing prices and longer commutes. That is how Trump won the 2016 election in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, and why his on-again, off-again, pro-American immigration policy is at the core of his impending 2020 race.

Follow Neil Munro on Twitter @NeilMunroDC or email the author at NMunro@Breitbart.com

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Donald Trump Backslides on Campaign Promise To Curb Legal Immigration - Breitbart News

Beware the unintended consequence. Thats the lesson unfolding in the upstate agriculture industry as farmers deal with the collateral damage of the Trump administrations crackdown on illegal immigration.

Legal immigrants perform critical labor on farms around the country, including upstate and Western New York. They pick apples, plant crops, tend animals. But they are worried even though they are here legally about being questioned, misclassified or harassed by law enforcement. That worries their employers, who value the labor of their workers, and it hurts local merchants when potential patrons fear traveling away from their farms.

Unless Americans want to pay more for their food and does anyone think they do? the problem cannot be allowed to fester. Congress needs to improve the guest worker program that makes farming possible and, more fundamentally, agree to an immigration reform plan that relieves this issue permanently.

The national meltdown over immigration legal and illegal is the root of the problem on upstate farms. Suspicion follows even legal workers laboring here under the authority of the governments H-2A visa program, which authorizes guest workers. Those people typically do hard, physical, low-paid work from which many Americans recoil.

But the backlash against immigrants is complicating life for farmers, who worry they wont be able to keep their help or, worse, wont be able to find it at all, as the national mood drives down the number of people willing to work in fear.

The first solution to this problem is to streamline the H-2A program, making it easier for immigrants to make use of it, ensuring that compliance rules are simple and taking steps to protect visa holders from legal threats. Its not just the right thing to do for workers that we need, but for farmers who hire them and shoppers who consume the goods they plant and pick.

Even more important, though, is for the country to get past its stalemate over illegal immigration. Its a real issue, of course, and needs to be attended to, but its not the most important matter on the national agenda. Whats more, it is one that can be resolved by people of good will in both parties who are willing to focus on facts.

First is that the country simply isnt going to deport millions of illegal immigrants. Americans will not stand by as good people are abused and families are torn apart. We need a better answer, very much like the one that the Senate approved in 2013. Give illegal immigrants a path to legal status or citizenship that requires payment of back taxes, possibly a fine and getting in line behind those who are here legally. Thats not unreasonable.

Some wont hear of that, insisting that all who are here illegally must be sent packing for the sake of a legal purity that is rarely applied in other contexts. At some point, though, reality must intrude. That doesnt mean no one can be deported. Illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes should certainly be ejected, for example. And modern technology sensors, drones and so on can be used to protect the borders, far more effectively than a wall ever could. Acknowledging the fact of illegal immigrants doesnt obviate the need for sensible and effective border security.

Finding a resolution that most Americans can accept is the only way to puncture this boil on our civic life. The extremists need to be politely turned away so that people with common sense and good hearts can attend to a problem that is dragging millions into its unnecessary vortex.

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Editorial: We need a better guest worker program, and immigration reform - Buffalo News