Health & Fitness
Immigration: What Happened to Immigration Reform?
The US Senate has already passed their version of Comprehensive Immigration Reform.
The US House of Representatives is now back in session until December, 2013. There are already sufficient votes to pass Comprehensive Immigration Reform in the House, but now the Representatives are saying that the schedule is too busy to consider immigration. They are in the midst of debates about Syria, the national debt and government spending.
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Why do we have 11 million undocumented individuals in the US? Because our immigration system has failed, and continues to fail more every day. There are insufficient visa numbers available for highly skilled workers. If a company does not file for an H1B visa on the very first day that the visa numbers become available each fiscal year, the company runs the risk of not getting the worker(s) it needs. How absurd is it that there is only ONE DAY PER YEAR that a business can file for a highly skilled worker? Our current immigration system threatens our competitive edge in the world marketplace.
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There are not enough low-skilled workers to meet the demand in the US. How many US citizens respond to job ads for positions as landscape workers, cleaning people, pizza delivery? Yet, we need these jobs to be filled. Employers who try to fill these jobs with undocumented persons, are penalized, even though there is a shortage of US workers to fill the jobs.
US citizens and permanent residents have to wait more than six or seven years to sponsor their adult children to come to the US to reunite with their families.
The US has 11 million undocumented, because our immigration system is broken. It is dysfunctional and doesn’t work. Everyone recognizes this. Then, why is our US House of Representatives unwilling to address a problem that everyone agrees is a problem?
The best way to fix a problem is to address the problem. Our undocumented population is not going away, the need for highly skilled workers is not going away, the need for low skilled workers in shortage is not going away, families wanting to reunite with each other are not going away and undocumented children raised their entire lives in the US are not going away.
The problem will not go away and will not take care of itself until we stand up and fix it.
