America needs bipartisan compromise on immigration

The United States is facing three major problems: a humanitarian crisis at our southern border, the unauthorized status of over 11 million immigrants and a shortage of both skilled and unskilled workers.

All three problems could be remedied significantly with the passage of immigration reform legislation that physically strengthens and enhances the border, provides law enforcement with the resources they need to expeditiously process applications, creates a pathway to citizenship for those who came here illegally as children but have worked hard and played by the rules and paves the way for moderate increases in legal immigration.

Not only would a compromise of this sort help mitigate the ongoing crisis at the southern border, it would also relieve a historically tight labor market, which has been a major source of the current inflationary environment, while also ensuring that everyone living here is paying their fair share in taxes.

Yet, our political system is so broken — and our discourse is so

How to have your say:

adversarial — that Republicans in Washington, D.C., blame Democrats for allowing open borders, while Democrats criticize Republicans for being devoid of compassion when it comes to immigration policy, and political gridlock persists. All the while, Americans on both sides broadly support immigration reforms.

Roughly two-thirds of American voters support offering a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers (69%), strengthening border control (68%), and offering a pathway to citizenship to undocumented immigrants here already who have committed no crimes and already pay taxes (66%), according to recent polling.

Furthermore, in terms of skilled immigrants, more than seven in 10 (71%) of Americans support increasing the number of immigrants who have a high level of education or specialized skills, including 83% of Democrats and 63% of Republicans.

In this newly divided Congress, both sides have an obligation — from a practical, humanitarian and economic perspective — to meet in the middle on this issue, and pass bipartisan legislation that addresses this multifaceted crisis.

We welcome letters on all issues of public concern. All are subject to editing and condensation, and they can be published only with the writer's true name. Letters must include the writer's home community and daytime telephone number for verification purposes. Please limit letters to 150words.

The humanitarian emergency at our southern border, which did also exist during the Trump presidency, has devolved into a catastrophe during Joe Biden's first term. Millions of migrants, including children, are risking their lives to make the perilous journey from Central America — as we saw last June when 53 migrants were found dead, locked in a truck outside San Antonio.

A recent opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal cited data that contextualized the scale of this crisis: from October 2021 through September 2022, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported slightly more than 2.7 million enforcement actions, which includes detentions of unauthorized individuals who crossed the border, and those deemed “inadmissible” at the border. For the same period in 2018-2019 — the last prepandemic year — Border Protection reported just 1.1 million enforcement actions — itself a huge increase from slightly more than 680,000 in 2017-2018.

Democrats who ignore and downplay the southern border crisis are making matters worse, but so are Republicans like Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott, who have used migrants as political pawns

Email:

letters@dailybreeze.com (Please do not include any attachments) by sending them on planes to Democrat-run cities and locales.

What this border crisis requires is not an all-or-nothing approach, but rather, reforms that will bolster funding for border security and law enforcement, expedite the processing of claims by migrants seeking asylum and make muchneeded improvements to the application process.

While surges in unauthorized immigration require intensive federal and state spending, legal immigrants soon begin paying taxes themselves, and also contribute legitimately to the workforce. In a historically tight labor market, moderate increases in legal immigrants — both skilled and unskilled — will have a clear benefit to the overall economy.

Though Republicans often claim that unskilled, low-wage immigrants often take jobs from American workers, the facts simply do not bear that out. In fact, when measured over the long term, the impact of immigration on overall native wage is “close to zero” per a National Academy of Sciences report.

Additionally, research by the economist Giovanni Peri shows that unskilled Americans may actually benefit from an influx of unskilled

Main:

310-540-5511

Fax:

310-540-6272 immigrants, as native English-language skills give them an advantage vis-à-vis moving into managerial roles in their industry as immigrants join.

Notwithstanding the necessity of immigration reform from a practical perspective, the politics are tricky, with both sides ostensibly hardened in their views.

Yet, compromise is still possible, as we saw with the passage of bipartisan infrastructure and gun safety laws by the current Congress. Further, as recently as 2013, the Senate managed to bass a bipartisan immigration bill that would have prevented the problems we are currently facing. That bill ultimately died, as House Republicans were committed to refusing anything that would codify a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and an increase in future admissions.

With the incoming Congress nearly evenly divided, extreme agendas must be jettisoned in favor of a grand bargain that Americans broadly agree on: a stronger border, a pathway to citizenship, as well as moderate increases in authorized immigration.

Twitter:

Follow or send tweets to

Facebook:

Leave comments at