THE RAISE ACT_fbjh121217

BRIEF IMMIGRATION HISTORY

Immigration in America can be traced from the acts that were put in place to control immigration–

• The Irish and German immigration of the 1840s and 1850s had virtually no constraints.
• Central and Southern Europe immigration came in the late 19^th, early, and 20^th centuries and were not restricted except for health and felonies.
• Johnson Reed Act of 1924 – this Act imposed national origins quota system.  It excluded Chinese.
• The 1965 Ted Kennedy immigration act – this opened the door to mass immigration of unskilled and low skilled workers, primarily through unlimited family chain migration.  One result was that we have more Somalia born immigrants than Australian born in immigrants.  Over 36 million immigrants or 94% of the total have come to America over the last 50 years for reasons having nothing to do with an employment. This added to the 24 million illegal immigrants resulting in 60 million immigrants legal and illegal who did not come to this country because of a job offer on or because of their skills.
• This flood of immigrants has caused hardships on American low-income citizens.

• Wages for Americans with high school diplomas are down 2%
• Wages of Americans who did not finish high school are down 17%

The elitist claims that the legal immigrants and illegal immigrants take jobs that Americans will not do.  This is nonsense. If the wages are decent and the employer obeys the law, Americans will do any job.

Because we give two thirds of our green cards to immigrants’ relatives, there is a huge backlog in the system.  This policy forces highly talented immigrants to wait in line for years behind applicants whose only claim to naturalization is a family connection…  Consequently, we miss the very best talent coming to our country.

Simply stated, we have an immigration system that is failing.  Madison’s test of increasing the wealth and strength of the community is not being met.

RAISE ACT

The RAISE ACT is the brainchild of Tom Cotton, US Sen. from Arkansas.  He has an impressive background as an American.  After attending law school at Harvard, he served as an officer in Iraq and Afghanistan with the airborne.  His decorations include the bronze Star and a Ranger tab.

Here is how the act works. First is very similar to the immigration acts of Canada and Australia.  When people apply to immigrate, they are given an easy to calculate score on a scale from 0 to 100. This is based on education, age, job salary, investment ability, English language skills, and any extraordinary achievements.

Then twice a year, a US citizenship the immigration service would invite the top scores to complete their application and it would invite enough high-scoring applicants to fill the current 140,000 annual employment-based green card slots.

This program would end unlimited chain migration. It would remove quotas per country for high skilled applicants that are shut out of the process because of their country of origin. Finally, it caps the number of refugees offered permanent residence to 50,000 per year.

The net result would be an annual immigration pool that be younger, higher skilled, and ready to contribute to our economy without using welfare as more than half the current immigrant households do today.  We would stop importing millions of unskilled workers to take jobs from current blue-collar Americans and undercut their wages.

DACA

Obama illegally immigrated 700,000 people into this country and put them into a legal limbo. His act was illegal since the Constitution specifically designates the power and the responsibility for all immigration to the Congress of the United States and not to the Executive branch.

No one wants to send these kids back… However, a compromise must be made since they are here illegally and unfortunately because our president was irresponsible. There are two alternatives –

1. We can grant citizenship to all the DACA people that have been law-abiding productive citizens. However, this would legalize chain migration of their parents, the very people who created the problem by bringing the kids here illegally.
2. Pair any attempt to codify DACA with reform of the green card system to protect American workers. This means that chain migration must be ended.

CONCLUSION

Citizenship is the most cherished thing our nation can bestow upon new immigrants. The government should treat this citizenship in a way that puts the interest of our current citizens first and welcome those who are best prepared to handle the duties of citizenship and contribute positively to our country.  When this happens, Americans will start again trusting the leadership. The, Senator Tom Cotton RAISE program should be supported since it seems to have solved most if not all of the problems associated with our current dated 1965 Act on immigration.