In Support of Skilled Immigrants

As the election campaigns heat up we, the nameless rabble of voters, brace ourselves for a suspension of common sense, but playing fast and loose with immigration is another matter. Immigration isn't just another bureaucratic issue, it is how our country came into being. For the State Department to change their mind, after encouraging all these professionals to spend thousands of dollars to "file right away", is unconscionable.

How can the Congress, even a Congress who's leadership reads excerpts from The Cat in the Hat into the public record, suggest that millions of people who came into the country illegally be given a pass to stay while the thousands who labor with great pain and no small expense to do it legally are dismissed out of hand.

Don’t get me wrong. I think Mexican immigrants make a great addition to the country but now we are talking about ignoring thousands of advanced degreed professionals while we wave in millions who may very well not make quite the same contribution to our future. And before you think these professionals are coming to steal your jobs, let me tell you that if it wasn't for foreign professionals there is no way my company or Caterpillar or the hospitals could deliver services.

We need professionals in the US; we don't have enough and our schools do a poor job of encourage our native born students to study science and engineering - show me an Illinois farm boy with a degree in engineering and I will hire him tomorrow. According to the US Dept. of Education, the US graduates 70,000 engineers a year. India 350,000, and China 600,000. Those may or may not be accurate numbers but the scale is clear; we need help or we are going to be left behind.

Now the immigration bill is stalled and yet the United States is in danger now and in the future. We are in danger in the future because our policies block thousands of technically sophisticated immigrants from contributing their skills and knowledge to our future . We are also in terrible danger right now from terrorism and here is some common sense: there is no point in Homeland Defense or billion dollar missile systems when you can drive a pickup truck loaded with biological terror over the Mexican border any Sunday afternoon.

We need Mexican immigrants too. They are hard working, conservative, and family oriented and an enormous amount of work would go undone without them (you’d think the Republicans would be greeting them at the border with presents) but we have to enforce immigration control and set some standards. If we don’t enforce English as the required language, we are begging for break up of the United States. It doesn’t sound like a big issue but think about World War I. If we were a German speaking country, we would never have backed England, our old enemy, and there would have been no World War II; no Hitler. The United States missed being a German speaking country by one vote. The world is burning, Congress, stop chasing votes and get to work.