It’s time for all of us to stop wringing our hands and realize we have the power to fund our government. It’s a democracy. Call Mitch McConnell: 202-224-2541. Call Cory Gardener: 202-224-5941. Tell them to get off their butts! Tell them to call the bill to the Senate floor and pass the funding with a veto-proof two-thirds majority, or they’ll all be looking for jobs come the next election. We hold the power, not Trump and not the Republicans. We, the people, can demand our government pay our citizens, our employees.
For those of you who still think the President and his supporters may have the right idea, let’s debunk the myths.
1. A lot of the Republicans supporting Trump don’t actually believe there is an immigration crisis. That’s because undocumented immigration at our Southwestern border are at the lowest level in almost 50 years!
Many Republicans subscribe to the theory that the federal government needs to be a lot smaller. Of course they are pretending that they haven’t created a bunch of workarounds like having air traffic controllers work without pay, reopening the Bureau of Land Management offices to approve oil and gas leases, instructing the IRS to send refund checks and bringing back the maintenance workers who clean toilets and empty trash cans at our national parks.
The list goes on. These delusional politicians believe they are demonstrating to everyone we can live with a smaller government. They are in fact dropping our economic output by about half of a percent every month the partial shutdown occurs. And they know it. They don’t care. Let’s talk about the immigration myths.
2. There are no illegal aliens. We make the laws. If the current laws were in place when my grandparents immigrated about 100 years ago, they would not get in. A cousin sponsored them. My family was uneducated and unskilled. That is not allowed in Trump world. We spend hundreds of millions of dollars detaining would-be immigrants. Instead, let’s create very efficient, effective, secure screening, and process as many immigrants as possible to add to our labor force. We can charge applicants our actual cost for the process. We can use fingerprint, facial recognition and other data checks to correctly and securely identify immigrants. Let’s give them tax IDs. Let’s charge them an additional income tax as visiting workers. Let’s change our laws and encourage them to seek citizenship in two years instead of making them wait five years. If they don’t apply in five years, they have one year to apply for citizenship or leave the country — because we want citizens, not perennial foreign workers who do not support our communities.
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3. Most undocumented immigrants are not slipping through the Southwestern border; they are overstaying their visas. A wall won’t change that. According to the Department of Homeland Security, in 2017 about 300,000 people were apprehended at the Southwestern border.
That’s the lowest since 1971. Some crisis! More than twice that many visitors overstayed their visas.
The most egregious is France, with more than 16,000 overstaying their visitor visas. Beware French extremists infiltrating! You know which country has the highest percentage of visitors failing to leave the U.S.? Portugal. Yep. Portuguese people just don’t want to leave. They overstay at a rate of more than 2 percent, and Hungary is a very close second. You think they’re all drug dealers and rapists? Or maybe they just want jobs!
Most of these people are seeking the same American dream that brought each of our families here. These folks are not looking for a fight with Homeland Security. We should not criminalize the desire for economic security. We should tax it!
Others are not walking across Central America because they thought it would be fun like your cousin on the Pacific Crest Trail, or your college roommate who did the AT. These folks would prefer to stay home, if that was a safe place. It’s not.
4. Let’s stop the problem at its source. If we really want to stem the flow of immigrants at our Southwestern border, we could come up with an effective strategy, work with foreign governments to stop the violence created by drug cartels south of our border. Cartel violence and government corruption is driving people from their homes. These are the same cartels we are fighting at our border. We have a vested interest in fixing this problem.
5. A wall won’t stop the drugs. Drugs are coming through ports of entry, disguised as other things. According to government reports, drugs get to the U.S. on trucks, in private vehicles, on individuals, through tunnels, via U.S. mail from China and flung on catapults.
6. One of the persistent myths is that Americans lose jobs to cheap foreign labor. Unless you did not graduate high school, this just isn’t the case. Natural-born citizens generally do not compete with foreign labor in the same job market.
Economic research demonstrates foreign workers add to the economy. They buy goods. They often start businesses and employ workers. Thus they are job creators, not job robbers.
7. Another pernicious myth: Immigrants commit crimes at a higher rater than citizens. Not true, the opposite is true. Immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans, according to a peer reviewed 2017 study of government statistics.
8. Customs and Border Protection officers do not prefer a wall. In a survey, less than half of one percent advocated for a physical border. Most agents said they need more agents and more technology.
So call Mitch McConnell and Cory Gardner. Call friends and family in states with Republican senators. Tell them to call out their senators. Pay our people! Either do your job, or we will vote you out! Be sure to tell them that you know the wall is not an effective border protection tool, and you don’t buy the fear mongering myths they are putting out.
This is our country. We pay our bills. This is not a game. People are not political footballs.
See our digital online version of this column for links to source material. Susan Knopf is a Summit County resident. She has won awards from the Associated Press and United Press International for her news reporting.