Some Thoughts On Immigration

by Sheryll Bonilla, Esq.

The agricultural industry relies heavily on immigrants.

They take smelly, physically hard, low-paying jobs cutting chickens, beef, and pork, and packaging the meat to send to stores, or to other food production facilities to be used in making soups, frozen entrees, and other products.

The quotas they work under are stressful.

Those processing lines are crowded and high-pressure.  Immigrants also take sun-intense, back-breaking jobs harvesting onions and potatoes and other produce out of the ground at 75 cents a bucket or harvesting crops in the sweltering heat.

Immigrants work long hours for low wages, without benefits.

These are not desirable jobs, so the farm owners have a difficult time getting citizens to take the jobs. Farms rely on immigrants, and so, we Americans, in turn, rely on them to provide food for us.

It’s not just agriculture. It’s hard to find workers willing to wipe the poopy butts or change the pee-pee diapers of the frail and elderly. Most of us know someone who is or was in a nursing home.

Next time you visit, see how many of the staff are immigrants. Think of how families would be affected if those immigrants were not available to take care of persons in care homes.

Then think of how businesses would be affected if families had to decide who must give up a paying job so they can stay home to take care of that elderly relative because no immigrants were available to staff nursing facilities.

If employers think they have a worker shortage now, imagine how much worse it would be if the labor pool shrank due to people staying at home caring for elderly or frail relatives because there were no nursing home staff to perform these tasks.

As my dad once told me, don’t look down on immigrants – they take jobs that other people are unwilling to take. Immigrants provide an important source of labor because all too often those jobs are ones that citizens find undesirable.

Sen. James Lankford (R-Oklahoma) negotiated with the Democrats a border protection bill that gives Republicans everything they’ve wanted for years.

This bill funds enough judges to cut the wait time to six months so asylum seekers don’t linger for years awaiting a decision.

It gives President Biden the power to shut down the border now if there are too many people coming across the border. It funds legal assistance for children – as young as three years old, imagine if they were your precious babies – who were separated from their parents at the border, so the children are protected.

Senator Lankford got all these Republican wish list provisions on immigration in exchange for the Democrats getting funding to help Ukraine continue fighting off Russia. 

To his great consternation, after getting a conservative’s dream bill, Trump commanded the GOP in the House and Senate to kill the bill so he could run on “protecting the border.”

Sen. Lankford urged his fellow GOP senators to back the bill – one that they could not even get when the Republicans controlled the House and Senate under Trump.

The GOP response was to threaten Sen. Lankford severely if he didn’t drop it.

Immigration does not have to be an issue in the 2024 election. The GOP in Congress simply has to say, “Thanks for giving us everything we’ve ever wanted on immigration, let’s get this bill passed!”

The GOP killed their own bill 50-49, to keep immigration as an issue, even though the bill would assuage the concerns of so many voters across the country.

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