"Immigrant Replacement Reform Bill" is the Answer

THE PROBLEM: Immigration Reform. When you listen to members of Congress, you’d think that absolutely nothing about the current immigration system is working and the whole thing needs to be trashed and started over. Yet when you ask any immigrant who came through that system, and you’ll learn just how effective our current laws are.

For example, we already have a "Guest Worker Program." It’s called a Work Visa, and must be applied for and granted before entering the U.S. The immigrant must have a job waiting for him or her and to have an employer as a sponsor, who must certify that there are no qualified Americans that can fill that job. It’s a strategy that has allowed the Immigration service to protect American jobs. For decades, it’s worked just fine. An immigrant can only stay in our country as long as they work for that one employer. They’re not allowed to change jobs, as that negates their Work Visa.


That’s often a high price to pay for some, but most do it gladly, because they know it’s worth it in the long run. After they make all the necessary effort and sacrifice to obtain a Green Card, they are then provided a long and arduous path to citizenship. It’s a difficult but hardly impossible journey through layers of laudably protective bureaucracy, and it’s another part of the immigration system that works just fine.

The problem isn’t the need to reform the immigration system. The system works fine when people use it. The main problem is the need to get more people into the system. So far, all of the approaches offered up by Congress rely on proven lawbreakers (crossing the border illegally is still a crime, no matter how regularly it may be done) being enticed with so many sweets that they’ll be compelled to come join the party (and, not surprisingly, 6 out of 7 will join the Democrat party, which explains a lot about the immigration debate).

SOLUTION: Quite simply, we make one major, temporary reform to the Immigration system, called the "Immigrant Replacement Reform Bill." For a two-year period, we offer amnesty (yes, amnesty) to American employers who have knowingly or unknowingly hired illegals. Each worker must provide immigration documentation, verified through the

Immigration Service, and be issued a new non-duplicatible biometrics identification card. At the same time, we temporarily open the floodgates to those immigrants who are first in line pursuing the system legally, allowing employers to sponsor as many workers as they need to replace those that turn out to be illegal. As soon as one employee is proven to be illegal, they are quickly replaced with one who has gone through the immigration process.

Granted, the process will likely have to be shortened to meet the immediate demand, but that works to our advantage; illegals will be forced to leave because their jobs are disappearing, those jobs can then be filled by either Americans or newly-legalized immigrants who we now have the means to track. Obviously, many of them will be the same people, but at least now we know who they are, which is the entire point of the current immigration reform debate.

At the end of two years, amnesty is lifted, employers will once again be held responsible for hiring illegals (with loss of their business licenses, the way it used to be), illegals will be prosecuted for merely coming over the border (the way it used to be), and a return to sanity, a sense of fairness, and the rule of law will prevail over the land.