Americans for Immigration Reform
Mr. Alberto Cardenas, Jr. was the guest speaker for the HCA August luncheon. Mr. Cardenas is the Executive Director for a new organization called Americans for Immigration Reform or AIR. This organization is being sponsored by the Greater Houston Partnership and its main goal is to work at the national level to set an immigration policy that protects the interests of this country and allows for a legal immigrant work force. Mr. Cardenas stated that he was first brought into this topic when he was working as the Government Affairs Director for Texas Tech University, making sure that the higher education dollars were flowing their way. He stated that he got a call from Senator Hutchinson saying that she needed him on her team. Mr. Cardenas said that immigration had just become a big issue, the House had just passed a very punitive bill, and the Senate was about to take up a bill. Mr. Cardenas said that the Senator asked him to help message the issue, not only for Texas but for the entire Country. That was how I got into the immigration issue, said Cardenas. This is an issue that will not go away until we fix it and it must be addressed so that we may continue to maintain the businesses that you have and to keep the Texas economy going. We need to look at not just where we are or where we have been, but where we need to be as a country, and a region. You need to know how this issue will directly effect your industry and what you need to do to protect yourself on immigration policies that are currently in place.
To answer the question of what is the direct effect of the immigration policies on your industry today, we need to look at the current U.S. immigration policy. In this Country, if you want to have a legal work force of low skilled immigrant labor there are some serious restrictions. Anybody that wants to come into the United States legally has to stand in line and there are only 5,000 openings available for non-skilled laborers. According to Mr. Cardenas, this number includes anyone who wants to work in the U.S. in fields such as construction, meat processing, canneries, or the service industry. Only 5,000 legal, non immigrants per year are allowed into the United States. That is the problem we find ourselves with today and that is why we have over 12 million undocumented immigrants living in this country. For those in the engineering field or other professional fields that say we need to have more high skilled immigrants, the laws of this country say that we can allow in only 65,000 H-1-V visas which are the high skilled visas. According to Mr. Cardenas, “the day those applications are filed the slots are already booked.” The policy needs to be reformed and there are some solutions available, but that is the direct effect upon industry when you cannot have a workforce come into this country to work legally stated Mr. Cardenas.
What do you need to do to protect yourself? The first thing I would say is that we have a problem with the employment laws of this country. As an employer or a general contractor these laws say to you that your subcontractor has an employment problem or you need to provide a social security card along with a driver’s license on all of your employees. To protect ourselves we can do one of two things; reform our laws or deal with the situation that we have at hand with the status quo. Mr. Cardenas stated that it was this issue that got the Greater Houston Partnership to form the 501C-3, Americans for Immigration Reform, and ask him to serve as their Executive Counsel. His main priority is making sure we come up with a rational solution on our immigration policy. Mr. Cardenas stated that there are two extremes on this issue; one side says that everyone needs to go home that doesn’t belong here while the other side says that all of those individuals need to become citizens of the United States. We need to find the middle ground stated Mr. Cardenas and that is the Partnership’s goal here. Mr. Cardenas said that he spent two years with Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison’s office looking at this issue and in 2006 they put out the Hutchison Pence proposal which looked at getting people to go home and come back in legally. One thing that Mr. Cardenas said that struck a note with the audience is that there are currently 70,000 individuals who are not U.S. citizens, that are currently serving in the United States Armed Services, active duty, some in Iraq and Afghanistan. He then asked that crowd who among us is willing to take their place in order for them to be deported? It is issues such as this that need to addressed and need to be used to frame the discussion on immigration reform.
Mr. Cardenas stated that he believes that we must be a nation of laws and that we must have sovereign borders, but when the laws don’t work they need to be changed. The Partnership’s campaign looks at a couple of key principles such as securing the borders, fences protecting both the northern and southern borders and protecting our ports, but for the economy of this country accountability and verification is the key. For an employer it makes absolute sense to have the government get its house in order. The government could run an I.D. system where you could have a legal worker present to you a card that could be scanned and checked to make sure that the worker is legal. Mr. Cardenas also said that we must have a future flow worker program, one that makes sense for this Country and for this region. He stated that we cannot allow ourselves to be the floodgates to everybody, but we also have to look at not repeating our mistakes down the road. There are 8.1 million undocumented workers in this country according to Mr. Cardenas, and there 1.1 million undocumented workers in this state contributing $220 billion worth of productivity.
Mr. Cardenas recognized that there are other issues that need to be addressed in the immigration issue. He recognized that our public schools and hospitals are being over-burdened. He stated that these are issues that can be addressed. As an example he stated that for the hospitals we could take some of the medical withholdings being taken out of everyone’s paycheck, and use some of that money to compensate the public hospital system. The education system is also in need of reform and this campaign is trying to find a solution toward that goal. Mr. Cardenas did state however, what his organization is not attempting to do, and that is to deport students in our schools of higher education who may be here illegally but has been here since they were two years old. We are not saying this person needs to be a citizen tomorrow, but we are saying that there needs to be some rationality to the laws.
The Americans for Immigration Reform campaign is rooted in this principle, in order to change where we have been we need to change where we are going. The best way to do that, according to Mr. Cardenas is to mobilize a constituency and a ground operation so that when politicians take up this issue there will be an organized coalition in place. AIR plans to do this with targeted media messaging in key congressional districts and states, and they are going to do it in a way that will show what the economic impact of our inaction or possible action can be. Mr. Cardenas stated that he believes that the task of leadership is not to seek refuge in scapegoats, and this issue has been scapegoated. We cannot also seek refuge in reaction. Mr. Cardenas asked for the contractors support in reaching his group’s goal of a fair immigration program and closed by saying that we cannot have an immigration policy that has a statue along New York harbor welcoming everybody with open arms and a wall across the southern border keeping people out. Granted we have to have law and order but we should have a balance in between that allows those that want to work, and come here legally, to do so.
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