Immigration Reform
5th District Congressional candidate Chris Palombi thinks America needs to reform its immigration system and he thinks it’s going to take a fresh perspective to make that happen. “Immigration reform has been something that has been a long time coming. DACA was enacted under President Barack Obama back in 2012 as an executive order, and it’s been eight years and Congress has still yet to touch that. They have still yet to legislate and do their job for immigration reform since then. The troubling thing is that we have a lot of DACA recipients, they’re now in limbo.”
Palombi says that parties must work together to fix immigration on several fronts. “And the only way that we can get any sort of meaningful reform is having a bi-partisan solution. One that is a multi-pronged approach, and making sure that we are increasing security at the border while also making sure that we are processing the legal backlogs of applications.”
5th District Congressman Steny Hoyer said, “America needs immigrants to ensure an adequate workforce. Why? Two people are producing less than two children. What does that mean? Your population shrinks. We need workers in America. We need immigration.”
The System Is Broken
Hoyer said everyone admits there’s a problem. “There’s not a Republican in the Congress of the United States that won’t tell you the immigration system is broken. There’s not a Democrat that won’t tell you it’s broken.”
Hoyer said Republicans refused to vote on a comprehensive immigration bill and he blamed President Trump for demonizing immigrants. “He’s generalized. He’s libeled immigrants, particularly from Central America.”
Hoyer claimed the vast majority of Americans support DACA. “The DACA kids who came here as infants or seven years old or eight years old who have lived here all their lives, gone to school here, graduated from high school here, gone to college here, maybe a nurse at St. Mary’s Hospital or in Charles County, or Calvert Memorial. Eighty-five percent of Americans say, ‘We don’t want to kick those people out.’ All they know is America.”
Broken Promises
The congressman said President Trump promised to help. “The President said he was going to fix it. I sat next to him. He was right next to me. I said, ‘Mr. President, we need to solve these DACA issues. There are about 2,800,000 of them who got DACA, but there are another 1.2 million or so who did not trust the government to get their name.’ Now, they’re saying, ‘See I told you so.’ Trump didn’t make that promise. Obama made that promise. But it was a promise that America made to these kids. You come forward, you put your name on the line, and you show us what you’re doing, you’ll be okay. Trump broke that promise. Now the court said you can’t do it, so it hasn’t been broken. But he sat there and he looked at me and he said, ‘You send down a DACA bill and I will sign it.’ And we couldn’t get it passed in the House and Senate. So, it never got to him.”
Palombi said that immigrants entering the country legally should come first. “We have a lot of individuals right now who are still within the process to become citizens. They should come first; they went through the process. I think it’s a marvel that we have so many people that still want to come to our country to seek a better life. They still seek that American Dream. Even though, every four years, we have individuals who say they’re going to leave the country if their person doesn’t win or not. But they stay, because in our country it’s that American Dream that we provide for everybody. Especially in the case of DACA recipients, many of them have no ties to the country from where they came from anymore. I think we have a moral, ethical, and economic problem that we need to have solutions for.”
Hoyer said he’d keep up the push for immigration reform. “We need immigration reform and we’ll pursue that.”