Immigration Reform

Immigration Reform

The United States of America does truly need immigration reform. But it doesn’t need it in the way that so many seem to think.

First of all, we need to stop illegal immigration in its tracks. A law should be enacted that says that anyone entering the United States of America illegally can never be a legal resident, ever. This whole idea of amnesty flies in the face of our laws. We have laws that should be obeyed. If we have amnesty, then we are saying you can choose to break laws in the U.S.A. if you want to.

We do need to streamline the process of coming to the U.S.A. legally. One should not have to hire an attorney just to enter, but that is the way it often is.

We should not be paying for people to come here. It seems that there is too much competition for medical schools here in the U.S.A. We are turning away well-qualified, American college students from medical schools because there simply are more applicants than there is space available, yet we have foreign students in our medical schools. Charity begins at home. We should educate our own first.

We have millions of people out of work here in the U.S., but, we have nurses from many countries around the world. If we can educate people from Nigeria and other countries to be nurses, why can’t we educate Americans?

When people apply for visas to come to America they have to provide proof that they will be self-supporting. That is that they have resources that they can and will rely on for their living expenses and medical treatment. Why then are there so many non-citizens on food stamps (SNAP) and Medicaid as well as indigent care? One immigration reform should be that one must be a U.S. citizen in order to receive ANY government services. This should include Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, indigent care, free lunch, etc.

Non-citizens should be required to have social security and Medicare withheld from their paychecks to help support the system they helped break.

A big part of immigration reform should be education reform. All children age four through eighteen should be given a free education. Four year old kindergarten should be available for all. However, it should not all be provided by the public school system.

The government should determine the total cost to provide the proper education for a student. That is to provide everything so that teachers are paid properly and don’t have to take money out of their own pockets to buy supplies. Then, make this money available in the form of a voucher that goes with the child. The public school system would have to compete with the private sector for each student. The only difference is that the school building and grounds would be built and maintained by the government. This would give the public school system a little bit of an advantage over the private sector that would have to build and maintain their own facilities at their own expense.

There should be a national lottery that puts half of its profits into the education system. Each participating state would get the proceeds generated by that state. In other words, there would be no donor states. If Texas generates $10 billion dollars in profits from sales, then Texas receives $5 billion. The remaining $5 billion would go to paying off the national debt.

All teachers should receive a good salary. As it stands now, there are only two kinds of teachers: those who teach because they love it and could not imagine doing anything else and those who could not get another job because they are incompetent. All teachers, whether working in the public or private sector, should have to pass competency tests in order to become teachers and to remain teachers. If they don’t pass, they are out. The teachers’ unions won’t like this, but too bad. Who are the schools for, the teachers or the students?

For higher education we should provide a way to pay for higher education. We are paying for non-citizens to come and be educated; why can’t we make college free for all citizens?

Since we would have a world of students that would spend four years in college goofing off if we simply made all college free, that isn’t an option. But what we could do is to provide for everyone to receive their college funding provided they maintain a C or better average.

There should be no interest on student loans made to U.S. citizens. We pay taxes that provide those funds, so we citizens are loaning our money to college students with the hope that they will find good jobs and pay taxes. There is no need to have students kill themselves to pay interest.

People who graduate and then take on certain jobs should have their student loans forgiven. Teachers who work in the public schools should have 10% of their student loans forgiven every year. In ten years their debt would be completely forgiven. Continuing education for teachers in the public school system should be free.

Doctors who take jobs in free clinics could have 10% of their student loans forgiven every year. Other doctors could have the equivalent of one day’s pay deducted from their student loans for each day donated to a free clinic or similar. The same would be true for nurses.

Non-U.S. citizens would have to pay 100% of the cost of education with no exceptions. Private scholarships and endowments could be utilized, but no public funds could be used to pay for the education of any non-citizen.

Finally, any non-citizen convicted of any crime other than a misdemeanor should be deported immediately without exception. All persons should be required to have picture ID at all times. Anyone without proper, current identification should be detained until proper identification is made.

Picture ID should be required to vote. The whole idea that requiring photo ID is somehow discriminatory is stupid. Why is it harder for a black or Hispanic person to provide proper documents than a white person? Are we saying that black and Hispanic people don’t have birth certificates?

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