Dear President Trump and Congress,

This has gotta stop. It has been 40 years since we have had effective immigration reform. The problem then was four million people who were undocumented spread over the Western and Southern states. Now we are talking 12 million people, spread over the whole country. The American people have spoken. Polling supported closing the borders. Polling supports deporting criminals. Polling does not support mass deportations.

It is past time to clean things up.

Those who are working — everyone pays a fine and gets legalized. Let’s get them out of the shadows so they are not prone to abuse, not prone to an underground economy. In reality the employers are going to pay any fines. I would have done that if any of the men working for me had been undocumented when I was still farming full time. Good employees are worthwhile, they are worth keeping. Let’s get everything above board.

Some are going to raise the question — we need to give them asylum because their home countries are violent. Ok, why are those countries violent? Because the cartels are there. Where did the cartels get their money and power? Selling drugs here. Our causal attitude about recreational drugs is killing people in our country and causing violence in other countries. We won’t solve our immigration issue until we work on this also.

We also need to stream line the process. None of my grandparents were born in this country. My grandparents from Europe took decades to finally get naturalized. I can understand those who want to just skip the process. But, how’s that working for us? I’m still not sure about this whole artificial intelligence thing, but if it can help streamline the process, I might support that.

This has gotta stop. Kicking the can down the road has not served us well. Treating the issue as a political hot potato does not serve us well. In his 1973 book “The Dance of Legislation,” Eric Redman says, “Washington, D.C., does not tackle issues so much as try to be seen tackling them.” Anyone who has worked in D.C. will recognize that statement. Effective immigration reform is long overdue. This is not a partisan issue. For the benefit of the country and our future we need to deal with this now.

---

Farmer, writer and educator, Paul Betancourt is a lecturer at Fresno State and written books on Swiss political history and environmental policy.