Regarding Ron Whitlock’s news article on US Senators Cornyn and Barrasso, both Cornyn and Barrasso are idiots, especially Cornyn.
The border does appear to be secure now with illegal immigrant apprehensions being relatively low, if not very low. But that does not mean the border actually is secure. This is only a temporary lull in crossings.
It may last a short time or a long time, but it will not last. We have seen illegal immigration surges in the past, and we will see them again UNLESS we take effective action. Neither Cornyn nor Barrasso would recognize effective action if it was given to them carved in stone.
If we genuinely want secure borders, the first thing we need to do is to revise our punitive immigration laws to allow many more people to enter our wonderful country legally. Actually, that fast is becoming an imperative.
The birth rate in the U.S. is falling at a time when the Baby Boom generation, which powered employment and a strong economy for decades, is retiring. This means, as Baby Boomers continue to leave the workforce and as we continue to have a low birth rate, we will see an increasingly critical shortage of workers, especially skilled workers in well-paid positions.
We need to be importing those future workers NOW, and giving them the education and training they will need to fill those middle class jobs that are crucial to our economic health and growth. We literally are running out of time as most demographers will tell us.
We live on the border. When I moved here in 1980, I saw lush fields of crops being tended to and harvested by workers; virtually all of whom were Mexican immigrants with few of them here legally. Today, in the Rio Grande Valley, many of those fields have disappeared under the growth of our cities and suburbs. But we still have vast amounts of land in this nation that are under cultivation. And we still import thousands of Mexican workers, most illegally, to tend those fields and produce our crops.
Illegal border crossings is a decades long on-going process. Yes, we need to control our borders. But we need to do that in a logical, well-coordinated, AND HUMANE way. What we have now, to me, unquestionably, is the worst in the 45 years I have called the Valley home. It is long past time we change our immigration laws to admit more people into our beautiful country, to provide them with the education and training they need to fulfill much more than back-breaking agricultural work, that we welcome them because they will fill a critical need in our nation, become a true asset to our nation, and become proud and valued US citizens.
We are a nation of immigrants. Every one of us or our ancestors came from some place else, even our Native Americans immigrated here. It is the intelligence and courage that drove those immigrants to endure great peril that many did not survive to arrive on these shores and build the strongest nation the world ever has seen. And now we have idiots who want to stop that process and throw the gears of our nation into reverse.
That’s insane.
Editor’s Note: The above guest column was penned by Samuel Freeman, a writer and researcher, Viet Nam Veteran, and former university professor based in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. The column appears in the Rio Grande Guardian with the permission of the author. Freeman can be reached by email via: srfree1542@icloud.com
