Sen. Calls For ‘Skills-Based’ Immigration Policy Reform

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Republican North Dakota Sen. Kevin Cramer told Tony Perkins of Washington Watch that there needs to be two different approaches to tackling immigration policy reform: one aimed at criminals, and another for peaceful jobholders and community members.
Cramer made his comments in early January, following Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) capturing an estimated 3,500 arrests of criminal illegal immigrants during President Donald Trump’s first week in office, as noted by the Washington Stand. While many news outlets report that ICE is conducting “raids” in order to make these arrests, this is untrue, according to ICE’s Baltimore field office director Matt Elliston. (RELATED: Ending Birthright Citizenship: A Challenge Worth Taking to SCOTUS)
“I really hate the word ‘raids’ because it gives people the wrong impression, as if we’re just arbitrarily going door to door and saying, ‘Show us your papers,’” Ellison told the Associated Press. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” he added, insisting that “the worst go first.”
Sen. Cramer’s Commentary
Cramer agreed with Perkins that “everyone but the criminals are happy that these violent … immigrants that are here illegally are being removed,” there is still some concern over immigrants who’ve been here for decades as a result of the broken immigration system.
“With regard to people who’ve been here decades, I think we have to have a different track [than with criminals],” Cramer continued. “The president has, in many cases, been much more open to different pathways for Dreamers and others than most Republicans. But I also think it becomes a bit of a negotiating tool at the same time, because to really deal with the problem, we have to fix our legal and our illegal immigration system to make sure that our economy can meet its potential. We should have a skills-based immigration policy. If you need more engineers or surgeons, we should have more H-1Bs. If you need more farm workers, we should have more H-2As. We just don’t have that flexibility in our system. Every other country in the world does, but we do not.”
Trump’s approach to immigration is also helping restore balance, said Cramer, noting that the ongoing policy changes “really sends the message to the other countries.” (RELATED: ROUNDUP: Trump & Vance First Week In Office)
“Look what [Trump] did over the weekend with the president of Colombia. [O]ther would-be illegal immigrants are looking at what’s going on in the last week in the United States and going, ‘I think I’ll change my plans next week. I’m not going to try to get into the United States.’ … I think you’re going to see a big shift in the behavior of countries and would-be illegal immigrants that will help sort of work through this,” he added.
“… But we do have to get our house in order when it comes to the one million plus illegal immigrants that come in every year, about 800,000 or more of which don’t bring a skill set or an education that’s in high demand in an economy that is constrained by a workforce shortage. So there’s a lot of opportunity here for people on all sides to come up with solutions, I think.”
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