Am I the only one outraged that our immigration laws and
policies have become hostage to the restrictionist rabble such that any public
discourse on immigration is a game of one upsmanship on how high the wall on
the Mexican border should be, or whether or not little children should be
allowed to go to school unless they can prove their legal status in
America. Lost in the hyperbole and
grandstanding is a real (as opposed to imaginary) problem best illustrated by a
true and unfortunately all-too-common story.
Amit Aharoni, a native and citizen of Israel graduated from
the Stanford University School of Business, and rather than taking his
prodigious education back to Israel, decided to stay in the U.S. and open up an
online cruise booking business called CruiseWise.com. Investors were so
confident in the prospects that he received $1.65 million dollars in start-up
capital, the majority of the money coming from abroad. With that money he was able to get up and
running and he hired nine U.S. employees with plans to eventually expand to
hundreds. These are workers here in the
U.S.—not India, or "Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan". What's more, these are new jobs created at a time when America desperately needs them the
most.
So recently, after Amit had filed the necessary paperwork to
be able to stay and work in the U.S. he
was stunned to learn that the agents of the Department of Homeland Security denied
his request. Amit, who was forced to
leave the U.S. and presently is overseeing the start up operations from
Vancouver, Canada is reportedly moving his company to one of any other countries
whose environment is more hospitable for foreign entrepreneurs, maybe even
Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan.
This past August, the Obama Administration announced
initiatives to streamline business related visas and provide much needed help
for start-up companies. But as usual,
the message so clearly enunciated at headquarters didn't even make it out of
the building let alone the beltway. Just
like the well-intended prosecutorial discretion memo that pragmatically outlined
DHS priorities on who should be removed from the country which was not only ignored,
but prompted a wave of insubordination as ICE field officers, denied their red
meat, howled in protest.
So let's step back and see where we are in all of this: as our economy continues to languish we have
people willing to invest money into our country and create U.S. jobs. Yet despite instructions from the President, the
functionaries empowered to adjudicate visa applications still have the mindset
they grew up with in a post 9/11 world:
immigrants are bad and are coming here to do us harm. We should all be so harmed to have Amit come
here with a giant bag of money and hundreds of jobs. And while this Kafkaesque circus rolls on, Mitt,
Perry, Newt, Cain et al have this surreal discussion about how much fencing is
enough to protect us. Protect us? From who?
Amit? Schoolchildren in
Alabama? Tomato pickers?
Clearly any adults left in the room need to stand up and
stop this madness. Fixing our broken
immigration system can go a long way to fixing our broken economy. But to pretend that the real issue is the
swarms of illegals that are snapping up all the good paying jobs and our
"generous" welfare benefits is an insult to our traditions as a
nation of immigrants not to mention our collective intelligence and distracts
us from seeing the self destructive folly of Amit's situation and the thousands
of others just like him.
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