Immigration: Why Biden Has It Right! March 3, 2024 If you have time for nothing else, watch this: Immigration in one powerful, informative video. Eight minutes. And — humor me! this stuff is so important! — two minutes of San Antonio’s (independent) mayor. The bill Trump killed was endorsed by the Border Patrol Union, the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. As argued above, it needs to be revived. One of its 12 most important provisions would let immigrants work while they wait for their asylum claims to be adjudicated. That’s what they want, as generations of immigrants have wanted when they first arrive: to wash dishes, bus tables, dig ditches, mop floors, pick fruit — whatever it takes to get a toehold into the American dream. And, as it happens, we need them: Immigrants are coming to the rescue of employers struggling with a historically tight labor market, and their arrival helps lower inflation. (Axios) The economy is roaring. Immigration is a key reason. (Washington Post): Immigration has propelled the U.S. job market further than just about anyone expected, helping cement the country’s economic rebound from the pandemic as the most robust in the world. That momentum picked up aggressively over the past year. . . . “Immigration has not slowed. It has just been absolutely astronomical,” said Pia Orrenius, vice president and senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. “And that’s been instrumental. You can’t grow like this with just the native workforce. It’s not possible.” . . . Stephen P.: “I live in Sonoma. There are vineyards all around me. I can tell ya with 100% certainty that if the Repubs get what they want on the on the border there will be a rebellion here — and throughout all agricultural states. And I see HELP WANTED signs on store, gas station, manufacturing buildings everywhere I look. I agree tho, we need an orderly immigration system.” Orderly, for sure: Republicans are absolutely right about that — and Democrats have never disagreed. We voted for the 2013 bipartisan bill that passed the Senate 68-32 and that would have sailed through the House and been signed into law by President Obama had the Republican House speaker allowed a vote. Instead, he blocked it — just as today’s Republican speaker is doing today. On instructions from Trump, the Republicans want to keep the crisis just as it is. It’s shameful. Speaker Johnson, a Christian extremist, should be taking his orders not from his temporal boss, but from his other one. The one who said: For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me. Not a word about razor wire or alligators in moats.