Mitt Romney's Strategy For Bipartisan & Long-Term Immigration Reform

MittRomney.com June 21, 2012

Cut Red Tape That Is Keeping Immediate Families Apart

Currently, legal immigrants in America often have to wait years to be with husbands, wives, and minor children. As president, Mitt Romney will ensure that husbands, wives, and their minor children are brought together on a timely basis.

•Mitt Romney will speed the processing of applications by eliminating the red tape that is keeping immediate families apart.

•Mitt Romney will work with Congress to give legal permanent residents the same priority as citizens when applying to bring husbands, wives, and minor children to the United States.

•Mitt Romney will reallocate green cards to family of citizens and legal permanent residents.

First of all, there is no delay of any consequence for spouses and minor children of American citizens.  The processing time for immediate family immigrant visas is about 6 months.  In any event most of those who are applying for spouses and children are doing so based on adjustment of status in the United States, with many of those beneficiaries in the United States illegally or who fraudulently enter with non-immigrant visas with the intent to adjust status when the sponsor obtains citizenship.  The usual story is that a legal permanent resident (LPR) applies for a spouse or child either overseas or in the U.S. illegally.  As an LPR there are significant delays and country limits.  However once that LPR naturalizes, an immediate visa becomes available.  So the only delay is because the now U.S. citizen was once an LPR.  There is no "red tape" that delays an immigrant visa application.  There are minimal requirements and fraud prevention efforts but those have little or no impact, especially since most fraudulent marriages or fraudulent applications by persons who are not children are approved.

Second, how will Romney, without Congress, reallocate green cards to "family" of citizens and LPRs while he is expanding immigration based on supposed high skilled immigrants?

Grow Our Economy By Growing Legal Immigration

The United States is currently excluding too many workers who will start businesses, create jobs, foster innovation, and help grow our economy.

Attract More Highly Skilled Immigrants:

•High-skill immigrants start companies, create jobs, and drive innovation at an especially high rate. The United States is also projected to face a shortage of 230,000 science and technology workers by 2018. At the same time, we have set the caps on high-skill visas so low that, for some countries, an entire year’s quota has been filled in an hour. Mitt Romney will ask Congress to raise the caps on visas for highly skilled immigrants.

•Many country caps—or limits on immigrants from specific countries—are so low, that America is losing some of the best and brightest to our international competitors. Mitt Romney will work with Congress to raise the country caps.

•America should keep the best and the brightest here in the United States. Every foreign student who obtains an advanced degree in math, science, or engineering at a U.S. university should be granted permanent residency.

Will Romney be issuing his own executive orders creating immigrant visas to be reallocated to family based immigration?  Or is he implying that all the new immigrant visas will be taken from the adult parents, adult siblings and adult children of U.S. citizens and LPRs?  That is the only reservoir of immigrant visas.  He will certainly need legislation for that.

Furthermore, Romney claims that he will create a military service only DREAM Act:

Military Service


Mitt Romney believes that young illegal immigrants who were brought to the United States as children should have the chance to become permanent residents, and eventually citizens, by serving honorably in the United States military.

However, under current law once an alien enters military service, that alien is automatically eligible for citizenship.  There is no intervening legal permanent residence status.  So Mittens can't just create a new class of LPRs through military service without Congress.

Mittens also seems to not know what the problem is.  He talks much about the border:

Secure Our Borders & Discourage Illegal Immigration

According to the non-partisan Government Accountability Office, Border Patrol lacks control of over half of our southwest border. And some estimates indicate that over 40% of illegal immigrants in America entered the country legally, but then overstayed their visas.

•Mitt Romney will complete a high-tech fence to enhance border security.

•Mitt Romney will ensure that we have the officers on the ground we need to gain control of the border.

•A Romney Administration will work to develop an efficient, effective system of exit verification to ensure people do not overstay their visas.

•Mitt Romney will develop an effective, mandatory employment verification system that will enable employers to be sure that those they hire are eligible to work. This will discourage illegal immigrants from coming to America to seek jobs. 

•Mitt Romney will foster a legal immigration system that works. This will offer an alternative to those who would otherwise enter illegally. For instance, reforming our current temporary worker program will offer employers who need such staff a legal option to find employees.

But there is nothing about interior enforcement.  Exit verification is nice, but unless there are officers doing the exit verification as part of a departure control program, not just some record system administered remotely as currently proposed, and arresting and formally deporting the visa overstayers, the practice of exit verification is pointless. 
  
Furthermore, the high-tech fence is a boondoggle for contractors.  Only a physical fence, a barrier to both persons and vehicles, is effective and aids control of the border.  
  
There is nothing about the failure of DHS and ICE to implement an effective interior enforcement strategy.  It appears there will be no increase in deportations and no repeal of the Obama Regime DREAM Act amnesty, which will only continue the magnet of illegal immigration. 
  
The only positive aspect of the plan is E-Verify, but without interior enforcement, illegal employees will only go off the books.  Now because there is no work-place enforcement strategy, illegal aliens work openly with Tax Payer Identification Numbers, expired authorized Social Security Numbers, fraudulent Social Security Numbers, or stolen Social Security Numbers.  While E-Verify will discourage some of the higher end employers, many will be shifted to off the books contractors or cash and will remain unless arrested and removed. 
  
There is also nothing in Mittens' plan for reforming the broken deportation system, fully implementing Expedited Removal much less expanding it to all aliens other than LPRs, or anything about the Obama Regime Administrative Amnesty. 
  
So, what we have is increased legal immigration, amnesty for DREAMsters, and expedited visas for family members. 
  
The rest is empty rhetoric, sly suggestions on decreased chain migration, or empty hints at enforcement.  Thin gruel indeed for patriots.