Every four years the issue of immigration is trotted out, to once again, be front and center of the political discourse during a presidential campaign. Republicans are particularly good at this, but in point of fact, Republicans have no intention of dealing with the issue seriously. The issue is red meat for their followers and the issue of immigration encourages campaign contributors to fork over millions of dollars. When in point of fact they really do not want to solve the problem. It is nothing but a joke to believe that we can or want to really physically remove 11 to 12 million people from this country.

Once you peel away the campaign rhetoric, illegal immigration is all about cheap labor. The cheaper the better because the Republican Party true benefactors are Corporate America whose profits are increased if wages are kept down.

The big secret is that our country benefits by having cheap labor, and that in a country that has an aging workforce, illegals provide manpower and woman power to keep the wheels of certain segments of our work force going.

My fellow Americans, we have to make a choice, we either admit that we want and need cheap labor or we have to decide once and for all if we want to kick out of this country millions of people and pay the cost of doing so.

It is my contention that the powers that be do not want immigration reform. It would be simpler and less costly to fine companies severely for each worker that they willingly hire illegally. The laws should be enforced if we are serious about immigration reform, and the fines should be increased so that the fines would no longer be the equivalent of a slap on the wrist. The fine should be consequential, let us say either $50,000 to $75,000 per person per incident; that would get corporate America’s intention.

Whenever there is an effort to pass legitimate immigration reform, it will fail in the House because the members have been bought off. They will always give the excuse of not wanting amnesty, but that is just a convenient excuse. Sure on the surface it seems wrong to give anyone who is here illegally a break, because they broke the law. But by insisting on having a punitive punishment we deny the very real fact that we have 11 to 12 million people here illegally. It is impossible to remove them and thereby we need to give them a path by which they can be here legally.

If we were honest with ourselves, we would admit that we should have a guest worker program. Our agriculture depends on the labor that illegal workers have provided. The advantage of a guest worker program is that we would know who is here in our country. The guest workers would pay taxes and the relationship would be mutually beneficial.

The canard that is used by demagogues all the time is that somehow jobs are being taken away from other Americans. What a joke, do you really believe that white America is prepared to pick apart chickens for processing, pick strawberries from a field in the heat of the summer, and clean someone’s toilet? Come on, get real! In the southern states where they have right to work laws, and where unions do not exist, I do not see any poor whites signing up in mass numbers to work in the fields, the fields that are hot and muggy in the summer.

It just makes me aggravated to hear once again, the ghosts of the past and the echos of campaigns where we are debating an issue, the issue of immigration. We must solve this issue once and for all for national security reasons. We need to know who is here! We must stop using the issue of immigration to raise campaign donations and finally deal with the issue in a sensible way.

We can solve the issue if we have the political will to do so. We should be wise and humane enough to finally bring those who live in the shadows a chance to come out into the light of an enlightened nation.