Want a Green Card? Invest in Real Estate – NYTimes.com.
Work as a bracero for seven years in a California farm field, pay your taxes, be a positive member of society, raise a family, and live in constant fear of deportation because a pathway to legalization is closed to you.
But if you are wealthy, you can come to America and get a green card while you study, all for investing in a speculative real estate scheme that “employs” people.
Now, I’m all for enterprise. But I think if we are going to expand the EB-5 program, we had best start looking after the people who have been making America run, not just the people who want to bring bags of cash with them.
If you think that is a “liberal” sentiment, I implore you to go to New York and read the words of Emma Lazarus inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. Then tell me when this country stopped being the refuge of the tired and poor, and became a vacation colony for the world’s wealthy and privileged?
Assisting people who are seeking to pull themselves up by their own boostraps — the opposite of the rhetorical “moocher” — is surely as conservative as you can get.
Conservatives world over could build themselves nigh-on-unassailable majorities if they simply promoted immigration policies based on fundamental conservative principles, rather than the toxic mix of fear and racism we so often see.
It is such an easy fix! But it does require a principled stand.
Reblogged this on 8th Congressional District Ohio.