While every member of Kansas’ congressional delegation has now made the taxpayer-funded trip to the U.S.-Mexico border to decry an influx of people from outside this country, they should be going to our local supermarkets or standing at the beef-packing plants of southwest Kansas instead.
There they should be pointing out how labor shortages raise meat prices and food production costs across the board. There they should be noting that this nation’s food system runs largely on the backs of immigrants.
Without the foreign-born residents that have gone to work in those slaughterhouses, feedlots, dairies and related livestock industries and processing facilities, the steaks, hamburgers, hot dogs, milk, ice cream and other foods we all enjoy would not be close to affordable on supermarket shelves. The same goes for the apple orchards of Washington state, the citrus groves of Florida and Texas, the vineyards of California and so on.
To claim that immigration is a problem without trying to solve this nation’s labor shortage by reforming the immigration system is nothing short of hypocrisy.
The answer isn’t to open borders. The practical lawmakers are proposing policies that give those with working papers a path to citizenship. They give immigrant children who have grown up here over the past few decades the rights they deserve.
Granted, there are hard decisions in policymaking. Not every new arrival will get to stay. But Congress must stop politicizing the treatment of migrants and refugees seeking work, all who happen to be humans.
Lawmakers look like fools as they bow down to the likes of Donald Trump, who’s made his name in politics by kicking hard-working immigrants at every turn.
Kansas is an agricultural state that doesn’t run without the meat packers, without the grain elevators, without the food processing plants and ag equipment manufacturers that dot rural America. Who will fill their jobs as the aging American workforce retires?
Stop, think, read widely and listen before casting a vote in this year’s August primary and November’s general elections. The state’s GOP congressional members are not working for answers, they’re simply deferring to one extremist leader who has no interest in bipartisan solutions on immigration. They know it, but they don’t have the courage to say it.
Why let this continue when elections can change things?
