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Plan allows immigrants to fill jobs

The proposed Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act would give workers a three-year visa to take unsought jobs.

By SAUNDRA AMRHEIN
Published May 18, 2005

TAMPA - Some of their husbands and neighbors are disappearing.

Maria Ines said her husband was one of about a dozen Argentine workers from Palmetto to be deported recently after federal officials showed up looking for him.

She's left here with their 9-month-old daughter cleaning restaurants until she can afford an airplane ticket home.

Ines, 38, wants a chance for her family to live and work legally in the United States, she said in Spanish, joined by about a half dozen other immigrants and several American citizens who gathered Tuesday in front of City Hall to support a proposed bill in Congress.

The bipartisan bill, the Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act of 2005, is supported by both Republican and Democratic lawmakers. It calls for border security measures and the sharing of information and technology by federal, state and local officials.

It also would create a new visa to allow foreign workers to enter the country and fill jobs not being sought by American workers.

The visa would be good for three years and could be renewed one time for a maximum of six years in the country. By then, immigrants would have to return home or be in the pipeline for a green card.

But opponents like the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, say the bill is an unneeded amnesty provision.

"We believe it encourages further illegal immigration," said Jack Martin, FAIR's special projects director. "We also don't think a guest worker program is necessary. These people are taking jobs that could go to America's working people."

The jobs that Americans "supposedly" won't take today, he said, are paid severely depressed wage levels because of the large numbers of immigrant workers.

"If that number were reduced we have no doubt that wages would increase to the point that Americans would be attracted to the jobs," he said.

FAIR also doesn't trust that the bill includes an effective mechanism to make sure the jobs foreign workers get are ones that can't be filled by American workers.

Ines' husband worked at the Port of Tampa and other jobs as a welder with a fake Social Security number until he was arrested three months ago, she said.

"There are no jobs back home," she said. "The economy is really bad."

Workers like her husband, who had a clean criminal background when he sought employment in the United States, should be given a visa, she said. They pay taxes and aren't asking for handouts.

"We are not terrorists," she said.

The gathering was called by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. ACORN plans to help open a Tampa office with the Florida Immigrant Coalition to work on legal issues for workers, including battling exploitation by scam artists.

Some of the members of the group wore star-dotted gags, trying to make the point, organizers said, that they didn't have a voice in this country.

Roxane Kolar, an ACORN organizer, said members support the bill because it promised to crack down on security problems while at the same time letting foreign families legally fill empty jobs.

"It's a compromise," she said.

[Last modified May 18, 2005, 00:49:11]