Op-Ed -Senator Feinstein & Amnesty Redux

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No, I didn't misspell CONgress, I do that because CONgress is the opposite of PROgress.

Sen. Feinstein is doing her best for the folks who fund her campaigns and get the votes out for her by sneaking a new farm guest worker program into legislation to continue the funding for the Iraq war.

The bill which was inserted in the larger legislative package will offer legal status, albeit not a pathway to citizenship (yet) for 1.3 million workers who are able to prove they have been in the U.S. for at least 150 days or worked a total of 863 hours in the U.S. The bill would allow the workers to remain for only five years, but the odds of being able to get them out after five years is practically nonexistent, it only gives Feinstein and her cronies in CONgress more time to "mitigate the plight of the workers'

"It's an emergency," Feinstein said of the farm worker situation. "If you can't get people to prune, to plant, to pick, to pack, you can't run a farm."

The only real emergency in this situation is the need for more votes for the Senators and Representatives seeking re-election.

One issue which has made the move "necessary" are the recent crack downs on illegals in the Central Valley agricultural regions of California, a vast stretch of farm land which produces most of the agriculture in California and is nearly 400 miles (600km) long. Also the recent moves made by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) Border Patrol Agents and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers to slow the flow through the porous border have apparently made some of the large mega-farming corporations nervous.

On the other end of the spectrum, Rep. Zoe Lofgren is pushing a bill which will allow immigrants who are graduates of U.S. colleges to skip the entire H1-B temporary high-skilled workers visa program. Instead allowing them to immediately apply for full citizenship. The San Jose, Ca. region Lofgren represents is part of the Silicon Valley, the high-tech capitol of not only California, but of the United States.

Lofgren is in fact teaming with several conservative Republican members of the House of Rep's. to attempt this maneuver.

"This is no time to say to high-skilled workers in a global economy that we don't want you," said Barry Cinnamon, chief executive of Akeena Solar in Los Gatos. "We're happy to have that argument with anyone."

The real problem can be argued about until sometime in the next millennium as regards why not enough high tech jobs are going to skilled American workers, but one bottom line stands out when we see the amount of money spent by lobbyists "working" the halls of CONgress to secure specialized legislation.

One very real problem are the lobbyists and their money used to legally bribe legislators.
One very real answer is to not control the lobbyists, but to put them on their own endangered species list and then make sure they become extinct by legislation curtailing the practise of legal bribery.

What are the odds of the legislators slitting their own throats in such a manner?
Any takers?