Weekend Reading: Highlights from this week’s immigration news (August 8-12)
Date: August 12, 2016
This week, business leaders from across the country voiced their support for our #ReasonForReform campaign, which officially launched on August 3. In an op-ed on Huffington Post, Jalak Jobanputra, Founding Partner of FuturePerfect Ventures, writes: “People from all across the world have great ideas, and we want those people to be formulating them, and founding their companies, in the United States. By doing so, they would be training and employing Americans as they grow their businesses.”
Read: “A Call for Immigration Reform: Entrepreneurship is Unrestrained by Nationality”
Doug Pruitt, chairman of the board of Sundt Construction and NAE member, explains just why immigration reform is so important to Arizona in the Arizona Capitol Times: “The reality is that many of the 11 million undocumented people living in this country are an untapped work force wanting to blossom. In Arizona, 4 percent of our population is currently undocumented, and 80 percent of that share is between the ages of 25 and 64, or prime working age.” He argues that immigration reform will provide his state with the educated and skilled labor it needs to thrive.
Read: “Americans Must Demand Reasonable Immigration Reform”
The Journal Sentinel ran an editorial expressing Wisconsin’s need for immigration reform, as young workers increasingly leave the state in search of work elsewhere. John Holevoet, director of government affairs for the Dairy Business Association, notes, “If you look at how rapidly we are aging, particularly in rural parts of the state, come 2035, we aren’t going to have the workers to fill agricultural jobs no matter what we are paying.”
Read: ”Editorial: Immigration Reform Needed”
This week we also heard how vital immigration reform is to the future sustainability of the agriculture industry. Brownfield Ag News highlights this through an interview with Jay Hill, a farmer in New Mexico, who says immigration reform “needs to provide stability and also needs to address challenges facing farms with an aging workforce.”
Read: “Immigration Reform is Critical to Agriculture”
In Case You Missed It:
This week’s Reason for Reform spotlight is on Russian-born immigrant, recent Stanford Graduate School of Business graduate, and entrepreneur Misha Esipov, who is “on a mission to improve immigrant lending around the world” and “build a cross-border credit bureau to connect U.S. lenders to international data.” His company, Nova Credit, is developing an international credit passport system that allows people’s credit histories to follow them from country to country. Read more about Esipov’s reason for reform here.
