Pulse On Policy: Texas 21 Congressional Forum With Video

On Wednesday, May 2, the San Marcos Area Chamber of Commerce partnered with the Austin Chamber Commerce to host and sponsor a forum for the Texas 21 Congressional runoff candidates…

On Wednesday, May 2, the San Marcos Area Chamber of Commerce partnered with the Austin Chamber Commerce to host and sponsor a forum for the Texas 21 Congressional runoff candidates.

The four candidates hope to replace Congressman Lamar Smith. Smith was first elected to Congress in 1986. He announced his retirement from Congress in November 2017.

He currently serves as Chairman of the Science, Space, and Technology Committee and continues to serve on both the Judiciary Committee and the Homeland Security Committee. He is the former Chairman of the Judiciary Committee and the Ethics committee.

Democratic candidates Mary Wilson and Joseph Krosper, as well as Republican Candidates Matt McCall and Chip Roy, attended the event to discuss issues from the recent Tax Reform bill to immigration and education.

The date for the primary runoff election is May 22; Early voting begins Monday, May 14, and ends Friday, May 18.

• QUESTION 2: Next question is about immigration. Immigration is important to many business owners in central Texas, who would seek to hire the labor they need to be competitive in today’s economy.
  
  How do you plan to address immigration, not just as it generally relates to people who are already in a country legally. But more specifically on the issues of highly skilled workers, the increased numbers of agricultural and non-agricultural immigration slots and immigration caps in general?

MATT MCCALL (R): Immigration, what we’re all trying to do at – 75 percent of the people in the United States say that they’re Christians, whatever that means to them. But as a basically Christian nation, I believe that what we’re trying to do is balance the law and mercy.

And we have a problem, and the problem is that we haven’t been taking nationhood seriously. And so we need to seal our border because it’s about immigration. It’s fascinating to me that the Democrats wanted mandated $15 minimum wage and still leave the borders open for low wage, poor workers to come in and push wages down.

That just doesn’t work. You need to seal the borders; I’m not against immigration. I’m for legal immigration. And in order to bring wages up we have 4.5 percent unemployment, but that doesn’t really capture it. Because we have a labor force participation rate of 47 to 49 percent depending on how you measure it.

That means half of all the people age 16 to 65 are not in the labor force. Of those who are in the labor force, half work with the state, federal and local government.

This is unsustainable living. That’s how we’ve created a lot of jobs in the last few months, and the unemployment rate hasn’t changed. Because, even though they told us that it would, you create more jobs people are coming back into the workforce and that’s a good thing.

They tell us that there’s threat of inflation because we have low unemployment, and yet there’s zero sign of it. We need to grow the economy and not worry about inflation until we actually see some, and we see wages really going up.

I agree that we have a terrible disparity of income problem, and the 1 percent is becoming crazy wealthy. This is not the result of capitalism. This is the result of socialism and liberal fascism where the government controls every aspect of our economy.

I went to the Soviet Union when I was in college; they have millionaires and billionaires and everybody else was dirt poor. So the left says, “Oh we have a problem so we need more government. Oh that didn’t work so we need more government. Oh that still didn’t work so we need more government.”

This is how you get in this situation that we’re in. And we need to radically cut, reorient, and cut the size of government. We need to reorient them. Us, we the people to our government and get back to the Constitution and the tenth amendment.

MARY WILSON (D) So, again my orientation of this is who do we need to help, and who is being hurt. A colleague of mine in East Texas is a foster parent. She got a call from CPS, some kids had been in places, in CPS has been in the office for 12 hours, and they wanted to know if she and her husband could take in these two children.

So they did. Turned out is was a toddler and an infant. The infant was still nursing, and the mother had been deported. So I think we have immigration policies that separate nursing infants from their mothers, that that is immoral. And I’ll even call that evil.

And if we want to have legal immigration, then let’s rewrite the laws. But I am not up for traumatizing children and separating them from their parents. What we’re doing right now is wrong; it’s absolutely wrong. And so for all the people that I hear saying, “Well the people need to come here legally,” tell me, do you know what that process is and do you know how long it takes and how archaic it is?

I do. My youngest daughter’s an immigration attorney, and she tells me, “I can file a form and file all the paperwork for somebody. A week later if one form changes, something as simple as the date on the form, we have to go back and refile everything.” It’s an archaic system that we have, to suggest that people can come here legally right now is just a farce.

And so we need to rewrite the entire Immigration Code, upgrade it, make it streamline so people can actually come here in a legal way if that is what you want them to do. If it’s in the time frame that actually takes less than 15 or 20 years which is now the average time to get here in any kind of legal way.

So people get here quicker, most of them come from Canada or Australia or those kind of nations. But if you come from Central and South America, or countries where your coworkers skin is brown, you don’t have that kind of expediency.

We need to rewrite the code, and it needs to be one written without the racism that’s built into it. And why do I say that? Because we can go back to the original 1880 Chinese exclusion act and know that every immigration policy that we have had as a law, has included racist elements to it.

So I would want to eliminate that factor to it, and I wanna streamline it, and I wanna quit traumatizing children by separating them from their parents.

CHIP ROY (R): We need an immigration system that gets to the heart of our sovereignty as a nation, and the needs of our country that puts America first.

We need to have those that we need to have for our economy and have the workers that we need. But let’s talk about compassion for a second. Is it compassionate, for our nation, in the false name of compassion by the way, to have a system where there are children riding on the top of train cars. Dying in the process, getting sold into the sex industry through a corrupt drug cartel at the border.

Mothers, the ranchers that I’ve talked to in South Texas, mothers and some fathers dying in the desert, crawling across trying to bring their children or themselves to the United States.

Is it compassion on our part to have a system that is so broken that we allow that to happen because we refuse to stand up as a sovereign nation and secure our borders?

I would say that’s the opposite of compassion. I would that we have a duty as a country to defend our borders, secure our borders and make sure that everybody knows the rules that they play by.

There are people on waiting lists coming into our country, yet, but we are the most generous nation in the world. Over a million people legally coming into our country every year. Let’s make that system better; let’s make it more efficient and more effective. There are lots of ways that we can all agree to do that.

But we have a duty to defend our border for the United States of America’s interest, but also those that we are inviting to come here who follow our laws and those that are risking their lives because they think that we just have an open borders policy when we shouldn’t.

We need to end diversity visas; we need to end chain migration. We need to recreate an immigration system that actually works and produces what we need for people coming into this country and the labors that we need.

And that we need to have a system that starts first with secure borders, ending visa overstays, the 600,000 people who overstayed their visas last year, they didn’t come across the border more or less.

For the most part, they came here with visas and then overstayed. That needs to end. We can fix that. It is our duty as a country to do that for the betterment of commerce and for the immigrants that seek to come here.

JOSEPH KOPSER (D): If we cannot fundamentally agree on what the goal is, we will never pass good legislation. Here’s where I see. We, as a people, have got to stop ripping families apart. And excuse it however you want, of how we got to know, but this is where we are. A country that made a promise to dreamers, who to no fault of their own are here today, playing by the rules.

And now they want to change the rules. and that’s not right and it’s not the American way to do it.

But let’s talk about what we really need to face facts with, which is that we are a nation mostly of immigrants.

Most every Texan that is here today immigrated to this state depending on how far back you want to go generations wise. But more importantly, because this is hosted by Chambers of Commerce, let’s talk about the critical role that new Americans can play in our economy.

Go to Indeed.com, go to either one of these chamber websites, and you will see tens of thousands of job openings that are yet to be filled.

We have to make sure, that whether it’s reforming the H-1B process or the H-2 process to make sure that workers all up and down the scale of skill have the ability to come here and work and if need be, return to their country and be able to move back and forth more easily.

We can do that with safe borders, and secure borders. We have to know whose there, but we also have to realize that we’re having fewer fewer kids in our families today.

We’ve built an entire tax structure; we’ve built social security safety nets knowing that there’d be eight workers for every one retiree.

Today that number is less than five and six workers per retiree and because of productivity keeps going smaller and smaller.

If we don’t bring in new Americans into this country, and do it more efficiently, we are going to end up with the economic stagnation that you’re paying to suffer. And in the coming years, they will sell more adult diapers than they will baby diapers because the changing demographics.

We have to face that reality and embrace the immigrants and new Americans as a part of our culture.