What will North Carolina’s immigration debate look like in 2023? | Opinion

Between the midterm election and the continuation of COVID-19 policies at the border, immigration was definitely one of 2022’s buzzwords. North Carolina congressman-elect Ted Budd tweeted about the “border” more than 20 times between January and November’s election. Senator Thom Tillis also used stoked fears about the “border crisis” when campaigning for Budd, and continues to tweet about the “violent, criminal illegal immigrants” he sees as threatening America’s safety.

Tillis worked with Senator Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) to create a framework for a legislative compromise on immigration that would have created a path to citizenship for recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) while giving more money to border patrol and continuing Title 42, a COVID-era policy that allows immigration officials to deny an asylum application on the basis of public health.

While Tillis and Sinema’s framework failed to gain traction, the Supreme Court extended Title 42 last week.

The combination of anti-immigrant rhetoric and a lack of long-term immigration policy is setting up the United States for another tense year in 2023. More than 819,000 asylum cases were added to the backlog in fiscal year 2022, and 30,000 new cases were added in the first two months of the 2023 fiscal year. There are almost 1.6 million immigration cases pending in court or with US customs.

Yes, there are more migrants seeking permanent residency in the United States than ever before. They are oftentimes fleeing countries where their lives feel threatened, or they are people looking to make a living in the United States. Republicans may attempt to make immigrants props in their election campaigns, but they are still people.

“You can’t discourage people who have the will to survive,” says Baldemar Velasquez, the founder and president of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC). FLOC, a branch of the union AFL-CIO, represents farm workers in North Carolina. FLOC helps migrants obtain H2-A visas, a temporary status that allows them to come and do farm work in North Carolina, and fights for better working conditions for farmworkers, no matter what country their citizenship is in.

North Carolina is one of the biggest producers of sweet potatoes, Christmas trees and strawberries in the United States. Agriculture is our top industry. The majority of our farms are family-owned, and they need migrant workers during harvest seasons. By stoking anti-immigration embers, politicians ignore that our economy is built on the backs of immigrants.

In 2023, politicians must consider the bigger picture when deliberating on immigration. Velasquez says that there is an obvious need to focus on foreign policy, considering that can be a force driving people away from countries like Cuba and Venezuela in the first place. If the United States had better relationships with these countries, it would hopefully aid in our country’s economic prosperity.

Velasquez also notes that FLOC has agreed to a new contract with the farmers. The new bylaws will continue a system of seniority where the workers who have worked at a farm continuously over the seasons will have first priority for returning to the states during the next harvest. They also have more protections in case they are fired unjustly.

Farm workers are just part of that migrant labor force. While temporary work visas are not the same as those seeking asylum in the United States, people who are seeking asylum are unable to work without permission from the U.S. government, another application process that can take time.

There are 11.2 million open jobs in the United States, and only around 6 million adults in the United States were unemployed in July 2022. At least a million of these jobs are hospitality-related. Making the application review process quicker in the first place would help us fill these jobs more quickly.

DACA recipients and “documented dreamers,” or folks who age off of their parents’ visa application, are also political footballs in this story. These are children of the United States who have grown up here and been educated by our school systems. In complicating their path to citizenship and tossing them through court decisions and failed legislation, we lose people who can be skilled workers in our economy.

When Budd and other anti-immigration conservatives say they want to control immigration, the only thing they accomplish is stoking xenophobia. It seems like they can’t acknowledge that most people just want their children to be educated and their bills to be paid — the same thing that the “working class Americans” they always talk about want. Hopefully they learn this in 2023, and create a better immigration process for all of us.