The City Council for San Diego, California recently passed a proposed immigration reform resolution on a unanimous basis. The resolution apparently represents a call to action showing the Council’s support for ‘reasonable’ steps to allow citizenship and naturalization for the millions of immigrants already living in our nation. It was a stepped-down version of an earlier draft that barely made it past the City Council’s Rules Committee last month.
Still, the fact that the entire council was in overwhelming support for the revised draft shows that there is bipartisan recognition of the fact that immigration reform is an important issue, in both California and the nation at large. One Councilman stressed that he feels that the current immigration system is ‘broken’, and that San Diego’s City Council supports a viable pathway to citizenship in conjunction with securing the nation’s borders. Additionally, he indicated that families should be reunited when possible and companies who seek strong candidates to employ need to be able to hire that talent when they can’t fulfill their requirements from local candidates.
Several Council members worked to iron out the wrinkles in the original resolution to make it something that individuals from both sides of the political sphere could support. While the resolution is considered mostly symbolic in nature, only complete approval by the City Council would allow it to be passed. Now that this has happened, its supports hope that it will send a clear sign to members of the nation’s Congress that reasonable immigrant reform is vital.
This resolution from one of California’s border communities demonstrates how important citizenship and naturalization is, especially for those undocumented immigrants who were brought to our country as children. These individuals have spent most, if not all of their lives in our nation. It seems only fair to provide a reasonable method for them to become legal, fully-functioning members of our society so that they may contribute to the country that they love just as much as any other American.
Source: KFMB Channel 8, “City council to review immigration resolution,” April 9, 2013
