HR 3012 is a great first step in immigration reform
I am writing to you today as a member of Immigration Voice (http://www.Immig rationVoice.org). Founded in December 2005, Immigration Voice is a rapidly growing, national grassroots non-profit organization of over 70,000 legal, highly-skilled immigrants. Immigration Voice members are committed to sensible improvements to the employment-based immigration and green card process by supporting H.R 3012 – Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act.
The current immigration system is broken, causing hardship for high-skilled immigrants and their families – myself and my family being one of them. There are up to a million such applicants who are doomed to wait for up to 30 years to receive their green cards. This issue has been causing massive brain drain to other competing economies, which ultimately hurts U.S innovation, in addition to preventing creation of new jobs and hindering the economic recovery.
To address this issue, which impacts American competitiveness and innovation, I would like to request you to please give adequate coverage to H.R 3012. This bill has bipartisan support in Congress, which is a significant accomplishment considering the current political climate, and will drastically reduce wait times for applicants from 30 years to less than 10 years.
I applaud both Democratic and Republican leadership in Congress for their commitment to high-skilled immigration reform and for their support for H.R 3012. This is a great first step in the right direction. I urge your esteemed organization to kindly provide due coverage to the issue of high-skilled green card backlogs as well as H.R 3012 – Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act.
Varma Mudundi
San Diego
Waging war against ALS
The 2012 Presidential campaign is in full swing. We read about it in this newspaper every day. Herman Cain, Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, and of course President Obama. They all are fighting for their political lives. But with Veterans Day approaching on November 11, what the American public needs to hear about is the campaign our nation’s veterans are waging against Lou Gehrig’s disease, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).
More and more people are dying of this disease at a very young age. Our son was 28 year old when he passed away from ALS.
Yes, the disease that took the life of baseball legend Lou Gehrig is striking our military veterans at an alarming rate. In fact, studies show that vets are twice as likely to die from ALS as the general public. And it doesn’t matter when or where they served in the military – home or abroad, peace or war, from World War I to Afghanistan. There is no treatment. No cure. Only death in an average of two to five years.
We don’t know why vets are more likely to develop ALS. But we do know that greater awareness of this campaign will help in the fight to find the cause, treatment and cure for this horrible disease. On Veterans Day, I hope this newspaper honors these American heroes and tells their story, which largely has been ignored by the media.
I urge your readers to visit the Wall of Honor at www.alsa.org. There they will see the faces and read the stories of the veterans who are fighting ALS and those we already have lost to the disease. There they will see the campaign that has not been written about by the press. They will see the stories of people not simply engaged in a political fight, but in a fight for their lives.
Margaret Wendel
La Mesa