New Op-Ed by Simon: "The Immigration System Is Better, the Border Is Safer, But More to Do"

Today, Simon penned an op-ed in Huffington Post on immigration reform and border security.

From the piece: 

"Success on the Border - Additional resources, better strategies, and enhanced cooperation with Mexico have brought about significant improvement in the border region in recent years. The total number of border patrol agents on the U.S.-Mexican border has gone from 5,300 to 18,500 today. Net migration of undocumented immigrants into the U.S. has dropped from 500,000 a year a decade ago to zero today, while crime on the U.S. side of the border has plummeted and incidents of "spillover violence" from Mexico are rare. By some measures, El Paso, the largest city on the border, is the safest big city in America today. While more needs to be done to make the border region even safer and the very real threat of the violence from Mexican organized crime is very real, there has been significant and undeniable progress made in recent years. The Senate immigration reform outline powerfully acknowledged this progress last week, reporting that "border security has improved significantly over the last two Administrations" in its second sentence...

...The Immigration System Is Better - While Congress has failed to act, the Obama administration has taken a series of important steps to improve the legal immigration system in the U.S. in recent years, including: prioritizing criminal migrants for deportation; making it easier for families to stay together during the legalization process; expanding the nation's worker verification system and working hard to improve it; replacing work place raids with more targeted and effective I-9 audits; and removing the threat of deportation from deserving undocumented youth.

The result of these actions is that our immigration system, built for a different economic era and a different America, is far better today than when the bipartisan effort to reform our system began in 2005."

To read the full piece posted on the front page, please see here.