While Jeb Bush promotes the “Act of Love” immigration reform plan, Loyola University student Mathew Lamb offers an arguably more sensible alternative.

…It’s an economic fallacy to believe that an influx of immigrants will permanently drive down wages, since those immigrants will also buy products here and could help the economy in return. However, to help mitigate the short term effect of an influx of cheap labor, an immigration reform package must start with at least some economic reforms. Otherwise, the flood of cheap labor will have a devastating short-term effect on American labor and wages. A good immigration reform plan, therefore, must take steps to help grow the economy by increasing opportunities, encouraging wage growth, and cancelling out wage depression.

Conservatives should offer an immigration package which includes cutting the corporate tax rate, approving the Keystone Pipeline (and expediting the process for all future pipelines), rolling back EPA regulations on carbon, and implementing real spending cuts–not just reductions in planned increases. There are plenty of other economic steps the U.S. could take, but these are at least a few which would help grow the economy. President Obama and the Democrats should accept these offers as reasonable concessions if they are truly dedicated to achieving immigration reform.

However, these reforms will not allow for growth overnight. In order to allow the economy a chance to grow and prepare for the influx of new workers, immigration reform should not fully kick in for at least two or three years.

Immigration reform must include a way to stop illegal immigration in the future. Otherwise, it is a waste of time to even consider it. Since liberals seem to love infrastructure projects, we should make them happy and build a fence across the border. It is pointless to even talk about immigration reform if we do not have a plan to stop illegal immigration in the future.

…That being said, we need to accept that we have been screwing up immigration for years: we have failed to keep illegal immigrants out of the country….

I am opposed to blanket amnesty for illegal immigrants. People who broke the law should be punished for cutting the line in front of legal immigrants; not rewarded. It is, however, reasonable to expect illegal immigrants to pay their taxes and go through the same citizenship requirements as legal immigrants. Conservatives should push a growth-friendly, fence-friendly immigration reform over the moderate Republican and liberal Democrats current immigration bills.