Local baseball icon turned politician Steve Garvey has broken with his fellow national Republicans in order to support a policy of comprehensive immigration reform.
The column came as the GOP, led by Donald Trump and his campaign, promoted a policy of mass deportations — a move Garvey, who is running for United States Senate, decried as unrealistic.
Garvey began by saying that the under-resourced and overloaded immigration system has created a massive bureaucratic backlog that has spilled into other parts of American society, such as education and the judicial system.
“Illegal immigration is… blatantly unfair to the millions of hard-working immigrants who came to the United States legally and now call California home,” Garvey wrote in the Aug. 2 column in La Opinión.
“However, the mass deportation of the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in our country is not a realistic solution,” he added.
“Fixing the immigration issue is more complex.”
Garvey advocated for tighter border controls and more “Remain in Mexico” policies, while at the same time prioritizing the processing of green cards for families, streamlining the citizenship progress, and reducing the wait times for those seeking entry into the United States.
“Securing the border and making it easier for good actors to come here, are two sides of the same coin,” he wrote. “You can’t solve this issue with only one or the other.”
Garvey credited his time playing for southern California professional sports with giving him a different understanding of immigration than the nativist stance that is currently supported by many other members of the Republican Party.
“When I played baseball for the San Diego Padres and the Los Angeles Dodgers, I shared the dugout with teammates from across the world. We learned so much from each other, and I truly value the cross-cultural friendships I developed,” he wrote.
” But if it were not for the United States immigration policies, these teammates would never have been able to share the bench with me and build a new life in this country.”
