Two strong, capable women picked for our new President’s cabinet promise to deliver a big chunk of the promised change: Immigration reform. I envision a significant impact on our state, our region, and on Kirkland.

Janet Napolitano, nominated for Secretary of Homeland Security, and Hilda Solis, nominated for Secretary of Labor, each bring the personal and professional background and “let’s get real” grit required to address 12 million undocumented workers among us and more coming every day.

Solis, a Congresswoman from California, is the daughter of immigrants, her father from Mexico, her mother from Nicaragua. Napolitano, governor of Arizona, is Italian-American. We have something in common. My father immigrated from Italy in 1955.

Solis aims to protect all workers. Imagine the brutal employer telling a frightened illegal she will be deported for complaining about unsafe working conditions. Ignoring the need for immigration reform, stalling on developing a fast, simple path to legal status, we create the environment for that kind of abuse. I don’t want that on my conscience.

Napolitano looks at immigration from the standpoint of homeland security. As Arizona governor, she knows first hand how ridiculous our attempts to barricade the border have become. Border Patrol spending quadrupled since 1993 but more than 8 million illegals have arrived since then.

From a security standpoint, it’s interesting that none of the 9/11 terrorists entered the country illegally, and that Ahmed Ressam, who tried to smuggle bomb-making materials into the US, was caught at a border station in Port Angeles. Why didn’t he hike through the deserts of Arizona? Maybe laziness, mostly stupidity. He picked a slow time of year, gave a bogus story about driving from Montreal to Seattle on business – via Victoria? – and plenty of other signals that would have gotten the attention of any border agent.

To me, it seems to make sense to keep our borders as open as possible to as many people who want to come here. Nearly every illegal would have happily come through legal channels had they been available. The vast majority come for the low-skill jobs that Americans don’t want or can’t do, yet there are only 5,000 green cards available each year to those in that category. Open up that number and speed the process and you’d almost eliminate illegal border entries. Our border agents could focus on the really bad guys.

Low-skilled workers come here in direct correlation to our economy’s growth. When the jobs are there, they come. When they’re not, they don’t. It benefits us and them if they can enter quickly, as quickly as moving from one state to another when the jobs open up. When a Washington state farmer needs to harvest his fruit, she needs people now, not a year from now. Imagine a border station that can issue green cards, or at least work visas, on demand.

Then there’s a special class of immigrants we really need. Let’s grant a green card automatically to any foreigner who earns a technical degree here. We have the best universities, train the best and brightest from other nations, then send them home to build new companies that compete with us. That’s crazy. We need that talent here to help us start the next generation of Microsofts, Amazons and Boeings.

My father was one of those students. He won a scholarship to get an MBA from Syracuse University, then joined Sperry-Rand, developers of the UNIVAC, the first mainframe computer.

Let’s root for Janet and Hilda. We have to get real, or we all will suffer.