By JAMES PRICHARD
Associated Press Writer
The United States needs an employment-verification system that helps prevent illegal immigrants from getting jobs and punishes employers that knowingly hire them, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said Saturday.
"That'll stop the flow of people into this country for work because they won't be able to get work," the former Massachusetts governor said during a campaign stop in Grand Rapids.
Romney also campaigned earlier in the day in the northern Michigan resort town of Traverse City, where he said he favors issuing more seasonal visas to foreign workers in industries such as agriculture and tourism while cracking down on illegal immigration.
Tourism is one of the state's three largest industries, and many Michigan employers have struggled to fill jobs in hotels and restaurants during the summer tourist rush. Romney said more temporary workers should be allowed where there are labor shortages.
"The answer to that is simple, which is issue more visas," he said. "If our employment sector needs additional immigrant laborers, then issue the visas necessary to provide that work force."
Federal law permits businesses needing seasonal help to obtain what are known as H2B visas for foreign laborers -- if they can prove good-faith efforts to hire locally first.
Some in the hospitality industry worried that President Bush's plan to reform immigration, which stalled in the Senate earlier this year, would have required more paperwork and regulatory hurdles to bring in seasonal workers.
Romney said he appreciated such concerns because some hotels and restaurants in the Cape Cod resort area in Massachusetts had similar problems.
"I'm not going to leave America's employers without the capacity to meet the needs of our consuming public," he said.
Romney is a Michigan native whose late father, George Romney, served as the state's governor from 1963-69 and was president of American Motors Corp. Romney said if elected president, he would try to help the struggling domestic automotive industry by boosting federal investment in energy-efficient technology.
Federal fuel-economy standards have done little to improve gas mileage, while hurting domestic companies more than their foreign competitors, he said.
"Automobile efficiency improvements are important but they should be reached on a collaborative basis with the auto industry," Romney said, adding that he believes the U.S. should strive to be weaned from foreign oil within two decades.
He criticized Gov. Jennifer Granholm's handling of the state's budget crunch during a debate held Tuesday in Dearborn with other GOP presidential hopefuls. He resumed taking swipes at the Democrat on Saturday, saying she should have been able to close the $1.7 billion budget gap by making more cuts to state services and without agreeing to more taxes.
At a Kent County Democratic Party fundraiser in Grand Rapids, Granholm said Saturday that Republicans in the state House of Representatives were given a chance to vote on balancing the budget entirely through cuts and not one voted to do so.
"They didn't have the courage to stand up for their convictions because they knew how bad it would be," she said.
Associated Press Writer John Flesher in Traverse City contributed to this report.
