Media Elites Continue Push for More Foreign Labor Despite High Unemployment

By Roy Beck, Monday, September 14, 2009, 2:11 PM EDT

I watched NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday afternoon and heard TV and magazine journalists http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp ... 0#32824350 warn that the U.S. may have entered a long era of European-style high unemployment. Then I got online and saw that writers for some of the nation’s largest newspapers are still talking about needing to increase foreign labor to relieve U.S. worker SHORTAGES! Irrational? Yes. But if you are as committed as Congressional leaders to high immigration, you apparently have no threshold for embarrassment.

That these media elites will still argue labor shortage in the midst of the worst jobs depression since the 1930s is a strong sign that the open borders forces are not giving up – and that they will not let a little thing like 15 million officially unemployed Americans get in their way.

The most irrational are the opinion leaders who sit on the editorial boards of many of the nation’s largest newspapers. You would think they would look out into their own newsrooms, see all the empty desks of their downsized colleagues and realize that we have too many workers, not too few.

But their eyes are on something different – the vision of a world without borders and with the free global movement of labor.

I’ll focus on my hometown paper, the Washington Post, where Lee Hockstader, who's a member of the paper's editorial board, got giddy with the prospect that Pres. Obama next winter should be able to sell the public on an immigration bill that greatly increases the importation of foreign labor.

Recession or no recession, a comprehensive reform bill must provide a way out of this mess born of neglect by offering a path to legality for undocumented immigrants already here and a mechanism for future workers, skilled and unskilled, to enter the country in adequate numbers to meet the job market’s demands.

-- Lee Hockstader “Immigration Awaits Its Turnâ€