Thread: Scott Walker Lays Out Pro American Worker Stance on Immigration

by Matthew Boyle
21 Apr 2015
Washington, DC
1287 comments

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a likely 2016 GOP presidential candidate, is marching forward with his bold new pro-American worker immigration policy. He’s not afraid to push for a legal immigration system that doesn’t box out American workers with a massive influx of inexpensive foreign labor.

After first rolling out his new ideas on Glenn Beck’s radio program on Monday, Walker appeared on Fox News’ Megyn Kelly’s show to further elaborate on how he hopes to protect Americans economically from special interests pushing for a massive influx in cheap foreign labor from around the world.

“When it comes to immigration, as a governor I don’t have any direct role in that—but having talked to border state governors and having talked to other people, seeing how screwed up immigration has become under this president, it was clear to me talking to them and listening on this issue, traveling to the border actually going there with the governor of Texas Gov. Abbott, seeing the problems there, yeah from my standpoint going forward we need to secure the border, we need to enforce the laws that we currently have with an e-verify system,” Walker said.

“You’re pretty much in line with the other Republican candidates on this,” Kelly asked as a follow-up.

“Well the one thing they’re not saying is we need to make sure as part of that any future legal immigration system that goes forward has to account for American citizens and the workers of this country and their wages to make sure that even with legal immigration in this country we respond to it in a way that doesn’t take jobs away from hardworking Americans,” Walker added, separating himself from the rest of the 2016 field.

Since Walker has moved forward with this new strong pro-American worker position on immigration, he’s been berated by strongholds of the liberal establishment including MSNBC, Mother Jones magazine and the Huffington Post.

The Huffington Post attacked Walker in a blaring headline on Monday night: “Scott Walker Tacks Far Right On Immigration.”

In the piece, written by Igor Bobic, the Huffington Post argues that Walker “may be hoping to placate conservatives wary over his previous support for a pathway to citizenship for many undocumented immigrants.”

Walker’s strategy is somewhat reminiscent of then-Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who, faced with similar questions over his devotion to the conservative cause in 2011, memorably tacked far right of his GOP rivals by endorsing “self-deportation.”

Yet not even Romney, who lost the Latino vote to Obama by more than 40 percentage points in November 2012, supported curbing legal immigration, a concept at the core of what it means to be American. Walker’s pivot to the general election, if he makes it that far, could prove difficult, given that he will need to seek the votes of many Americans who immigrated here themselves — or whose parents or grandparents did so.

There are several things wrong with what Bobic wrote, but for starters, what Walker is proposing is an immigration policy that ensures American workers and legal immigrants already here have jobs before new foreign workers are brought into the country to compete for scarce employment opportunities.

What Bobic leaves out of his piece is that Democrats and leftists—even labor unions—used to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Republicans in fighting against open borders policies that hurt American workers. For instance, liberal Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) helped kill the amnesty and legal immigration increase effort by Sens. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and John McCain (R-AZ) during the George W. Bush presidency on the grounds that it would result in union workers in California losing their jobs. But she has abandoned that position to join open borders advocates by voting for the Senate “Gang of Eight” immigration bill last Congress.

The late Rep. Barbara Jordan (D-TX), an influential member of the Congressional Black Caucus when she represented Houston in Congress, led an effort to protect not just the black community but all Americans from both illegal and legal immigration. And of course, Coretta Scott King—the now deceased widow of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.—famously wrote to Congress back in the early 1990s to call for economic protections for the struggling black community when it came to immigration levels both legal and illegal.

That’s not to mention that even Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid stood up protecting American workers back in the 1990s from high immigration levels—before the Democratic Party made a clear and conscious decision to aim to change American demographics and engage in open racial pandering.

In addition to the Democrats completely shifting from where they used to stand, most in the GOP establishment have moved away from protecting Americans as well—in large part due to the special interests and big business lobbyists pushing for a massive influx in cheap foreign labor. That’s what terrifies Washington so much about a viable candidate for the presidency like Walker coming out as strongly as he has as an immigration populist—and why the long knives are out to get him from pretty much everybody.

Bobic’s mistaken narrative notwithstanding, however, the entire institutional left has since joined The Huffington Post in driving this anti-Walker narrative in the wake of his bold new position. MSNBC’s Steve Benen attacked Walker using Bobic’s piece to argue that Walker doesn’t stand a chance at winning any more Hispanic voters than Mitt Romney did in 2012.

“In the last presidential election, Mitt Romney positioned himself as the most anti-immigration general-election candidate Americans have seen in a generation. The Republican nominee opposed both comprehensive reform and the Dream Act; he endorsed ‘self-deportation’; he criticized bilingualism; and he casually threw around words like ‘amnesty’ and ‘illegals’ as staples of his campaign rhetoric,” Benen wrote. “It was tough to imagine what more Romney could have done to alienate immigrant communities, and the results were predictable: President Obama received over 70% of the Latino vote. How much worse can Republicans make matters? The party’s 2016 candidates can do the one thing Romney didn’t: go after legal immigration.”

What’s perhaps more interesting—and another fact that Benen leaves out of his piece—is that polling shows that former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who like Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) has barely any distinguishable differences from Democrats on immigration, if any at all, is actually polling worse among Hispanics against likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton than Romney performed against Obama. Bush, according to two recent ABC News and Washington Post polls, trails Clinton among Hispanic voters by an even worse margin than by which Romney lost—71 percent for Clinton to 26 percent for Bush. So much for MSNBC’s advice to Republicans like Walker.

It doesn’t stop there, though. The extra-liberal Mother Jones magazine—which is openly supportive of progressivism and worked overtime to try to oust Walker in his recall election and his re-election—cited an ex-Walker aide, Liz Mair, to attack him.

“Liz Mair, the GOP operative who resigned from Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s campaign-in-waiting after a day on the job, is in campaign mode again—and this time, she’s targeting her former boss,” Mother Jones’ Sam Brodey wrote. “On Tuesday morning, Mair sent an email detailing Walker’s ‘Olympic-quality flip-flop’ on the issue of immigration.”

Brodey added that Mair’s email says that “historically, Walker has hardly been an immigration hard-liner: in 2013, he vocally supported expanding legal immigration, and as recently as March, he said he was in favor of giving undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship. She suggested that Walker’s back-tracking could make him an easy target for strong GOP rivals.”

Mair, who’s a supporter of open borders and an unashamed amnesty advocate who supported Rubio’s “Gang of Eight” bill last Congress, was fired from the Walker campaign after a series of questionable moves—including her open support for amnesty and open borders. She also openly attacked Iowans in Tweets before she was hired with Walker, which played a big factor in Walker’s decision to fire her.

Mother Jones is hardly the only liberal outlet to use Mair’s negativity about her former employer to attack Walker. Bobic used her comments in his piece, as did MSNBC and the Washington Post—which also attacked Walker.

Mair’s commentary aside, most conservative leaders side with the position Walker has now aggressively taken on immigration—a position that’s been articulated by Senate Judiciary Committee subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest chairman Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL).

“The last thing low-skilled native and immigrant workers already here should have to deal with is wage-depressing competition from newly arriving workers,” National Review editor Rich Lowry and Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol wrote in a joint op-ed while fighting Rubio’s Gang of Eight bill last Congress. “Nor is the new immigration under the bill a panacea for the long-term fiscal ills of entitlements, as often argued, because those programs are redistributive and most of the immigrants will be low-income workers.”

Kristol, in separate commentary on July 15, 2013, added that Rubio’s Gang of Eight bill has a “huge increase in immigration in that bill, two to three times the number of immigrants over the next decade as over the last decade. And that is bad for working class and middle class wages and economic opportunity in this country. And I think that’s something Republicans need to get serious about.”

The National Review editorial board wrote on June 17, 2013, about Rubio’s bill that “the creation of a large population of second-class workers is undesirable from the point of view of the American national interest, which should be our guiding force in this matter.”

“The United States is a nation with an economy, not an economy with a nation,” the editors of the National Review added.

Daily Caller editor-in-chief Tucker Carlson questioned on Fox News in December 2012 whether the U.S. should have such an increase in legal immigration. “Does the United States need massive new numbers of the low-skilled immigrants in a post-industrial economy? Is that good for the United States?” Carlson said.

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote in February 2014 a column that echoed each of the above. “A reasonable immigration compromise would… privilege high-skilled immigration over low-skilled immigration, given the unemployment crisis among low-skilled native workers and the larger social crisis that threatens to slow assimilation and upward mobility alike,” Douthat wrote, noting that the GOP establishment has abandoned American workers. “But the House leadership seems to favor an approach that would create… looser labor markets, continued wage stagnation and fewer jobs for the existing unemployed.”

“History shows that granting such legal status [to illegal immigrants] is not without profound and substantial costs to American workers. Does Congress care?” Peter Kirsanow of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission added in a June 11, 2013, op-ed.

“Virtually every kind of ‘work that Americans will not do’ is in fact work that Americans have done for generations,” Thomas Sowell, a conservative columnist, added the same day. “In many cases, most of the people doing that work today are Americans.”

The Washington Examiner’s Byron York has also written frequently about this topic, most recently touting polling numbers from Gallup that found Americans by and large side with Sessions—and now with Walker.

“Gallup recently asked adults around the country a very simple question about immigration: Are you satisfied, or dissatisfied, with the level of immigration into the United States today? Are too many immigrants coming? Too few? Or is the number just about right?” York wrote in January.

Before giving the results, it’s important to note what that number is. The U.S. awards legal permanent resident status — a green card, which means lifetime residency plus the option of citizenship — to about one million people per year, a rate Sen. Marco Rubio calls “the most generous” on earth. In addition, the government hands out more than a half-million student and exchange visas each year, tens of thousands of refugee admissions, and about 700,000 visas to temporary workers and their families. The percentage of foreign born in the U.S. population is heading toward levels not seen since the period of 1890 to 1910.

York then described the actual results—which were astoundingly in Walker’s favor.

“So is that too much, or too little? Gallup found that 47 percent of Americans believe the level of immigration should stay where it is,” York wrote. “Thirty-nine percent want to see it decreased. And just seven percent want it increased. (The remaining seven percent said they don’t know.).”

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Originally Posted by Judy

A sponsor of a bill in Congress is more than just a supporter. There are far more supporters of the FairTax legislation than 74 in the US Congress, there are 74 Congressional sponsors of the FairTax legislation, 68 sponsors of HR 25 in the US House of Representatives and 6 sponsors of S 155 in the US Senate, which is a very large perhaps historic number of sponsors for major legislation in the US Congress. A sponsor is someone who has studied the bill and actually signed their name to it, which is a commitment to this particular bill as part of tax reform. A supporter is someone who states they like it and believe they'll vote for it if it comes to the floor for a vote but are not as committed to it as a sponsor who has either introduced the legislation or signed on as a co-sponsor.

Please don't attempt to paint me as an idiot! I know how the sponsorship of bills and the U.S. Congress works.

Originally Posted by MW

Please don't attempt to paint me as an idiot! I know how the sponsorship of bills and the U.S. Congress works.

MW, you are the one who made the misstatement, trying to compare the number of supporters for amnesty to the number of sponsors of the FairTax legislation, which of course forced me to clarify the differences between a supporter and a sponsor.

I don't understand how anyone can still support the income tax after 102 years of failure to pay the bills and worse, allowing mandated theft by the government of earned income and profits which it then uses to fund illegal immigration, massive excess legal immigration, and free trade treason that hurt our workers with unemployment and wage deflation and harms our businesses with unfair illegal competition. This is the same socialist income tax that drains our economy of over $1.3 trillion a year in tax exempt revenues for these 501 C 3 tax fraud "charities" and deprives our federal treasury alone of over $400 billion a year in lost tax revenue, many of these orgies being the same ones we fight every day in our effort to stop illegal immigration and reduce legal immigration numbers.

by Matthew Boyle
22 Apr 2015
Washington, DC
650 comments

While seemingly the entire political establishment—from the Institutional Left to the mainstream media to even some establishment Republicans—have their long knives out for Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker over his new pro-American-worker immigration position, the cavalry has arrived to defend him.

Phyllis Schlafly, the longtime grassroots conservative activist who personally took on the leftist Equal Rights Amendment and has fought against the political establishment from a populist perspective for more than half a century, told Breitbart News she’s pleased with Walker’s new strong stance in favor of American workers.

“I’m thrilled to see that Scott Walker wants to defend American jobs and understands that American voters are directly impacted by immigration — both illegal and legal,” Schlafly, the founder and CEO of Eagle Forum, said in an emailed statement.

Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol agrees.

“Anyone’s free, obviously, to disagree with what Walker said,” Kristol told Breitbart News in an email. “But what strikes me is that the establishment types seem offended that he even dared say it.”

For Kristol’s publication on Wednesday, Jeffrey Anderson wrote a piece titled “Walker’s Smart Play On Immigration.” In it, Anderson lays out that Walker isn’t just right for policy purposes—it’s a political winner too.

“Scott Walker’s recent comments suggesting that the United States’s policy on legal immigration should be focused on what’s good for American workers — a seemingly obvious point that nevertheless has ruffled feathers — offers further evidence of the Wisconsin governor’s political savvy,” Anderson wrote. “When two of one’s strongest competitors (namely, Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio) share a weakness on an issue, it’s smart to draw attention to that issue by making clear there is daylight between you and them.”

Anderson showed Walker is proving to GOP voters and independents—and even some Democrats who may cross over to vote for him in a general election—that he can be trusted on immigration. Anderson wrote:

What’s more, every Republican presidential candidate will soon step onto the debate stage and declare that he or she is against amnesty and in favor of strengthening the border first. GOP voters won’t be credulous enough to trust these avowals, but they will be left to search for clues as to who, if anyone, is actually to be believed. Among those who sound reasonable, the candidate who is criticized by the others (and by outside pundits) for bucking the consensus, for being to the right of the others on this particular issue, is the candidate voters will trust. When Walker says, ‘I’m not sure we need to increase legal immigration,’ GOP voters will hear, ‘I really would strengthen the border and really wouldn’t grant amnesty.’

The message is playing really well in early states, too. Former Sen. Scott Brown—who represented Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate before moving to New Hampshire and challenging Democrat Jeanne Shaheen in 2014—told Breitbart News that, while he’s not endorsing in the 2016 cycle,Walker is right on this issue. Brown emailed:

In New Hampshire, we care about securing the border and enforcing the rule of law. Right now, due primarily to a lack of leadership from President Obama, neither are being done. I know Governor Walker, and have discussed this issue with him. I know he supports legal immigration. I know he also wants to reform our immigration system in a way that will help grow the economy and create more good-paying jobs for the many middle-class Americans that have been left behind during the Obama years. We can accomplish both goals, but it requires bold leadership and a new Republican president.

While Brown lost in the race last November, the race was closer than expected because he fought tooth and nail on immigration and national security in the general election.

Brown was counted out by pretty much everyone in Washington, as Shaheen was polling well ahead of him until the last days of September—but then, when he turned up his immigration populism over the month of October, he saw what was a Shaheen 10-point lead turn into a virtual tie. If Brown had had more time to make his case, too, he might have pulled off the incredible upset and been only the third person in history and first since the 19th century to have been elected to the U.S. Senate from two separate states.

Moreover, Brown’s support will go a long way in the first-in-the-nation primary state. Again, while he’s not endorsing Walker’s candidacy for president, Brown is massively influential in New Hampshire and has won over many inside the Republican Party infrastructure and tons of Republican and independent voters there too—in addition to being considered an authority on immigration matters.

Brown’s not the only major New Hampshire player singing Walker’s praises on this. Howie Carr, the Boston-area radio host and Boston Herald columnist, spoke very highly of Walker on his radio show on Tuesday.

“How is that ‘far right’?” Carr asked, while criticizing the Huffington Post attacks on Walker over his comments. “He’s taking a stand for American workers. How does that make him a right winger?”

Carr then read several articles and took callers from New Hampshire, having a back-and-forth banter about how Walker is standing up for ordinary Americans—laying out how people in New Hampshire are craving a leader who will stand up not only to big business but big labor on this matter.

Down in South Carolina it’s obviously a big issue as well—conservatives and mainstream Republicans there are likely to gravitate to Walker more and more on it as he articulates the case clearly.

Karen Martin, an influential Tea Party activist who’s very close with state power players and is from the Greenville-Spartanburg area of South Carolina, said in an email to Breitbart News:

We want people to take a deeper look at issues and develop stronger conservative convictions. That’s our goal as activists. I have stronger, even different views on a few issues now than I did 6 years ago. Governor Walker is moving the conversation as he examines anew an issue that may not have impacted his state much as Governor, but has a crushing impact on American families … the simple math of fitting a growing multitude of blue collar workers into a shrinking blue collar work force, and how even a lenient ‘legal’ immigration policy may need to be reexamined for the economic health of our communities and nation.

Iowans also stand strong against open borders immigration policies. Elected leaders there including Rep. Steve King (R-IA) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) are strongly in line with American-first immigration policies, with King being one of the most vocal in Washington and Grassley frequently working alongside Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL)—this issue’s intellectual leader—on the matter.

Even National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru—whose wife April is working for the campaign-in-waiting of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, someone who like Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) stands with all the Democrats and some establishment Republicans in favor of massive immigration increases—wrote favorably of Walker, defending him from mainstream media attacks.

In addition, National Review editor Rich Lowry has publicly defended Walker. “Walker should take the shots [from the media and establishment] as a compliment, and hopefully, the rest of the field will begin to think and talk about immigration the same way,” Lowry wrote.

That’s not to mention Walker’s outspoken support from people like GOP pollster KellyAnne Conway and conservative columnist Ann Coulter on the issue, as well.

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