Unemployment tied to lack of Immigration Enforcement

Commentary
Published: Mar 23, 2010

Unemployment Tied to Lack of Immigration Enforcement
by Jim Kouri


Although President Obama says creating jobs is his top priority, his failure to enforce immigration laws at worksites has led to job losses for American workers. That is the message of a new television ad campaign by Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS) and allied organizations concerned about unemployment.

"The United States is suffering its highest unemployment rate in decades, yet President Obama has cut jobsite enforcement of immigration laws by 60 percent. How seriously should we take his claims that he is focusing on this issue?" asked Diana Hull, the President of CAPS.

The ads note that over 8 million jobs are held by foreign workers who are in this country illegally and ask Americans to call the President to complain.

Even when illegal workers are apprehended, they are typically released and free to take other jobs. Furthermore, the Obama Administration annually admits more than a million legal foreign workers under various immigration programs.

"Obama is truly hypocritical on this important issue. Even as he claims to generate jobs for American workers, he removes them with his immigration policy," Hull said.

It's the Unemployment Line, Stupid

James Carville coined the axiom "It's the economy, stupid" to deftly underscore the electorate's anxiety that swept Bill Clinton into the White House in 1992. Nearly two decades later, the Washington power elite now trumpets an economic recovery even as Americans watch living-wage jobs disappear faster than the Dodo bird. Despite brutal job losses that have hammered the American working and middle classes, more than 125,000 foreign workers continue to arrive legally in United States every month. Joining these legally imported workers each month are nearly as many illegal immigrants, most of whom are hungry for work and in need of social services that were created for America's most at-risk and in-need citizens.

The 2010 Forecast: American workers shouldn't expect any more appreciable relief from Washington this year than they received in 2009. Most Democrats favor open borders and mass amnesty in order to boost their voter registration in key states, while many Republicans generally oppose them only as a means to leverage greater concessions from the Democrats on foreign worker visas for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The Late, Great State of California

The Golden State's make-believe economy of the past two decades has vanished with the bursting of its ethereal dot-com and fantasy real estate bubbles, leaving nearly 40 million Californians to face successive budget deficits of more than $20 billion annually, crumbling infrastructure, sustained drought and jobless rates deep in the double digits. Yet the professional politicians perpetually roosting in Sacramento appear alternately paralyzed and punch-drunk; frozen in partisan acrimony one moment and stumbling around with tax-and-spend proposals the next.

The 2010 Forecast: Hope for little and expect even less. This train of unrestricted growth and wild-eyed spending has been out of control for years now and Sacramento has proven itself unable and unwilling to act decisively. Even at its present population growth rate of around 1% - almost all of which is due to immigration and birth to immigrants - California will hit nearly 60 million people by 2050 and 85 million people by the end of this century. If you think things look grim now, try to envision what your kids will be facing in a state twice as crowded but with dramatically less resources than it has today.

CAPS and its partners in the Coalition for the Future American Worker are running the ads to educate the public about immigration policy and its impact on unemployment. The current ads can be viewed at www.CAPSweb.org.

Source: Californians for Population Stabilization

Jim Kouri, CPP is currently fifth vice-president of the National Association of Chiefs of Police and a staff writer for the New Media Alliance

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