Thread: Walker Stands Strong: Backs Up American Workers Against Open Borders Yet Again

Originally Posted by vistalad

IMO the single biggest obstacle to a rational immigration policy is a liberal press which simply will not criticize 'Bama's illegal amnesty. NPR has had coverage of DHS which does not even mention 'Bama.

IMO Scott Walker is taking the road which might lead to victory in 2016: hammer away at jobs for Americans - and don't forget to say that "Americans" includes all Americans. Middle class Latinos will be undercut by illegals, just like every other middle class American. Latinos with entry level jobs may find that their children are being undercut by the next wave of illegals.
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Americans first in this magnificent country

American jobs for American workers

Fair trade, not free trade

Exactly. And personally, I think Republicans need to send out better stronger messages to Black Americans, after all, our relationship with Blacks has been far closer for far longer than any relationship they've had with Democrats. Democrats really haven't done anything for Black Americans, it's only been Republican Agendas and Initiatives that have helped Black Americans, and of course, many of these Constitutional Amendments and Civil Rights Laws that were Republican initiatives, not Democrat initiatives, are the ones that have helped all minorities in the United States. To me, it's so strange, even weird and bizarre, that most minorities are registered Democrats instead of Republicans. Why would a minority in the United States want to register as a Democrat when Democrats fought to keep slavery in the United States, gutted every Civil Rights Act Republicans try to pass since Reconstruction, and sell out their livelihoods to this day to foreigners? I mean, WHOA, it's time to wake up and smell the manure pile you're sitting in with the Democrats.

I asked the question once of old time experienced Republicans about this, and their answer was quick and simple, Republicans never wanted what they did to end slavery or establish civil rights for black Americans to make blacks feel indebted to us. So, it was a moral decision not to pursue black voters based on what Republicans had done for them.

Well, I say, that's nice and righteous and all, but COME ON, if you don't get the messages out about our party and what we have done which in large part determines what we will do, then how will Black Americans voting today ever know the truth? They sure as hell won't learn it from listening to or reading the Democrat's Talking Points or ever hear about it from the media or in public education, so if we don't tell them the truth, who will? If they know the truth, then they can decide for themselves what party to belong to, but if they don't know, how can they be empowered to make a good decision? They're as entitled on their issues as anyone on any issue to know the truth about the Republican Party, not the lies they're filled with day after day, year after year for generations by the Democratic Party.

I believe it's time to end this Righteous Silence and start telling ALL VOTERS the truth, including Black Voters. The immigration issue is the perfect stage on which to do both, and I hope candidates in 2016 realize this and start doing it.

The media blames Romney's loss on his immigration "self-deportation" stance, that they think cost him the Latino Vote. No, Mitt Romney lost the Women Vote, the Black Vote and the Latino Vote.

And I can tell the GOP straight up, that if they don't win the Women Vote, it won't matter about the others. Women are the majority of the population, more women are registered to vote than men, and more registered women voters actually vote than men voters. So .... GOP, you better wake up and start pandering to people who actually vote, and you know what I'm talking about. It's time for the GOP to get its nose out of the bedroom and the doctor's office and focus on things our Constitution created this government to actually do which is control and prevent immigration, promote jobs for Americans, protect our trade, bring our industries back home, balance our trade deficits, balance our fiscal budgets, build roads and bridges, secure our nation and pay down the national debt.

Originally Posted by csarbww

I have had some reservations about Scott Walker's ambiguity over illegal immigration. But come on patriots, he has come out loud and clear about stopping the overwhelming invasion of illegal immigration and control of massive supposedly "legal" immigration. With that, far and above the other candidates he has earned our full support.

I may not be to the "full support" stage yet, but he has certainly risen above the rest of the Republican field on the issue of immigration. If the vote was tomorrow, I would vote for him. Not because I think he is the greatest thing since sliced bread (there is still the question of whether he's speaking from the heart), but because none of the other candidates current positions measure up. Up until a about a weeks ago I thought Cruz was good, however, I then found out he supports the tripling of work visas, including those in the STEM field. For all of the candidates, with possible exception of Walker: "You've been weighed, measured, and found wanting." (quote from the movie A Knight's Tale)

Personally, I think Walker's change in position is something we should be proud of, not critical of. After all, hasn't one of our key goals been accomplished ..... and that is to convince politicians that our way is the best way to serve Americans and America? Walker is singing our tune now, and I for one am grateful for that. I say let's praise his message and continue to convince him that he's got it right through our support. Being critical of his past position doesn't do us, him, or the country any good.

Judy Wrote (excerpt):

And personally, I think Republicans need to send out better stronger messages to Black Americans

I agree wholeheartedly because no group of people is being hurt by illegal immigration/excessive immigration more than the black community.

Aside from unable to take his state out of the red and is still facing a $2 billion budget deficit. Walker made the decision to cut taxes for millionaires and billionaires, while slashing programs and refusing investments at the expense of middle-class families and Wisconsin’s financial well-being. He is against equal pay for women, would remove regulations that protect our environment from greedy toxic polluters, supports traditional dirty energy forms only and is against protecting endangered species. He would not get my vote.

Originally Posted by csarbww

I would like to believe the Koch brothers are patriots, but they seem to be ambiguous on stopping the illegal alien invasion.

The Koch brothers are not ambiguous on illegal immigration. Neither is Scott Walker. They are both on the record in support of the kind of immigration reform amnesty for illegals ALIPAC has fought to stop legislatively.

W

Originally Posted by artist

Aside from unable to take his state out of the red and is still facing a $2 billion budget deficit. Walker made the decision to cut taxes for millionaires and billionaires, while slashing programs and refusing investments at the expense of middle-class families and Wisconsin’s financial well-being. He is against equal pay for women, would remove regulations that protect our environment from greedy toxic polluters, supports traditional dirty energy forms only and is against protecting endangered species. He would not get my vote.

Yes, he definitely has other problems, but so do all the Republican candidates of late. But, I will support his new immigration stance and hope this forces all candidates into supporting it as well. He has even other issues that would prevent me from voting for him in a General Election, but so far, so do they all. The Republican Party must get back to its original set of principles. It was Republicans who established the EPA to protect our environment and our species under Richard Nixon. It was Republicans who supported the women's right to vote and equal rights for women, and Teddy Roosevelt was the first national politician to support the Suffrage Movement, so for any Republican to oppose equal pay for women is just beyond belief.

Our Party got infested and infected somewhere along the way after Nixon and Ford. Was it Reagan and Reaganites? I don't know. All I know is it's turned our country on its ear and plunged the US into darkness, because without the Original Radical Republicanism in active play today, our country has no chance of survival, because we're wilting faster than we can count the damaged leaves.

Dear "artist"

Where are you getting your "facts." The economy in Wisconsin is good and getting better. He stood up to the union thug bosses. The unions have long ago been taken over by screaming Marxists. If they hate Walker then he must be doing the right things. The fact that the union thugs were so crazy to remove him should be all of the endorsement any patriot would need to support him.

We can argue economics all day long, but the facts are that unions always hate those who are for economic and political freedom. Remember all of the unions are in the septic tank for open borders and amnesty--so much for their fighting for the working man.

Dear "artist:"
I am an artist too. And you really need to get a new set of friends to hang around with because your environment green pals don't know squat. I am sure you have never been told about thousands, yes thousands of scientists who refute the whole man made global warming thing. Aside from the whole of geological science that tells us there have been drastic global climate changes from a frozen ice ball to endless arid droughts.

Yes follow the money my friend. Let us talk about the mega rich like the Clintons, George Cloney, and yes Al Gore who got rich following the government subsidy money into investments for "alternate energy" failures that are heavily subsidized and still barely competitive with the evil fossil fuels.

When you talk critically about Marxists Democrats I will be willing to listen to you.

Dear artist:

Amnesty is the national survival issue of our time but you won’t vote for Walker because he likes fossil fuels? Are you kidding me? You really need to get your priorities in order.

Lets talk about millionaires and billionaires like the Silicon Valley mega rich and the Chamber of Commerce and Mark Zuckerberg and Warren Buffet, and Google etc. all of whom are for amnesty and are certain to hate Walker because he came out against it—
so much for your implication that Walker is a tool of the rich. And not to forget the Hollywood mega rich movie hams.

"WEDNESDAY, APR 22, 2015 05:15 PM EDTScott Walker is now toast: The crazy move right that cost him the Koch brothers — and probably the nomination

First he had the Koch endorsement. Then he didn't. Why? A Glenn Beck interview where Walker moved wackier than Cruz

HEATHER DIGBY PARTON

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TOPICS: SCOTT WALKER, MARCO RUBIO, TED CRUZ, JEB BUSH, IMMIGRATION, GLENN BECK, KOCH BROTHERS,ELECTIONS 2016, POLITICS NEWS
Scott Walker

(Credit: AP/Jim Cole)

According to a number of well-respected journalists, the Koch brothers are putting their heft and muscle behind Scott Walker for president. Or maybe not. It depends on whom you ask.


First, let’s acknowledge once again that the Great Whitebread Hope from Wisconsin seems to have everyone in the political establishment mesmerized by his alleged strategic and tactical brilliance. Sure, he makes epic gaffes over and over again, but that cannot take anything away from the fact that he barely won a recall election and two swing-state elections in years in which Republicans ran the table. Why this is considered political genius remains a question for the ages. However, there can be no doubt that much of the Republican base loves him and much of the Democratic commentariat sees him as a very serious threat.
So when the news hit that David Koch had told a gathering at a Manhattan fundraiser that the nominee should be Scott Walker, it was as if there was nothing left to talk about. The deciders had decided.
But then something kind of funny happened. Walker’s recently terminated spokesperson sent out a series of notable tweets:

Internal polling must be looking dubious, showing attrition to more grassroots-conservative-preferred candidates for him to try this one.
— Liz Mair (@LizMair) April 20, 2015

Interesting that it’s being reported that Walker got the Koch nod today, bc I’m hearing that Koch folks really pissed re: imm flip-flop.
— Liz Mair (@LizMair) April 21, 2015

David Koch then made a statement walking back this apparent endorsement:

While I think Governor Walker is terrific, let me be clear, I am not endorsing or supporting any candidate for President at this point in time.

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They are now reportedly going to hold an “audition” of sorts during the summer for the Kochs’ primary Prom King. (Apparently their earlier “Koch Summit” was just a casual mixer.)
So what, exactly, did Scott Walker say that appears to have made the Kochs do such an about-face in record time? Well, it’s a doozy. Walker, you see, was once a “pro-immigration reform” Republican, which is likely one of the reasons the Koch brothers back him. Like most of the more libertarian-minded Big Business Republicans, they tend toward a more moderate stance on immigration. It’s good for business in a number of ways (for both good and bad reasons). Walker, being a proven anti-union, pro-immigration governor, was naturally at the top of their list of nominees. He had recently “moderated” his stance on illegal immigration but it was widely assumed to be a mild feint to the right for the purposes of winning the nomination. It brought him into line with all the other candidates like Rubio and Bush who had once also been pro-reform, so it was no harm-no foul as far as the primary was concerned.
But yesterday he went a step further. He appeared on Glenn Beck’s radio show and he said this:

“In terms of legal immigration, how we need to approach that going forward is saying — the next president and the next Congress need to make decisions about a legal immigration system that’s based on, first and foremost, on protecting American workers and American wages. Because the more I’ve talked to folks, I’ve talked to [Alabama Sen. Jeff] Sessions and others out there — but it is a fundamentally lost issue by many in elected positions today — is what is this doing for American workers looking for jobs, what is this doing to wages. And we need to have that be at the forefront of our discussion going forward.”

It’s hard not to fall down laughing (or lose your lunch) over the most notorious union buster in America waxing on about protecting American jobs, but he’s the last person to understand the irony of his comments. But by taking a position against legal immigration, he’s just placed himself to the right of Ted Cruz on this issue. He’s out in Ben Carson land. Not to mention that he’s obliterated the last tattered shreds of a conservative argument to appeal to Hispanic and other ethnic groups: the idea that illegal immigration is unfair to legal immigrants who’ve been “waiting in line” to come to this country. Walker wants to close down the line altogether. Only the most hardcore neo-Confederates like Sessions want to go that far.
Igor Bobic in the Huffington Post explained the possible reasoning:

By aligning himself with an immigration hawk like Sessions, 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.

A bunch of Republican senators were appalled when they heard about this. (They can count votes …) Talking Points Memo got them on the record.

Arizona Senator John McCain: “I think most statistics show that they fill part of the workforce that are much needed. We have, and I’m a living example of, the aging population. We need these people in the workforce legally.
Utah Senator Orrin Hatch: “I basically think that’s poppycock. We know that when we graduate PhDs and master’s degrees and engineers, we don’t have enough of any of those. … The fact is you can always point to some negatives, but the positives are that we need an awful lot more STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] people. … Frankly a lot of us are for legal immigration and for solving this problem.
Ohio Senator Rob Portman: “We want legal immigration. … As a party we’ve always embraced immigrants coming here legally, following the rules. And it’s enriched our country immeasurably. It’s who we are. It’s the fabric of our success.”
Senate Republican Conference Chair John Thune: “I think if you talk to businesses in this country, they need workers. We have a workforce issue in this country and I know in my home state of South Dakota where the unemployment rate is 2.3 percent, they can’t find workers. So having a robust legal immigration process helps us fill jobs that otherwise wouldn’t be getting filled.”

But recall that Walker said explicitly that he’s working with Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions on this issue. And Jeff Sessions had a lot to say about this in his “IMMIGRATION HANDBOOK FOR THE NEW REPUBLICAN MAJORITY” dated January 2015. It’s a fascinating document and well worth reading. It is the perfect example of right-wing populism at its most traditionally xenophobic.
He sets forth an argument that income inequality is not a result of the tax structure or the concentrated power of wealth but rather the result of immigrants stealing the jobs of natural born Americans:

The last four decades have witnessed the following: a period of record, uncontrolled immigration to the United States; a dramatic rise in the number of persons receiving welfare; and a steep erosion in middle class wages.
But the only “immigration reforms” discussed in Washington are those pushed by interest groups who want to remove what few immigration controls are left in order to expand the record labor supply even further.
The principal economic dilemma of our time is the very large number of people who either are not working at all, or not earning a wage great enough to be financially independent. The surplus of available labor is compounded by the loss of manufacturing jobs due to global competition and reduced demand for workers due to automation. What sense does it make to continue legally importing millions of low-wage workers to fill jobs while sustaining millions of current residents on welfare?

He put it into philosophical and historical perspective:

We need make no apology in rejecting an extreme policy of sustained mass immigration, which the public repudiates and which the best economic evidence tells us undermines wage growth and economic mobility. Here again, the dialect operates in reverse: the “hardliners” are those who refuse even the most modest immigration controls on the heels of four decades of large-scale immigration flows (both legal and illegal), and increased pressures on working families.

Conservativism is by its nature at odds with the extreme, the untested, the ahistorical.
The last large-scale flow of legal immigration (from approximately 1880–1920) was followed by a sustained slowdown that allowed wages to rise, assimilation to occur, and the middle class to emerge.
This is heady stuff for the base of the GOP. It’s very much the essence of the kind of right-wing populism we’ve seen in the past and there’s been interest in this idea within the party for a very long time. The usurpation of Eric Cantor was arguably the first shot across the bow of the Republican leadership on this issue for 2016. There’s little doubt that base agitation over immigration was one of the animating issues that led to his demise. If you listen to talk radio, the tone is still nearly hysterical. So there’s an audience for this message.a
Sessions, being a bit more polished than Walker, put it this way when asked about the comments:

“I thought it was a good statement that he made, which is saying, ‘I’m gonna ask the question, what is it going to do for wages and job prospects for my constituents and the American people as I analyze how to create a proper immigration flow into America. We’re not going to end it, we’re going to maintain immigration.”

The question most other Republican leaders are asking themselves is, “How are we ever going to win the presidency if we keep alienating Latinos like that?” And yes, business likes immigration too, but they have always been able to finesse it quietly behind the scenes while their candidates throw anti-immigrant red meat at the base. That’s not going to work going forward. Little Latino pitchers have big ears. And their own TV networks.
I confess I was surprised to read that the Kochs had put their billions on the line for Scott Walker in the first place. I understand the desire for a winning young newcomer, but remain bewildered why anyone would think Walker is that guy. His ratings at home in Wisconsin are in the dirt (and they were never sky high to begin with) and the fact that he’s been pretty much a Koch and Club for Growth puppet is no endorsement — he’s been so clumsy about it he’s left a trail of evidence of dark money collusion in his wake. He’s been very amateurish on the trail so far and now he’s heading off on a wild tangent over one of the most delicate issues confronting the Republican Party.
At the end of the Koch Summit last winter, the consensus seemed to be that Marco Rubio was the fresh face they were looking for. He’s young, good-looking and malleable to their agenda. And he’s Latino, obviously. Whether he’s any more ready for prime time than Walker remains to be seen. But after Walker’s faux pas this week, it’s likely that he’s going to get a good close second look. And there’s always Jeb if things don’t work out with the new kids. What he lacks in charisma he makes up for in dullness. At this point, that may be the best they can do.


Heather Digby Parton, also known as "Digby," is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism."



http://www.salon.com/2015/04/22/scot...he_nomination/