From Cafferty File:Tell Jack How You Really Feel:

February 12, 2009

Change immigration policy in light of job losses?

Posted: 05:00 PM ET
From CNN’s Jack Cafferty:

With the U.S. economy hemorrhaging jobs, it might be time to reconsider this country’s immigration policy.


Immigrants arriving at Ellis Island in 1905. Is it time to change our immigration policy?


Just last month our economy lost nearly 600,000 jobs, hitting an unemployment rate of 7.6%. Since December 2007 the economy has shed 3.6 million jobs, with almost half of those losses occurring in the last 3 months alone.

Meanwhile, there are millions and millions of legal and illegal immigrants who have jobs in this country. These job losses also come at a time when President Obama is under increasing pressure from Hispanic groups, who helped get him elected, to loosen up on the more aggressive immigration policies of the Bush administration. They’re calling on the new president to push for comprehensive reform that would balance law enforcement with new legal avenues to citizenship.

But some might wonder if now is the right time to make it easier for more people to get into this country when millions of Americans are struggling to find work. Remember when all we heard was that illegal aliens do the work Americans are unwilling to do? I wonder if that’s still the case today.

Others insist that this is the wrong time to close immigrants out. Tom Friedman writes in the New York Times about the importance of opening the U.S. economy to a smart and energetic immigrant workforce. Friedman says protectionism didn’t cause the Great Depression but did helped make it “greatâ€