By Donald A. Collins
triblive.com
Published: Thursday, Dec. 5, 2013, 8:55 p.m.
Updated 2 hours ago

The Washington Post was shocked around Thanksgiving to find that Americans are suffering from unemployment, tenuous job security and a shaky economic future. But its compelling vignette of a collapsing country and a desperate people ignores the driving factor behind America's decline — mass immigration and its devastating effects on American workers.

The Post has unintentionally supplied those of us who advocate realistic immigration levels with ammunition in its front-page story out of Chester, Pa.:

“The alarm rang on John Stewart's phone at 1:10 a.m. Up at 1:30, he caught one bus north into Philadelphia a little after 2 and another bus, south toward the airport, half an hour after that. He made it into work around 3:25 for a shift that started at 4, for a job that pays $5.25 an hour, which he cannot afford to lose.”

Stewart is 55, tall and thin, animated and black. “I can't save money to buy the things I need to live as a human being,” he added.

“American workers are living with unprecedented economic anxiety, four years into a recovery that has left so many of them stuck in place. That anxiety is concentrated heavily among low-income workers such as Stewart.”

The bipartisan establishment's solution: create more competition for these jobs. Real immigration reform groups have been hammering this for years. Citizens of Hispanic origin and certainly black leaders have nothing to gain from mass immigration. And illegal aliens are not civil rights victims.

The Post really veers into self-parody when it describes how conditions didn't used to be so bad for American workers.

“‘In the years back then,' Stewart explained, ‘if you left a job, you were able to find another job, within the next day or the same week ... .' This time, finding a job took him five months.”

No mention that immigration is the key change. In 1979, the immigrant population was about 14.1 million, according to the 1980 census. But since then we added 25 million legal and illegal immigrants (not counting their American-born children). And some in Congress would like to make legal the 11 million to 20 million illegal aliens here now.

Experts project that the Schumer-Rubio amnesty bill would add 50 million more immigrants in a couple of decades. So throw the John Stewarts, and other poor American citizens of all ethnic and racial types, under the bus?

The Post unknowingly makes the case against mass immigration, especially because of its effect on workers with less education:

“‘High-paying jobs for people who didn't go to college just aren't there anymore' in large numbers, said Melissa Kearney, an economist who directs the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution.”

We who seek rational immigration owe The Post our gratitude, as it has informed us about the fundamental choice in the immigration debate: more profits for the likes of Sheldon Adelson and Mark Zuckerberg — or a chance for John Stewart and millions more of our fellow citizens to live like human beings.

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