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Why import workers now?
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Posted: December 08, 2009
1:00 am Eastern
© 2009
At last week's Job Summit, there was talk of a second stimulus package, of tax credits for small businesses that hire new workers, of an infrastructure bank to select national priority public-works projects like the Hoover Dam and TVA of yesteryear.
But no one, it seems, advanced the one obvious idea that would have the most immediate and dramatic impact – a moratorium on all immigration into the United States.
Unemployment is at 10 percent, near the post-war high of 1983. Fifteen million Americans are out of work. Ten million more have given up looking or are working fewer hours than they would like.
We have been losing jobs every month for two years.
Why, then, are we still bringing immigrants into the United States at a rate of 125,000 a month to take jobs from fellow Americans and compete with our unemployed for the jobs that open up?
In the last year, 1.5 million new immigrants have come to take up residence and been issued work permits. Probably twice as many jobs have been taken by these folks as the 650,000 the Obamaites claim were saved or created by their $787 billion stimulus package. How do Democrats justify this?
Is Obama really out to defend the "little guy"? Far from it. Learn realities of president's policies you won't see on cable news: "Obamanomics: How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You and Enriching His Wall Street Friends, Corporate Lobbyists, and Union Bosses"
How can they justify bringing in another 1.5 immigrants in 2010 and another 1.5 million in 2011, when 25 million Americans they are supposed to represent are unemployed or underemployed?
If Obama voters feel disillusioned, do they not have valid reason?
As for illegal aliens, it is estimated that 8 million still hold jobs in the United States. Endlessly we are told that these hardworking folks are just doing jobs that Americans refuse to do.
But Middle American News has taken a look at the Census Bureau data. In almost all the occupations to which unskilled and semi-skilled illegal aliens gravitate, native-born Americans hold most of the jobs.
U.S. citizens account for well over half of all housekeepers, maids, taxi drivers and chauffeurs in the U.S., almost two-thirds of all the butchers, meat processors and ground maintenance and construction workers, and three-fourths of all porters, bellhops and janitors.
We are told that many if not most of these are "dead-end jobs" Americans do not want or will not take. Yet, how can that be true when American citizens are already doing most of these jobs?
As related here in October, USA Today found that, invariably, when U.S. authorities raid a plant site where hundreds of illegals are working, and send them packing, hundreds of Americans show up and apply for the jobs. Is this not as it should be, if we are looking out for our own people first? And isn't that what a family does, or should do?
Why, then, is the Obama administration cutting back on job-site raids and inspections? Why is the administration talking of moving in 2010 to legalize the status of the 12 million to 20 million illegal aliens in the United States?
Is putting illegal aliens on the path to citizenship a higher priority for this Obama crowd than opening up jobs for American workers?
Are the K Street lobbyists whose corporate bosses cannot get enough low-wage labor that powerful? Are the Hispanic lobbies like La Raza and MALDEF, with their charges of "nativist" and "xenophobe," so intimidating the Democratic Party cannot stand up to them?
Two weeks ago, the Washington Post, focusing on unemployment among young African-American males, wrote, "Joblessness for 16- to 24-year-old black men has reached Great Depression proportions – 34.5 percent in October, more than three times the rate for the general U.S. population."
More than one-third of all young black males are unemployed.
Which raises a question. Where is the Black Caucus?
Here are folks who favor preferential treatment for their black constituents over white Americans – i.e., affirmative action. But they go mute when it comes to immigrants coming and taking jobs and illegal aliens holding down 8 million of those jobs that could be going to the unemployed in their own community.
Nor is it only working-class Americans who are being shouldered aside by the annual flood tide of immigrants.
As Jerry Woodruff, editor of Middle American News, writes: "Immigrants are taking good, high-paying jobs from highly skilled Americans. The Census Bureau found that 34 percent of all software engineers ... are immigrants. Yet, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers reports that 48,000 U.S. software engineers are unemployed."
If Obama wants to take executive action to assist Americans out looking for work, he could take two strong and effective steps.
First, call on Congress to vote a moratorium on immigration until the unemployment rate falls below 6 percent. Second, instruct Homeland Security and the Justice Department to renew the raids and enforce the law against employers who are taking jobs from Americans by illegally hiring undocumented aliens.
If Obama did that, suddenly folks would sit up and say, as they did after Ronald Reagan busted the air controllers, "This man is serious."
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Pat Buchanan was twice a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination and the Reform Party's candidate in 2000. He is also a founder and editor of The American Conservative. Now a political analyst for MSNBC and a syndicated columnist, he served three presidents in the White House, was a founding panelist of three national TV shows, and is the author of seven books.
