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Media Elites Continue Push for More Foreign Labor Despite High Unemployment

 

By Roy Beck, Monday, September 14, 2009, 2:11 PM EST - posted on NumbersUSA

I watched NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday afternoon and heard TV and magazine journalists warn that the U.S. may have entered a long era of European-style high unemployment. Then I got online and saw that writers for some of the nation’s largest newspapers are still talking about needing to increase foreign labor to relieve U.S. worker SHORTAGES! Irrational? Yes. But if you are as committed as Congressional leaders to high immigration, you apparently have no threshold for embarrassment.

That these media elites will still argue labor shortage in the midst of the worst jobs depression since the 1930s is a strong sign that the open borders forces are not giving up – and that they will not let a little thing like 15 million officially unemployed Americans get in their way.

The most irrational are the opinion leaders who sit on the editorial boards of many of the nation’s largest newspapers. You would think they would look out into their own newsrooms, see all the empty desks of their downsized colleagues and realize that we have too many workers, not too few.

But their eyes are on something different – the vision of a world without borders and with the free global movement of labor.

I’ll focus on my hometown paper, the Washington Post, where Lee Hockstader, who's a member of the paper's editorial board, got giddy with the prospect that Pres. Obama next winter should be able to sell the public on an immigration bill that greatly increases the importation of foreign labor.

Recession or no recession, a comprehensive reform bill must provide a way out of this mess born of neglect by offering a path to legality for undocumented immigrants already here and a mechanism for future workers, skilled and unskilled, to enter the country in adequate numbers to meet the job market’s demands.

-- Lee Hockstader “Immigration Awaits Its Turn” by Lee Hockstader, Washington Post

I agree that we have 11-19 million illegal aliens in the country because of neglect. But the neglect was by the Bush/Clinton/Bush/Obama Administrations when they refused to fully enforce immigration laws and created a massive run on our borders and theft of jobs from U.S. workers.

Hockstader, however, buys the U.S. Chamber of Commerce argument that we have illegal immigration only because we have neglected to continually raise legal immigration quotas to meet our labor demands.

He and his Robber Baron friends figure that if we would merely raise legal immigration from 1 million a year to maybe 1.5 million a year, illegal immigration would stop because there wouldn’t be any jobs left for illegal aliens.

But here’s the recent reality that most opinion leaders don’t recognize:

We have tried the increasing-immigration solution for 45 years. Since 1965, we have continually increased legal permanent immigration from 250,000 average to more than 1 million a year – and also now allow more than 1 million temporary workers a year. And the result is that every year, until this recession, illegal immigration increased.

If anything, it appears that increasing legal immigration leads to more illegal immigration – probably because it creates more networks of housing, job connections and family ties to make it easier for more people to live and work illegally.

To ivory tower opinion leaders like the editorial boards of the Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and scores of other major papers, the nearly 10% official unemployment has no relationship to foreign workers.

… to be successful in reshaping the country’s dysfunctional system, any legislation needs to recognize economic realities . . . that millions of immigrant workers are here to stay, that many or most do jobs that native-born Americans don’t want; and that that Mexico’s comparative poverty will continue to drive immigrants north to a better life.

-- Lee Hockstader

Amazingly, Hockstader keeps referring to more increases in immigration as the “sane” alternative.

I would think that in the middle of the worst jobs depression since the 1930s that somebody would be too embarrassed to use the “jobs Americans won’t do” line. But not inside most newspaper editorial boards.

I guess they assume that the 15 million Americans who are looking for a job and cannot find even part-time work are all like their laid-off journalist colleagues (college grads) and that all foreign workers are non-English-speaking high school dropouts who pick strawberries.

In fact, of course, most foreign workers are competing in the exact same construction, service and manufacturing occupations as are most of the 15 million unemployed Americans. And there are at least another 10 million working-age Americans who aren’t counted in the official unemployment but who likely would take a job if one were offered.

Friends, just because some of the elites continue to state untruths as if they were gospel doesn’t mean we can’t eventually shame even editorial writers into abandoning this myth of labor shortages. The common sense of the common people can eventually prevail. I urge all of you to spread the word to your friends and colleagues to come to NumbersUSA and continually send free faxes to your Members of Congress and the President reminding them that the only SANE immigration policy is to suspend most immigration at least until official unemployment is below 5% again.

ROY BECK is CEO & Founder of NumbersUSA

Views and opinions expressed in blogs on this website are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect official policies of NumbersUSA.
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