Even before Obama’s State of the Union address, Democrats were scrambling to change their priorities from health care to jobs.
They realized that Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts represented a nationwide populist response against big government personified in Obamacare, and that voters are wondering why they are busy putting America into debt rather than dealing with the 25-million Americans out of work.
In the words of Obama’s chief economic advisor Larry Summers, “priority Number One has to be assuring rapid job growth.”
Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY), one of the strongest proponents of Obamacare, conceded “I don’t think it would be the worst thing to take a step back and say we are going to pivot to do a jobs thing.”
Sure enough, Obama said in his address that “jobs must be our number one focus in 2010.” Putting Americans back to work is more important than socializing health care, but Obama and the Democrats are just offering the same failed big government programs as a solution.
In the State of the Union, Obama falsely claimed that his trillion dollar Stimulus Bill saved two million jobs. Then, he laid out the principles for his Jobs Bill that would waste billions upon billions more taxpayer dollars on the same failed programs. The only difference is that he called it “investing” instead of spending.
A much simpler approach to protect jobs: cut back on immigration.
Democrats cannot pretend to stand for the people and job growth and against Wall Street while pushing for amnesty and mass immigration. In the State of the Union, Obama said, “And we should continue the work of fixing our broken immigration system — to secure our borders and enforce our laws, and ensure that everyone who plays by the rules can contribute to our economy and enrich our nation.” Immigration hawk Tom Tancredo would agree with that!
The White House’s website however clarified this trite line, “The President is pleased Congress is taking steps forward on immigration reform that includes effective border security measures with a path for legalization for those who are willing to pay taxes and abide by the law.He is committed to confronting this problem in practical, effective ways, using the current tools at our disposal while we work with Congress to enact comprehensive reform.”
In other words, he wants amnesty.
Despite claims that we are enforcing immigration laws and the economic downturn is causing illegal aliens to leave, there are still over 8-million illegal aliens in the workforce.
Rather than cracking down on illegal aliens and their employers, Obama has reversed positive steps towards enforcement made in the last years of the Bush administration.
Now he says he supports Rep. Luis Gutierrez’s (D-IL) misnamed Comprehensive Immigration Reform for America’s Security and Prosperity Act of 2009 that will completely gut all enforcement against illegal immigration and give a blanket amnesty to illegal aliens. The bill has over 90 Democratic co-sponsors.
According to a recent poll of Mexican Citizens, 56 percent said that they or people they knew would be more likely to come to America illegally if they thought an amnesty would be passed.
One of our new leaders, Freshman Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) — who defeated pro-amnesty Republican Chris Cannon in a primary last year — is fighting back. He introduced a bipartisan resolution that laid out three basic principles of an illegal immigration policy that would protect American jobs.
(1) E-Verify should be mandatory, and worksite enforcement policies should hold both employers and illegal employees responsible for violations of immigration law;
(2) Installing and sustaining border security infrastructure and manpower is a critical responsibility of the federal government; and
(3) Any immigration reform legislation Congress adopts should not grant amnesty to, or confer legal status upon, illegal aliens in the United States.
This resolution is a great start, but we need to
address legal immigration as well. While we should welcome those who come to
this country the legal way and want to become Americans, our first duty is to
American citizens.
Every month, our government issues 75,000 new permanent work visas and 50,000
new temporary work visas. That’s 1.5 million new foreign workers competing with
Americans for jobs since Obama took office.
Even if you believed Obama’s phony claim that the stimulus created or saved 2 million jobs, our legal immigration policy gave away three fourths that number.
Amazingly, no one in either political party is even willing to address this issue. In fact, Rep. Gutierrez’s amnesty bill will issue over 500,000 new visas to foreign workers next year alone.
The first thing we can do as a country to bring back jobs is crack down on illegal immigration, enact a moratorium on immigration, and reject amnesty. These simple steps will free up millions of jobs for Americans. And unlike his stimulus money, this will not put us further in debt. In fact, it will save taxpayers billions of dollars to pay for schools, hospitals, social services, welfare, and prisons for immigrants.
Standing up to uncontrolled immigration provides Republicans a golden opportunity to establish themselves as the true populist party who stands up for the American worker against special interest groups. ■
© Copyright, King Street Media Syndicate