CreativeDominant
Posts: 11032
Joined: 3/11/2006 Status: offline
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The Chamber-of-Commerce Wing of the GOP is still willing to punt away America’s sovereignty to ensure the steady supply of cheap labor their corporate string-pullers demand. Meanwhile, Democratic leaders blubber about racism while cynically scheming for a permanent demographic majority. They apparently don’t care how much damage they’re doing to the poor and working class of this country by insisting on the very policies that hurt the poor the most. According to the non-partisan Public Policy Institute, California has the highest poverty rate in the nation. California also has the largest illegal population. Coincidence? In 2006 then-Senator Barack Obama understood how damaging illegal immigration is for the working people of this country. “The number of immigrants added to the labor force every year is of a magnitude not seen in this country for over a century,” Obama wrote in The Audacity of Hope. “If this huge influx of mostly low-skill workers provides some benefits to the economy as a whole… it also threatens to depress further the wages of blue-collar Americans and put strains on an already overburdened safety net.” Barack Obama was not the first Liberal to make this observation. Legendary Texas Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Jordan understood how millions of cheap laborers pouring across our southern border lowered the wages of all working men and women, especially African-Americans. Sxities icon Eugene McCarthy spent his final years warning about the negative impact of unfettered immigration. Perhaps the greatest irony remains that civil rights titan Caesar Chavez was a lifelong opponent of illegal immigration. On August 4th, 1977, President Jimmy Carter issued a Presidential paper on immigration saying, among other things: “In the last several years, millions of undocumented aliens have illegally immigrated to the United States. They have breached our nation’s immigration laws, displaced many American citizens from jobs, and placed an increased financial burden on many states and local governments.” Carter went on to propose a series of reforms, focusing first on enforcement of our laws and establishing penalties for employers who knowingly hire illegal labor. The Democratic-held Congress did nothing. In 1979, then Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates issued “Special Order 40”, an internal police directive, prohibiting LAPD officers from initiating a stop based on the suspicion a suspect may be in the country illegally. Special Order 40 is the granddaddy of sanctuary city policies that have been replicated in nearly every major city in America, encouraging millions to move north of the border. The result has been catastrophic for the poor and working poor. I learned the ugly side of illegal immigration from Black construction workers who, for whatever local anomaly, once dominated the drywall trade in Los Angeles. They complained their $18 dollar an hour jobs had fallen to $13 an hour before vanishing entirely as the industry was taken over by a largely illegal workforce. Even with my B.A. in English I can understand the economics involved: lots of cheap labor cheapens labor. It’s supply and demand 101. While local Democratic politicians exploited this new underclass to increase social service budgets and solidify power within their personal fiefdoms -- city councils, school boards and county boards of supervisors -- Corporate America lobbied for lax border security because they couldn’t outsource everything; hotel chambermaids have to be where the beds are. Same for driveway pavers and meat and poultry plant workers. It’s called “insourceing.” What voters of both parties want is something so commonsensical you’d think even politicians would be able to grasp it -- first secure the border to stop the next 11 million from pouring in. Then deal with the host of significant residual issues starting with the Dream Act kids. Unfortunately that’s not what President Obama has chosen to do. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/11/25/the-liberal-case-against-illegal-immigration.html
< Message edited by CreativeDominant -- 4/22/2015 3:07:16 AM >
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