The Party Of Amnesty Is Not
The Working Man’s Friend
George Rasley, CHQ Editor
The Democratic Party has long portrayed itself as taking the same
place in the American political marketplace as do the Labor parties of
Europe – but the policies that today’s Democratic Party advocates,
especially its embrace of amnesty and benefits for illegal aliens, bear
little relationship to the day-to-day concerns of working Americans.
And today’s workers are starting to catch on that the Party of Amnesty is not the working man’s friend. Top pollster Kellyanne Conway, President & CEO of The Polling
Company, recently conducted a poll that found likely voters were
unequivocal in their support of immigration policies that protect the
American worker. Their sentiment is the inverse of the oft-repeated
phrase, “illegal immigrants do the jobs that Americans don’t want to
do,” saying instead that these workers should have a fair opportunity to
do the jobs that illegal immigrants currently do. (See links to
Conway’s poll at the end of this article)
And these voters get the economics of illegal immigration and
understand that depressed wages are one of the results of allowing a
flood of illegal aliens to enter the American workforce. “Raise the pay” is a rallying call for these voters, who believe
there are plenty of Americans to do the work and that better pay and
more training is an elixir for labor shortages. Working class voters,
married women, and political Independents agree with this in dramatic
numbers noted Conway.
These results turn the often-heard statement that illegal immigrants
do the jobs that Americans won’t do on its head. Over 8-in-10
respondents believe that American workers and legal immigrants already
in the U.S. should get first pick at these jobs before illegals. As one
can see from the graph below, blue collar workers support having the
opportunity to take these positions more than the any other demographic
group studied.
Perhaps the most important finding of Conway’s research was this data
point: 75% want more enforcement of current immigration laws,
including 63% of Hispanics and over 50% of Democrats
(emphasis ours) meaning that the Chamber of Commerce line to the effect
that Republicans are about to go extinct because they want our
immigration laws enforced is a bunch of hooey.
Today, despite President Obama and his Democratic Party allies trying
to blue sky the numbers, more than 92 million Americans remain out of
the labor force. This spring the unemployment rate dropped to 6.3 percent in April
from 6.7 percent in March, the lowest it has been since September 2008
when it was 6.1 percent. The sharp drop, though, occurred because the
number of people working or seeking work fell. Some 806,000 people left
the workforce in April alone and the Bureau of Labor Statistics does not
count people not looking for a job as unemployed.
While the government says the unemployment rate is in the low 6
percent range private economists say that in addition to the 19.4
million Real Unemployed Persons (July 2014), there were another 4.4
million persons who, while also saying they want jobs, have not looked
for work in the past twelve months. Solely because they haven’t looked,
these persons are not included among the marginally attached workers;
if included, then July’s Real Unemployment Rate of 12.2% increases to
14.6%, a figure more than twice the official BLS rate of unemployment. How has this occurred if the economy is in “recovery” as President Obama and his Democratic Party allies claim?
The major reason in our view is the lax immigration policies of the past several Presidents.
As Karen Zeigler and Steven A. Camarota of the Center for Immigration
Studies noted earlier this summer, “Government data show that since
2000 all of the net gain in the number of working-age (16 to 65) people
holding a job has gone to immigrants (legal and illegal).” This is remarkable, concluded Zeigler and Camarota, “given that
native-born Americans accounted for two-thirds of the growth in the
total working-age population.” Now here’s the key takeaway from Zeigler and Camarota’s study: “
Though
there has been some recovery from the Great Recession, there were still
fewer working-age natives holding a job in the first quarter of 2014
than in 2000, while the number of immigrants with a job was 5.7 million
above the 2000 level.”
This Labor Day, as TV commentators and newspaper editors cast about
for heroes of the American labor movement to honor they should forget
Samuel Gompers (the first and longest-serving president of the American
Federation of Labor) John L. Lewis (early leader of the United Mine
Workers and a founder of the Congress of Industrial Organizations)
Walter Reuther (United Autoworkers President and leading liberal
Democrat of the post-WWII era) or Eugene V. Debs (labor leader and
Socialist candidate for President) and honor Alabama Republican Senator
Jeff Sessions.
Senator Sessions recently observed that “Tens of millions of
Americans are on welfare, unemployment, and public assistance. Yet the
White House and their Senate Majority seem more concerned about the
economic demands of large corporations, or the citizens of other
countries, than about getting our own citizens back to work into stable
jobs that can support a family and uplift a community.”
In the Roosevelt-Truman era that is what the major labor unions, and
the Democratic Party, claimed to stand for, but no more. Today, the
Democratic Party represents the narrow interests of race-based pressure
groups, like La Raza, and the liberal urban elite, like Facebook founder
Mark Zuckerberg, who are far removed from the day-to-day cares of
working American families.
Jeff Sessions has been Capitol Hill’s most reliable (and principled)
defender of American workers. Were it not for his principled leadership
there is no doubt in our minds that “comprehensive immigration reform”
and amnesty for illegal aliens to further expand the American workforce
and dilute the wages of American workers would have become law by now.
And when you look at what illegal immigration has done, or worse yet
amnesty, will do to the quality of life for American workers that makes
Senator Jeff Sessions a true hero of and for American labor.
For a copy of Kellyanne Conway’s “Friends Family Memo” on her immigration poll please click the following link:
Immigration – Public Opinion Realities and Policy Political Opportunities
For a slide deck featuring Kellyanne Conway’s analysis from the study, please click here:
Immigration – Public Opinion Realities and Policy Political Opportunities – Friends Family Memo- 08 19 2014
The American people understand that this surge in illegals coming across our border is a presidential-caused crisis. This President's lawless actions have caused this nightmare.
These actions clearly demonstrate that he believes he is NOT bound by
the Constitution and will NOT take seriously his obligation to defend our sovereign borders.
