Jay Ambrose
Too many jobs going to illegal immigrants
By: Jay Ambrose
Examiner Columnist
March 17, 2009
A janitor’s job opened up at an elementary school in Ohio, and within a week there were 839 applications. If that doesn’t tell our policy makers anything about a way to address the nation’s unemployment problems, I’ll help them out.
Hundreds of thousands of people are desperate for work at the moment. Many will do almost anything honest. Though this job paid $15 an hour, they’ll work for less than that if they have to.
But if menial positions don’t scare them away, something else sideswipes their hopes – illegal aliens who have already stolen work they’d like to have, who keep wages lower than they would otherwise be and who are themselves frequently exploited, sometimes sweating for less than the minimum wage.
One answer is to send the illegals packing, thus eventually freeing up millions of jobs, and here is another: Change immigration laws to favor the skilled and educated, thus boosting the economy and helping it grow.
Please, please, skip the argument that American citizens won’t do the work – they already constitute the vast majority of workers in virtually every field employing illegals – and cut out the blather that enforcement of our immigration laws would be either impossible or cruel or that only a bigot would worry more about the welfare of citizens than taking care of residents breaking the law.
Hardly anyone is suggesting a massive, national sweep of the illegal aliens. The need is for an insistent crackdown on employers who have first been equipped by the federal government with reliable methods of figuring out who is legal and who isn’t.
This strategy will pretty much do the trick if accompanied by seriousness in deporting illegals as they are found – all made doable by increasing the number of law enforcement officials as necessary, and why not?
The Obama stimulus package has already increased government jobs that do not generate private sector jobs, whereas this increase could provide opportunities galore, especially for our least trained, most needy citizens.
It’s this datum about those who benefit that shreds the bigotry charge. Cheerleading for illegals is a way of swindling citizens, many of them minorities, many of them poor, many of them unemployed.
Restricting immigrants to the best educated is a means of heeding an argument President Obama made in a speech to CEOs the other day. He said a crucial foundation of our economy is a superbly educated population.
How can you make that point and then import millions of uneducated people who bring poverty with them, often costing far more in the public services they consume than any contribution they make in taxes?
Of course, Obama and the Democrats are not talking this talk because, for one thing, there are votes to be had from recent immigrants, from native-born citizens whose families came from the same countries the immigrants come from, and also from the illegals once they are made legal.
You can play the role of magnanimous, good, kind soul with other people’s money and jobs while pretending you are helping the economy through a variety of conceivably ruinous tactics, and you may even get away with it.
Just maybe, however, people will start catching on when politicians actually interfere with enforcement of immigration laws, as many have done, or when congressional Democrats are so unbelievably outrageous as they were when making it possible for illegal aliens to land some 300,000 stimulus-bill jobs by erasing a provision enabling employers to verify a worker’s legal standing.
Then you know you have a party in power that would just as soon see Americans scrambling for any reasonably decent job go jump in a lake.
Examiner columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies. He can be reached at: Speaktojay@aol.com.
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