Obama’s Amnesty Monologue
The President starts a one-sided conversation about immigration.
By J.D. Hayworth | April 28, 2011
President Obama lost his cool last week after a Dallas-based reporter corrected his misstatement that he only lost by “a few percentage points in Texas” when the correct number was ten. While we can poke fun at Obama’s fuzzy political math, when his administration tells Texas-sized lies about border security, the lives of our fellow citizens and our national security are jeopardized.
This occurred last month when Janet Napolitano told a group of border mayors in El Paso, “There is a perception that the border is worse now than it ever has been. That is wrong. The border is better now than it ever has been.” This is despite a Government Accountability Office report that found that 85% of the border is not “fully sealed” and 56% is not under “operational control” of DHS.
President Obama recently met with a number of self-proclaimed “stakeholders” in immigration policy where he repeated the false claim that the “Obama Administration has dedicated unprecedented resources to secure the border.” Obama makes these claims about increased border security to try to make amnesty more palatable for the American people.
The stated purpose of Obama’s meeting was to foster “a constructive national conversation on this important issue as we work to build a bipartisan consensus in Congress.”
A close examination of who was invited to the White House and who was not reveals just how out of touch Obama is with the American people on the issue of immigration.
By Obama’s own estimation, Arizona’s SB 1070 has become the focal point of the immigration debate in the nation. If he wanted a real conversation, he should have invited Governor Jan Brewer, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, or State Senate President and SB 1070 author Russell Pearce.
Governor Brewer responded to her non-invitation on Fox News, “You would have thought one of the [border state] governors would have been invited, since we are on the front lines fighting for security there…If we could sit down and discuss these things, we could get the solutions, maybe we could get something implemented.”
The reason why Governor Brewer was not invited is that Obama does not want a “conversation on this important issue,” he wants a monologue. Every single one of the 19 people Obama invited supports amnesty.
As to be expected, Obama invited a number of radical left wing activists like Al Sharpton and John Podesta of the George Soros funded Center for American Progress. He solicited the input of several police chiefs, mayors, and city council leaders from the cities of Philadelphia, San Antonio, Los Angeles, and New York. Every single one of these localities is a Sanctuary City where law enforcement refuses to cooperate with federal immigration authorities.
Also attending were union and business lobbyists, including AFL CIO president Richard Trumka, former pro-amnesty Senator turned corporate lobbyist Mel Martinez, and the CEO of the agribusiness conglomerate Cargill. Finally, he invited pro-amnesty religious leaders from the National Association of Evangelicals and the Mormon Church.
What stake do these people hold in immigration? The businesses and their lobbyists want cheap labor. For example, ICE has estimated that up to 25% of the employees at some Cargill plants are here illegally. On multiple occasions, Cargill administrators have been arrested for harboring illegal aliens and helping them obtain fraudulent IDs.
The left wing groups’ stake in immigration is political power. The Center for American Progress has an ongoing research project called “The Demographic Change and Progressive Political Strategy Series.” The Center champions the fact that immigration is causing “the voting electorate’s race-ethnic composition…to evolve rapidly” because if “minorities retain their current political leanings, this shift in the distribution of voters should substantially advantage the Democrats.”
All of these “stakeholders” are at odds with the constituents they purport to represent. When the National Association Evangelicals made a statement in favor of amnesty in 2009, 75% of the individual member denominations refused to sign on.
The non-partisan Center for Immigration Studies regularly commissions Zogby International to poll different constituent groups on immigration. They asked evangelicals if they preferred putting illegal immigrants on the “pathway to citizenship” or enforcing the law to have them “return home.” Evangelicals supported enforcement over amnesty by over a 6-1 margin.
While African Americans and Union households had slightly more liberal views on immigration, the vast majority are at odds with Al Sharpton and Richard Trumka. When asked the same question, only 30% of blacks and 28% of Union households supported amnesty.
Unions used to take a very different view on immigration. The founder of the Trumka’s union Samuel Gompers wrote in 1921, “Those who favor unrestricted immigration care nothing for the people. They are simply desirous of flooding the country with unskilled as well as skilled labor of other lands for the purpose of breaking down American standards.”
When assessing the assortment of race hustlers, left wing ideologues, and corporate lobbyists who Obama teams up with to promote amnesty, Gompers’s words ring truer than ever ninety years later.
The real stakeholders in our immigration are the 16 million unemployed Americans who have to compete against the 8 million illegal aliens in the workforce and over 1.5 million foreign workers we allow into the country legally each year. They are the ranchers in Texas and Arizona who see their property destroyed and lives threatened by invading drug cartels. They are the students who have to attend overcrowded schools with resources diverted for bilingual education. They are the thousands of Americans who have been murdered, raped, and robbed by illegal aliens.
The next time Obama wants a “conversation” about immigration, he should consider their voices as well.
J.D. Hayworth represented Arizona in the United States Congress from 1995-2007. He is the author of the book Whatever It Takes: Illegal Immigration, Border Security, and the War on Terror.
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