December 04, 2009

View From Lodi, CA Pittsburgh, PA: Obama’s Choice—Immigration Moratorium Or Defeat In 2012

If I were President Barack Obama’s advisor, I would tell him that after only ten months in office, his reelection prospects are fading.

Obama’s campaign rhetoric, especially about creating 5 million jobs, got him to the White House. But his aimless Jobs Summit with all of its empty words and unfulfilled promises won’t fool anyone. Ominously, the summit excluded critics. [Critics Not Invited to Jobs Summit, by Kara Rowland, Washington Times, December 2, 2009]

Since Obama took office in January, unemployment has steadily risen from 7.6% to last month’s peak of 10.2 percent. The Federal Reserve predicts that the rate will stay above 8 percent until 2012, a level once considered disastrous. Now is the time for action, not posturing.

Obama’s easiest way out of his employment crisis may be the hardest one for him to come to grips with: effective immediately, Congress must impose an immigration moratorium.

Incredibly, despite the shocking statistic that nearly 16 million Americans are jobless, the Department of Homeland Security acknowledged that the federal government issues 75,000 permanent work permits a month to foreign-born nationals.

Annualized, that’s more than one million foreign-born arriving in the United States to compete with unemployed Americans for scarce jobs.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that in October alone, Americans lost 190,000 jobs. Yet in October, 75,000 foreign-born received permanent work permits to directly compete with Americans for jobs. This is an outrage of such magnitude that it defies description.

Despite the recession, more than 100,000 legal immigrants enter the country every month, 1.2 million annually. They come by winning diversity lottery visas or through chain migration. Many immediately seek employment.

Additionally, according to a recent Pew Hispanic Center report, 8 million illegal aliens hold jobs. Only 4 percent of them were in agriculture.

USA Today reported that the situation is so grave that unemployed Americans are turning up in large numbers at day labor centers. Observers calculate that American-born workers at job centers formerly frequented only by illegal aliens have doubled during the last two years. [Unemployed U.S.-born Workers Seek Day Labor Jobs, by Emily Bazar, USA Today, December 2, 2009]

At the Jobs Summit, Obama heard solutions that will cost billions but have no assurance of success.

The Economic Policy Institute recommends spending $120 billion over three years to stimulate employment.

New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman recommends a multi-billion dollar jobs program similar to the ones in Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. [The Jobs Imperative, by Paul Krugman, New York Times, November 29, 2009]

Here’s more statistics to consider. As outlined by my VDARE.COM colleague Edwin S. Rubenstein, last month Obama’s administration claimed that 640,000 jobs were saved or created by his $787 stimulus program.

Many feel the estimate is inflated. Even if it isn’t, that works out to a $1.2 million cost to taxpayers per job. And the announcement didn’t mention that more than 7 million people have lost jobs since the start of the December 2007 recession.

Under the administration’s irresponsible immigration policy, many of those jobs created could have gone to foreign-born workers. Think of it: billions of stimulus dollars spent that might mean employment for immigrants.

Under my immigration moratorium solution, however, job creation would cost zero. Not one dime of your tax dollars would be needed to put Americans back to work.

If you’re in the job market today, your prospects are terrible. There are six times as many Americans seeking work as there are openings. The average duration of unemployment — the time the average job-seeker spends looking for work — is more than six months, the highest level since the 1930s.

An immigration moratorium is such an obvious beginning for putting Americans back to work that you might wonder why it isn’t a top priority.

I point to two reasons. First, federal immigration policy is on auto-pilot. No matter what the economic or social considerations may be, immigration grinds on.

Second, any politician who publicly challenges immigration will be hung out to dry by the ethnocentric lobbyists who dominate Washington.

My take is different. Obama should ignore the nay-sayers. Bold action that includes an immigration moratorium is called for.

Voters have a low tolerance for incumbent presidents during periods of economic crisis.

Go all the way back to Martin Van Buren when, in a scenario with remarkable similarities to today, the Panic of 1837 caused hundreds of banks and businesses to fail and thousands to lose their property. In the 1840 election, William Henry Harrison routed Van Buren.

If that’s too far back in history for you, consider these one-term presidents also ousted because of their failed economic policies: Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush.

For Obama, his choice is simple. Impose an immigration moratorium to give Americans a fair chance.

Or cling to political correctness, against all logic, and suffer a humiliating 2012 defeat.

Joe Guzzardi [email him] is a California native who recently fled the state because of over-immigration, over-population and a rapidly deteriorating quality of life. He has moved to Pittsburgh, PA where the air is clean and the growth rate stable. A long-time instructor in English at the Lodi Adult School, Guzzardi has been writing a weekly column since 1988. It currently appears in the Lodi News-Sentinel.