Carol Swain, the impressive Vanderbilt law professor we first encountered here, points out that our new “Yes We Can!” president “has lofty goals. Under his tutelage,” she wrote recently in the Nashville Tennessean, “we will cure cancer, end our dependence on foreign oil, reform health care and guarantee higher education to everyone who wants it.” But there are some doable things that, according to President Hope ’N Change, we can’t, or at least won’t, do.
I would like to focus on something that the president has not addressed: illegal immigration and its impact on unemployment, job creation and our failing educational system. Until he is willing to acknowledge the obvious, our best efforts are doomed to fail.
Over the next two years, his job-creation plan promises to save or create 3.5 million jobs. Meanwhile, there are an estimated 6 to 7 million illegal immigrants working in low-wage, low-skill positions that could be filled with U.S- born workers with high school educations or less….
Instead of expanding and protecting American jobs, the president allowed Senate Democrats to strip two E-Verify provisions from the stimulus bill. E-Verify is a highly effective voluntary program run by the Department of Homeland Security, which allows employers to check Social Security numbers against a national database. In 2007, it had a 99.6 percent accuracy rate and could yield results in less than three minutes….
And, Prof. Swain, concludes,
Unemployment is only one of many problems. Many of the president’s new programs lack any mechanism for verifying that the recipients are in the country legally. Such a failure to tackle the obvious does not bode well for the future.
Our rising health-care costs and educational burdens are all impacted by the presence of large numbers of undocumented and unauthorized residents who make it more difficult for hard-working Americans to enjoy some of the benefits of living in a nation that used to be one of the greatest in the world.
In the past, especially in economic downturns and periods of high unemployment, unions led the fight to restrict immigration, out of a desire to protect the jobs of their members and other American workers. Now unions generally support mass immigration since the new immigrants present a fertile field in which to harvest new members.
