Yes, it is really good news to see so many immigration expansionists being quoted in the media attacking the idea of reducing legal immigration.
It indicates that the concept is gaining enough traction for the immigration expansionists to become seriously worried.
We saw some flurries of these attacks a month ago when Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.) introduced the RAISE Act (S. 354) which they promise would immediately reduce annual legal immigration by 40% from its recent average above a million.
The attacks on this kind of immigration moderation started to look more like a blizzard after President Trump made strong statements to Congress Tuesday night about the need to change the legal immigration system to help American workers.
You may recall that I shot out a statement to the media as soon as the speech ended claiming that the President's comments were a "tacit endorsement" of the RAISE Act.
I'm pleased that many commentators, reporters and immigration expansion advocates the next day were making that connection and putting a lot of spotlight on the RAISE Act, which would end all Chain Migration categories and the Visa Lottery.
Most of the attention was given in the form of advocates and "experts" being quoted about what a horrible thing it would be to give out a half-million fewer lifetime U.S. work permits to citizens of other countries every year.
The expansionists' biggest argument seems to be that the U.S. economy would stagnate without the government-forced population growth created by immigration. They also make claims relying on the belief that the 50 million working-age Americans who have no job at all right now could not possibly be persuaded to take the jobs that those half-million denied immigrants otherwise would take.
Which of those 50 million Americans do the expansionists believe are too picky, or too lazy, or too pampered or too untrainable to be recruited to fill jobs that the government imports immigrants to fill?
Perhaps it is the 2 of every 5 Millennials of all ethnicities under age 30 with no college degree who have no job of any kind. The expansionists find it far preferable to add a million more work-permitted immigrants each year than to encourage better engagement of this young demographic that is in its physical prime and learning life-long habits of self-sufficiency or dependency.
Or maybe the immigration expansionists have such low opinions of the two minority groups with the largest number of Americans living in poverty that they think businesses shouldn't have to recruit among the 30% of all working-age Hispanic Americans and 36% of all working-age African Americans who currently don't have even a part-time job.
Immigration policies are always about who gets preference from the U.S. government. A very good sign this week was the statement from the AFL-CIO chief Richard Trumka that he agreed with the President's principle that immigration policies should show a preferential concern for how workers are affected.
Trumka and Trump spotlighting legal immigration levels! No wonder the expansionists are worried.
ROY BECK is President & Founder of NumbersUSA
