Former U.S. Senator and potential 2016 presidential candidate, Rick Santorum, told the Iowa Republican Party on Thursday that the GOP needs to put individual Americans ahead of corporate profits and that means lowering legal immigration numbers. Santorum said that low-skilled immigrants are filling U.S. jobs and keeping wages down for working Americans.
"The object of America is not corporate profits, the object of America is individual Americans, and that's who we should be for," Santorum said. "I'm not talking about radical cuts in immigration, but we need to curb it back a little bit and allow the American workforce to begin to profit more from the profits that are being made."
A stop in Iowa for Santorum with this message is significant since the state will likely host the first GOP presidential primary for the 2016 race.
Over the summer, Santorum had a similar theme during a speech, also in Iowa, at the Family Leadership Summit.
". . . we also have to face the reality that what's hurting American workers -- maybe more than anything else if you're an unskilled worker in America -- is a huge amount of immigration that's going on in this country," Santorum said.
"And I'm not just talking about illegal immigration. Yes, we've seen 12, 15 million illegal immigrants here who are competing in primarily unskilled jobs," he said. "But in the last 14 years since 2000, there've been more people who have come to this country legally than any 14-year period in American history, and that includes the Great Wave."
During that speech, Santorum also said that "wages should not be depressed to keep profits high".
For more on this story, see the Quad City Times.
