Obama’s Amnesty: An Attack on the Poor

[Geee]

Front Page Magazine:

Last Friday, the so-called “comprehensive immigration reform” effort received a boost when U.S. Chamber of Commerce head Tom Donohue and AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka reportedly came to an agreement regarding a guest-worker program. The deal indicates that one of the bill’s major stumbling blocks — the worry that a flood of unskilled, low-wage workers would crowd poorer Americans out of the job market — has apparently been overcome. Politically speaking, it has. For low-skill, low-wage Americans, however, it is an economic disaster-in-the-making. And though Democrats are once again casting themselves as the champions of beleaguered minority groups for pursuing this legislation, it is American blacks and Hispanics — the communities that suffer from some of the nation’s highest unemployment rates — who will pay the price for the Left’s amnesty folly.

A report published in 2011 by the Federation for Immigration Reform (FAIR) made the case that illegal aliens were already competing with Americans for jobs, especially in the low-wage, low-skilled category. “Immigration, Poverty and Low-Wage Earners: The Harmful Effect of Unskilled Immigrants on American Workers,” revealed that of the 1.1 million legal immigrants admitted to this country on an annual basis, less that 6 percent “possessed skills deemed essential to the U.S. economy.” ”Some family-based immigrants may be highly educated or skilled, but the vast majority of admissions are made without regard for those criteria,” the report stated. “The immigrant population reflects the system’s lack of emphasis on skill. Nearly 31 percent of foreign-born residents over the age of 25 are without a high school diploma, compared to just 10 percent of native-born citizens.”