Commentary:
By Raoul Lowery Contreras
Here we go again, the President is promising a Comprehensive Immigration Reform effort, again. He is doing so not because he wants Immigration reform, he doesn’t, what he wants is more support for his hard left turn in governance.
He figures that by promising immigration reform he can get the support he needs from Hispanics who, unlike their black brethren, did not swallow Obama hook line and sinker (Hispanics delivered 70 percent of their vote to Obama, blacks 97 percent). Is his appeal to Hispanics working? No, because his fraudulent immigration reform words will not deliver immigration reform.
If he really cared about Hispanics and their issue of Immigration reform, he would call in every western U.S. Senator plus senators from Florida, Georgia and Illinois. These people know Hispanic immigrants of all sorts but in particular they know Mexicans, the very people who are the majority of illegal immigrants and who always will be due to an accident of geography.
Like Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz once said 110 or so years ago, “Poor Mexico, so close to the United States so far from God.”
The border between the U.S. and Mexico is more than a surveyor’s line, it is a line between the most prosperous 1st World Country and Mexico which barely hit a modern economic baseline (takeoff) during WWII. Nowhere in the modern world is there such an economic contrast between countries as there is between Mexico and the U.S.
The economic disparity is certainly closer than it has been historically as Mexico continues to develop its economy with its shotgun marriage partner, the United States, but still it remains. The disparity causes a Mexican labor surplus to move north to fill an employment vacuum in farm work, construction and various service industries.
Despite unemployment among those without jobs and those who are underemployed to the tune of 16 percent, there are plenty of jobs for willing Mexican workers. In better times, jobs go begging and the economy is handicapped. A handicapped economy is not a fully charged economy that prospers and creates more and more jobs for a growing population and more and more business and tax revenue for all levels of American government.
An economy that can use Mexican labor is a good economy. Obama take note: An economy dominated by labor unions is not.
Why hasn’t Obama asked U.S. Senators and Representatives from both parties, say ten from each, to organize and develop a comprehensive immigration reform package that can pass the House and the Senate? He hasn’t because he doesn’t want to.
Keeping in mind that organized Labor – unions – spent half a billion dollars to elect Obama and that Labor is against immigration reform that includes a guest worker program, Obama is dancing to Labor’s tune and not of the country. That’s why no immigration reform movement by the White House.
We must remember that Obama voted for union-sponsored “poison pill” amendments to the McCain-Kennedy immigration proposal three years ago. That was in direct opposition to President George W. Bush who truly supported Comprehensive Immigration Reform. Obama helped kill the bill that a majority of Senators favored that would have solved the illegal immigration problem. In that opposition, he joined Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid who also owes his job to unions.
Given those political facts, one has to wonder why anyone believes that Obama truly supports comprehensive immigration reform. Why, because…
There is no hope for comprehensive immigration reform that doesn’t include a guest worker, work permit program that allows Mexican/Guatemalan and Honduran workers into the United States on an “as needed” basis. The unions are against such a program. Thus, Obama is against such a program though he won’t say so.
If anyone needs reminding, 95 percent of agricultural workers in California are Mexican born and the U.S. Department of Labor estimates half of them, 400,000, are here illegally.
Comprehensive immigration reform will not see the light of day under Barack Obama unless he jettisons unions. Will he ever do so when he is running for a second term? No.
Hispanics, therefore, especially Mexican Americans will continue to suffer illegality among and inside their families, lower wages and constant harassment by police throughout the West and South because legal Mexicans, Mexican Americans and others of darker skin must suffer at the hands of those who think that as most illegals are Mexican, most Mexicans are illegal.
Illegals should be treated as trash, as criminals, as American job thieves, as trespassers. As most of them are Mexican, then all Mexicans including American Mexicans should be treated as trash, as criminals, as American job thieves and as trespassers. Sorrowfully, many Americans think this way.
That will not change under Barack Obama.
Contreras’ books are available at amazon.com