Posted on 06/17/2012 6:29:39 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
I asked the same question in an update to Erika’s post on Barack Obama's unilateral move to accommodate young illegal immigrants by refusing to deport them and issue them temporary work permits instead. With potentially as many as 800,000 new workers flooding into the system, what happens to the millions of Americans who can't find work now? The Washington Post wonders the same thing, and more:
President Obama has just opened a floodgate of opportunity for young illegal immigrants in the United States, but could it squeeze the aspirations of legal Americans in the process? ...
Under the new policy, as many as 1.4 million undocumented immigrants under age 30 will be able to apply for the amnesty, allowing them to work and attend college legally. To be eligible, they must have been in the United States for five years, have no criminal record, and attend high school or college or be a military veteran.
The policy does not provide permanent legal residency, but it protects those who qualify from being deported and gives them a chance to renew their new status every two years. It also does not grant any public benefits, such as Medicare and Medicaid. Federal law already grants all undocumented immigrants the right to a public-school education and emergency hospital care.
The new policy could entail additional costs for administration and enforcement, however, and put pressure on state systems of higher education to meet growing demand for slots.
A move like this might have made sense in 2005-6, when the civilian participation rate in the workforce was near its all-time high (around 66.2% at that time), with unemployment in the 5% range, and labor so tight that hourly wages on entry level positions were constantly rising. American businesses would have welcomed a larger pool of legal workers and the competition wouldn’t have put others out of work or forced them to work for significantly less money. People would have opposed it for other reasons, but economically speaking, it wouldn’t have had a tremendously negative impact, at least not in the short term.
But now? We’re not creating enough jobs to keep up with population growth as it is. With this new policy in place, Obama will introduce hundreds of thousands of suddenly-eligible workers into an economy with an 8.2% nominal unemployment rate, a 14.8% U-6 un/underemployed rate, with a civilian participation rate that has plummeted from 65.7% at the start of the Obama recovery in June 2009 (the same as it was when he took office, too) to 63.8%, lower than it was when Reagan faced his first midterm election. Those who are already struggling to find jobs are not only going to face more competition for those slots, the glut of labor will depress entry-level wages even further.
Don’t make the mistake of dismissing the short-term benefits of this move for Barack Obama. When a chief executive “takes the bull by the horns” and acts in a strong manner, he will usually get rewarded with a bump upward in approval and support. Americans like to see leaders lead, which is the reason incumbent Presidents have such an advantage in re-election efforts. It’s also no secret that the Latino community had grown angry with the increased rate of deportations in the Obama administration, and this will heal a breach that Obama can’t afford in November. But this has a large potential for backfire — and if jobs reports this summer continue the downward trend we’ve been seeing this year, those 23 million Americans who already feel locked out of the economy will be asking the same question the Post does this morning.
I’m still waiting for an article explaining how this will affect the [fake] unemployment rate of 8.2%.
Adding 800,000 or so the the ranks of the workforce and the unemployed WILL have a negative effect on the rate.
If they pay unemployment tax they will be. Otherwise it’s a violation of law to tax them for services they cannot legally receive.
This is such a mess it’s staggering.
Good ultimately for America though, because the outrage as more of this becomes understood, it will force congress to act or be thrown from office. It will bring it ALL to a head.
It has got to make the security and intelligence communities in America ill to think that the loyalty of the Commander In Chief as questionable.
Sad to say but Madison and his cohort had little knowledge of the history of democratic forms of government ~ there was an awful lot of guessing and theoretical temporizing in their discussions of their own grand experiment.
If you can’t find a job and never had one you don’t get unemployment compensation. European systems do provide unemployment to students.
re: “The sooner the inevitable collapse caused by ignoring the Founders and amending the Constitution to institute Universal Suffrage happens, the better. Then the Republic can be reset and the vote extended only to taxpayers and Veterans.”
You mean civil war don’t you? The sooner the better? You do know what an all out civil war would entail don’t you? How do you know that the Republic will “reset” to what our Founders established, let alone the right to vote only going to taxpayers and veterans?
I assume the quotes you used from the Founders are intended to say that we no longer have a democratic republic, and that our government has evolved into a pure democracy. I would agree that we are certainly headed that direction, but I still think we are a republic and that the slide toward a “pure democracy” can still be averted.
The problem with this idea that a total collapse of our country into a civil war will produce a renewed, reset, and better America, as envisioned by our Founders, is that once a civil war begins there’s no telling where it will end up politically. It could just as easily turn us into a pure totalitarian state, communist state, or just decades of guerilla warfare run by groups of differing warlords.
As long as we can still vote, still have the possibility of removing those we don’t like in office through the ballot box (not bullets), and still have the possibility of changing the direction of our nation through Constitutional means, then I’m against open civil war. When and if our government removes all constitutional means for change, civil war will erupt on its own - but, again, what will happen politically is a complete unknown.
Civil war may come, but I would never hope for it.
Maybe this has been brought up already, but I haven’t noticed it. There is an additional reason for American citizens to be concerned: all of these formerly illegal aliens will now be legally eligible for affirmative action benefits, meaning that they may be given preferential treatment as job applicants and college applicants because of their minority status.
First stage to amnesty,everything is going as planed.
Ted Kennedy smiles.
The government is already duplicitous enough to camoflage an illegal’s provenance by negating many established requirements while simultaneously requiring normal American Citizens to contend with overly stringent requirements.
Congress can’t even get a truthful answer from DOJ about Gunwalker and Fast and Furious for cripes sake.
I submit motor voter laws and spontaneous poll affadavits as an example of this hypocrisy.
And your comment about unintended consequences is entirely plausible. If I were a business owner and had to hire people and illegals were indistinguishable, how do you think I’d solve the problem if I were vehemently against this government on its policy? Hmmm?
With enough race riots in the country our Dear Leader will declare Martial Law and try to take over.
What will this do to the official unemployment rate hovering around 8% but really 12-16%?
Agreed. The question is-When does this take effect? If it takes effect upon Obamas signature, then the UCX rate just went up about 2%. Regardless of which Gerrymandered statistic the Rats chose to present.
Americans are fed up. BHO knows he is going to lose in a landslide. He is trying to ruin the country and suck out the remaining monies. He has accomplished what he set out to do.
Refusing to enforce laws that protect American workers is a natural outcome of a Permanent Ruling Aristocracy form of government. Without the right of states to secede, it is impossible to regulate the tyranny and corruption of the Permanent Ruling Aristocracy (party bosses, lobbyists, federal employee union bosses, major Washington D.C. law firms, and the military/industrial/international banking complex) and their Orwellian Ministers of Truth (America’s newrooms and faculty lounges).
Ubama will decree that they get to collect unemployment if they can’t find jobs.
This racist move imposes slave wages on LEGAL immigrants!!
More Mexican restaurants or roofing companies competing with one another, will likely drive some to Canada...
What it means is that illegals will have work permits to waive at employers while citizens will not.
As soon as a couple of citizens file a complaint about being asked for the same kind of permits the feds will rise up against "profiling".
DOJ will, of course, take immediate action.
And documentation will be effectively a moot issue - no one will be willing to check doc's or ask questions.
And, that gets us back to my original supposition: What would an employer then do if presented with a possible illegal applying for a job? Would he, if overwhelmingly against Obama's action, take it out on all hispanics applying for a job? After all, it likely will be next to impossible to tell who is who. There's a simple fix for that.
Are there provisions in this executive order that if and when you hire one of these legal/illegal “children” do they have to be a member of a union?
“It says they won’t be eligible for Medicare but...”
That’s ok, we don’t have the money to pay Medicare for the current recipients, much less the folks that expect to collect sometime in the future, whether citizen, documented immigrant, or semi-documented immigrant.
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