Trump's position paper on immigration provides the perfect rejoinder to Kookie Robert's analysis. The Democrats will have to defend why we continue to bring in more foreign workers during a time when we have the lowest labor participation rates in 38 years. Minorities, the Dem base, have been the hardest hit by immigration. Hillary's "inclusive message" will be a liability, not a strength provided Trump stays on message with his own position paper and adopts Jeff Sessions brilliant template for victory written two years ago, Becoming the Party of Work--How the GOP can help struggling Americans, and itself.
So far, Trump has been following the Sessions template. Trump is appealing to the 75% of Americans who are not college graduates. They are the ones most affected by immigration that is taking their jobs and depressing their wages. Trump thru his nationalistic policies on immigration and trade is creating a new constituency that cuts across partisan lines. It will become more powerful as it is contrasted against the Dems policies. Sessions says:
According to a new Washington Post/ABC News poll, seven in ten voters believe that the Republican party is “out of touch with the concerns of most people in the United States today.â€
When Americans went to the polls in 2012, the following was true: Work-force participation had sunk to its lowest level in 35 years, wages had fallen below 1999 levels, and 47 million Americans were on food stamps. Yet Mitt Romney, the challenger to the incumbent president, lost lower- and middle-income voters by an astonishing margin. Among voters earning $30,000 to $50,000, he trailed by 15 points, and among voters earning under $30,000 he trailed by 28 points.
And what did the GOP’s brilliant consultant class conclude from this resounding defeat? They declared that the GOP must embrace amnesty. The Republican National Committee dutifully issued a report calling for a “comprehensive immigration reform†that would inevitably increase the flow of low-skilled immigration, reducing the wages and living standards of the very voters whose trust the GOP had lost. Over the past four decades, as factories were shuttered and blue-collar jobs were outsourced or automated, net immigration quadrupled. Yet the corporate-consultant class has pronounced that an insufficient level of immigration is the problem. A more colossal misreading of the political moment has rarely occurred.
Perhaps the most important political development now unfolding in the U.S. is the public’s growing loss of faith in our political and financial elites of both parties. To open the ears of disaffected voters, the GOP must break publicly from the elite immigration consensus of Wall Street and Davos. Republicans have a clear path to building a conservative majority if they free themselves from the corporate consultants and demonstrate to the American public that the GOP is the only party aligned with the core interests, concerns, and beliefs of everyday hardworking citizens.
But the immigration “principles†offered by House GOP leaders imply that record immigration levels must be increased further to meet “the needs of employers.†One such GOP proposal — to provide the food industry with half a million low-skilled workers each year — was polled by Rasmussen. Nearly 70 percent of independent voters opposed it.
“Most business leaders have long favored more open immigration. Different businesses want different kinds of people,†a prominent GOP fundraiser declared on TV. “A restaurant may want waiters and cooks; a hospital wants nurses and doctors; a university wants physicists; a business like Exelon needs more engineers.†Asked by the interviewer about hiring U.S. workers for open jobs, he replied that many of those now unemployed are “unable to compete for them.â€
Is that the message of a winning party? It might win a majority of votes at a dinner party in a gated community in Bel Air, but it is an act of profound delusion to think that plan can form the basis of a nationwide Republican resurgence.
Democrats in Washington have already cast their lot. A recent report from the Center for Immigration Studies shows that all net employment gains from 2000 to 2013 — a period of record legal immigration — went to immigrant workers, and yet the immigration plan championed by the White House and congressional Democrats would triple the number of immigrants given permanent legal status over the next decade, and it would double the annual flow of guest workers to compete for jobs in every sector of the U.S. economy. The Democrats’ plan delivers for international corporations, open-borders groups, and even workers now living in other countries — all at the expense of American workers.
So Republicans have a choice. They can either join the Democrats as the second political party in Washington advocating uncontrolled immigration, or they can offer the public a principled alternative and represent the American workers Democrats have jettisoned. Republicans can either help the White House enact an immigration plan that will hollow out the American middle class, or they can finally expose the truth about the White House plan and detail the enormous harm it will inflict.
I’m so tired of these idiots confusing legal immigration with ILLEGAL immigration!
Actually, they’re not confused. They know just what they’re doing. America is made up of immigrants, so calling someone “Anti-immigration” is just as bad as calling them haters of mom and Apple Pie. They KNOW this.
They just want to confuse OTHERS with this word charade.
EVERYTIME they say so and so is anti-immigration, EVERYONE needs to immediately jump in a say, “No Anti-ILLEGAL-immigration. There’s a HUGE difference!”
GRANHOLM: You know, give us any of them. But Donald Trump -- which is such a great contrast with what happened yesterday in Nevada on the Democratic -- Donald Trump being anti-Mexican, anti-Muslim, anti-woman, anti-immigrant, anti-science, and Hillary Clinton putting together this coalition that looks like America, it's an -- it will be an incredible contrast.He is now the face of the Republican Party. I hear these guys, desperately hoping that that's not going to be the case. But Donald Trump is now the face of the Republican Party. They have made their bed. They've got to lie in it.
'This Week' Transcript: Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Donald Trump - ABC News - Feb 21, 2016>
Doesn't make your observation any less valid! Our generous immigration policies (including a deliberate blind eye to illegal entry and stay) are hurting the nation and its people.
Agree...Trump, I believe, will be pretty good on immigration & I’m not alone in that feeling...
https://www.numbersusa.com/content/elections/races/presidential/2016-presidential-hopefuls.html