Is it time for a moratorium on immigration?

By Ralph Alter

While the Obama administration's approach to boosting employment for Americans in the face of the highest unemployment in decades remains tethered to magical thinking and slippery accounting tactics designed to inflate the number of actual jobs created or saved by B.O., a group of 10 Republican congressman has come up with a sensible approach sure to increase the employment of American citizens.

Virgil Goode at Townhall.com provides the group's statement, quoting from a letter being circulated by Lamar Smith (R-TX) and signed by 21 conservative congressmen:

""With a 10 percent unemployment rate, now is the time for the Obama administration to stand up for citizens and legal immigrant workers. Now is the time for the President to enforce immigration laws. When the jobs stolen by illegal immigrants are recovered for citizens and legal workers, American workers will benefit. President Obama could create eight million jobs for citizens and legal workers simply by enforcing immigration laws."

The influx of one million illegal immigrants annually, in addition to the 125,000 combined permanent and temporary work visas issued monthly by the federal government are displacing needy American citizens from the workplace. Mr. Goode echoes the Congressional testimony of Roy Beck from Numbers USA and his call for an immigration moratorium. They suggest that we:

"cut the 75,000 (permanent work visas issued) each month as close to zero as possible as long as the overall U-3 unemployment rate remains above, say, 5%?...The numbers demand the introduction of legislation to suspend the issuance of as many permanent work visas as possible during this Jobs Depression."

Last week the Census Bureau released statistics indicating that currently more than 16% of the American workforce is foreign-born. Compare that figure to the 5% of foreign-born workers tallied when Ted Kennedy's 1965 Immigration Act was passed.

Clearly the results of Kennedy's earlier "cause of his life" have been an unmitigated disaster for the American work force, and for our crime rate and health care system. It's clearly time for a moratorium on immigration until Americans can right our leaking financial ship.

Ralph Alter blogs at Right on Target www.rightot.blogspot.com