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March 31, 2009
by Kent Lundgren
Chairman, National Association of Former Border Patrol Officers
Let us begin by stating a first principle.
As something becomes more available, it becomes cheaper, and vice versa. This is the law of supply and demand. It is a fundamental, irrefutable law of economics, so well-proven that it needs no discussion. What must be pointed out here, though, is that sweat is a quantity covered by the law of supply and demand. As sweat becomes more available, it becomes cheaper.
It seems they do not, though - or perhaps they do, and just don't care. Or maybe they are responding to their vision of a higher calling than the good of the American public. Whatever their motives, though, make no mistake: when they call for "bringing workers out of the shadows," they are not talking about helping the legal workers of America, and when they say we should have "Immigration Reform" they are proposing laws that will benefit foreigners, not our own workers. For their own, political reasons, they are willing to damage individual Americans to benefit foreigners.
In justification of their calls for liberal immigration laws, they say that Americans won't do "that kind of work," whatever kind that is. What a contemptible statement! What an expression of disdain for their fellow Americans. Any politician who believes that of his constituents has a very poor opinion of them - but then, he knows them best; maybe they are lazy sluggards. He should not dare to speak for other Americans, though, who have done every job in this country, and do them still. They do them despite wages held down by the actions and inactions of the very people making those scandalous statements - our elected representatives
Now, we are in a crisis. Good, working Americans who have played by the rules are losing their homes as they lose their jobs. They cannot buy shoes for the kids, much less pay next semester's tuition. They will work. Millions of them will take any job that will keep a roof over their heads and food on the table and clothes on their family. But the jobs have to be there.
A tragic aspect of this failure of national will is that the very people who most need low-end jobs, our own undereducated, under skilled workers, are the ones most often displaced by illegal aliens. The American Dream is being moved farther and farther from their reach by the presence of foreign workers who take jobs our own people ought to have and depress the wages that are paid.
President Obama claims repeatedly that he will create new millions of jobs, that he will fix the problem with public works and stimulus packages that will pay for "shovel-ready" projects that will put people to work. He, and his cheerleaders in Congress, ignore the more obvious solution in favor one that requires spending on an unimaginable scale. Millions of jobs are still out there, but they are filled by illegal aliens who ought not to have them at all, much less at the expense of an American worker. We note with amazement that, apparently, there will be no extra effort made when those Obama-generated stimulus jobs are filled to screen out illegal aliens.
What the Administration and Congress should do is this: vigorously enforce existing immigration laws, and pass new ones that make it inconvenient to impossible for illegal aliens to stay here. The Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, is impeding interior enforcement of our immigration laws; in fact, she has nearly brought it to a complete halt. As a matter of official policy, she is deliberately protecting illegal aliens with jobs from detection and removal. She should stop that immediately and begin carrying out at least one aspect of her duty, that is, to protect the American people's jobs from illegal foreign competition.
An editorial does not offer the space to set forth the volumes of evidence that exist showing that illegal aliens have created a labor surplus that depresses wages, and that Americans will take jobs vacated when illegal aliens leave. Here, we offer only one recent example. In the spring of 2008 ICE conducted a series of enforcement operations at Swift meatpacking plants in several locations across the country. ICE arrested hundreds of illegal aliens, and caused hundreds more to leave. In every case, the jobs opened were filled within days by legal workers, and in nearly every case, at wages higher than were being paid before. Slaughterhouse work is among the jobs that, supposedly, American workers won't do. We can see that they will.
For further discussion and evidence of this proposition, visit the website of the National Association of Former Border Patrol Officers at http://www.nafbpo.org/ and click the button American Jobs for American Workers. There, we offer evidence and the outline of a solution to this problem.
In closing, we call for the administration and Congress to live up to their duty to see that American workers are protected, not sacrificed to foreign interests, and that the laws be faithfully executed. So far, they have failed miserably. We hope they can change. If they do not, we will surely change them.
Kent Lundgren
Chairman
National Association of Former Border Patrol Officers
