Immigration Law

HOW TO DESTROY A STATE'S ECONOMY IN JUST A FEW EASY STEPS

By Greg Siskind

Lou Dobbs and friends must be cheering. After all, they've sworn up and down that there are plenty of Americans who would love to take the jobs currently being worked by the millions of unauthorized immigrants around the country. Never mind that the estimated number of unauthorized workers probably far exceeds the number of unemployed Americans qualified and interested in taking the jobs (and, no, a laid off mortgage banker is not going to pick tomatoes).

We don't need to talk about this subject in theory. Arizona, Oklahoma, Colorado and other states are providing a real life laboratory. And guess what? The laws of economics still apply (not to mention commons sense).

Oklahoma probably has the most noxious of the new laws. And it's delivering all sorts of lovely dividends to the state. Perhaps the results are best summed up by Republican State Senator Harry Coates:

"You really have to work hard at it to destroy our state's economy, but we found a way," said state Sen. Harry Coates, the only Republican in the state Legislature to vote against the immigration law. "We ran off the workforce."

The quote from the leader of the advocacy group that pushed the bill through that state really tells you what this is all about (in case you thought it was about law and order):

Carol Helm, director of Immigration Reform for Oklahoma Now, says the Oklahoma law was necessary to stop a burgeoning population of illegal immigrants from "multiplying faster than the American citizen race"

Full post as published by Greg Siskind's Blog on February 15, 2008 (boomark / email).