Big Biz GOP donors, Dem Labor Unions for cheap labor

Big Biz GOP donors, Dem Labor Unions for cheap labor

Of course, big businesses led by Democrats, Republicans and independents naturally favor greater supplies of labor, but these aren’t your grandfathers’ brotherhoods for middle class wages anymore.

How else to explain the vocal support of SEIU (amid deafening silence from AFL-CIO affiliates and Teamsters) for an infusion of 11 million illegal immigrant workers to be granted amnesty? How else to explain an Obamacare-energized GOP poised to re-take the U.S. Senate insistent upon self-inflicted no-fence/pro-amnesty wounds?

Yes, we have favored regularization of long-term illegals due to the de facto amnesty of non-enforcement for more than a quarter of a century. And yes, we are happy that Republicans increasingly speak more of non-voting rights legalization as opposed to paths to voting (mostly for Democrats) rights-citizenship.

But not in the absence of a visible fence that deters and never takes  a day off. And not mass legalization of millions of low wage workers during a jobs depression.

Hugh Hewitt lays out the case for “masterly inactivity” as the best Campaign 2014 strategy in the Age of Obamacare:

It is political insanity to begin the year with an assault on the career military and then to antagonize those Republican voters who, even as they support regularization of the nation’s vast population of illegals, want a visible, permanent obstacle to a new wave of illegal immigration, not the promise of more Patrol Patrol that can be redeployed by executive order or drone patrols that can be grounded by the same.  A fence cannot be turned off.  The double-sided fences accompanied by access roads cost money but do work. They work in San Diego and other areas where they have been built, and the House GOP leadership’s head-scratching refusal to bluntly get behind a fence has to be because that leadership doesn’t support a fence.

Which is one of the reasons why more than a majority of the caucus is opposed to doing anything on immigration in 2014.  Rich Lowry estimated yesterday that one-third of the House favors moving the first of many “piecemeal” bills, one-third opposes anything, and one-third urges a delay until 2015 after the Senate is strengthened by at least a few new GOP members if not an outright majority.

I began 2013 hoping that a good bill would emerge from the Senate and was of course disappointed.  I then hoped a fence bill would emerge from Chairman Mike Mccaul’s Homeland Security committee, and was again disappointed. Now the best option open to the GOP is “masterly inactivity” on immigration and a redoubled focus on the many horrors of Obamacare, and somehow the House GOP allows this sort of story to emerge from its “unity-building” retreat.

Bravo Hugh. But what to make of labor unions which, despite their numerous negative effects, one used to could count on as allies in the goal of higher wages for workers? The best explanation is that given the epic loss of members in the private sector from over 30% in the 1950s to single digits today, labor unions are more interested in a new (and ignorant of unions’ broken promises over the past 40 years) audience from which to recruit new members rather than the protection of the wage levels earned by present members. Especially given that the poorly educated immigrants to be granted amnesty will be no threat to their public sector employee base.

American workers already face negative effects on their compensation from technology over the past 20 years and Obamanomics for the past five. To add 11 million to the low-skilled labor supply in one fell swoop would further decimate citizens trying to avoid or climb out of poverty.

Yes, life in the shadows for many long-term illegals is unfair; but that unfairness is outweighed just now by what their immediate regularization would do to wage rates and entitlement qualifications; not to mention the prospects for ending Obamacare before it pushed America over the government-run European-like anemic economy tipping point from which there may be no return in our children’s and even grandchildren’s lifetimes.

We support the efforts of border-security-first, tea partier conservatives like Senators Tim Scott (R-SC), Ted Cruz (R-TX), Jeff Sessions (R-AL) and 2013-convert Marco Rubio (R-FL) in opposing amnesty-first efforts by Speaker John Boehner, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and RNC Chairman Reince Priebus.

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson

Mike DeVine

Mike DeVine

Mike DeVine is a former op-ed columnist at the Charlotte Observer and legal editor of The (Decatur) Champion (legal organ of DeKalb County, Georgia). He is currently with the Ruf Law Firm in Atlanta Metro and conservative voice of the Atlanta Times News.

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