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Republicans Who Abandoned Middle Class Led to GOP Defeat
“If defeated Republicans like Ohio Sen. Mike DeWine and Rhode Island Sen. Lincoln Chafee want to know why “Reagan Democrats” turned against them in 2006, they ought to think back to May 25. That’s the day DeWine, Chafee and 21 other Republican senators voted yes for S. 2611, the “comprehensive” immigration reform bill. The message was loud and clear: The Republican Party did not give a damn about the American worker. It was hardly surprising, then, that when Election Day rolled around, the American worker declared he did not give a damn about the Republican Party,” says Robert Stacy McCain. “One of the odd things about life in nation’s capital is that it is possible in Washington to forget that there is still such a thing as the American working class . . . Those people are invisible in Washington , at least so far as the Beltway’s Republican elite are concerned. The GOP elite find it more pleasant to listen to the sneering snobs of the Wall Street Journal who – in reaction to a recent roundup of illegals at meatpacking plants – opined that “the nation’s illegal immigration problem is … primarily a labor shortage problem.” Wall Street, it seems, is another vantage points from which it is impossible to see the American worker.”
NBC will air Tom Brokaw’s illegal immigration documentary tonight at 8 eastern. “Brokaw notes the ‘passionate debate’engendered by ‘the waves of illegal immigrants, the undocumented workers who are pouring across the border from Mexico, Central and South America.’ Undocumented or not, many are extremely hard workers, indeed, or so local businessmen say. ‘These people work their butts off,’ marvels a construction company boss. He says they eagerly accept jobs that ‘Americans don't want,’ even at a fairly respectable $14 an hour or more,” the Washington Post TV critic writes.
“Counting on the support of the new Democratic majority in Congress, Democratic lawmakers and their Republican allies are working on measures that could place millions of illegal immigrants on a more direct path to citizenship than would a bill that the Senate passed in the spring,” the New York Times reported. “The lawmakers are considering abandoning a requirement in the Senate bill that would compel several million illegal immigrants to leave the United States before becoming eligible to apply for citizenship.”
Illegal Workers Face “Climate of Fear,” May Actually Be Deported
"Throughout the region, farm hands have simply disappeared by twos and threes, picked up on a Sunday as they went to church or to the laundry. Whole families have gone into hiding, like the couple who spent the night with their child in a plastic calf hutch. As record-setting enforcement of immigration laws upends old, unspoken arrangements, a new climate of fear is sweeping through the rural communities of western and central New York,” says the New York Times. “In small towns divided over immigration, they fear that speaking out — or a disgruntled neighbor’s call to the authorities — could make them targets of the next raid and raise the threat of criminal prosecution. Here where agriculture is the mainstay of a depressed economy, the mainstay of agriculture is largely illegal immigrant labor from Mexico. Now, more aggressive enforcement has disrupted a system of official winks, nods and paperwork that for years protected farmers from ‘knowingly’ hiring the illegal immigrants who make up most of their work force.”
