Watching The News Hour on WETA, particularly on Fridays to hear from Mark Shields and David Brooks, has been a long time habit in our house. These respected pundits always have interesting takes on the news of the day, which my wife and I frequently agree with. But on the impact of our badly failed immigration system, they have been less willing to state what they stated after the Brexit vote.
Finally, finally, finally, when they discussed the main News Hour story about the June 24th Brexit results, they finally came clean on why it happened. As I quoted Abraham Lincoln in an earlier OP ED, “You can fool some of the people some of the time and some of the people part of the time but not all of the people all of the time.” Brexit forced these worthies to finally talk about the repressed anger of the shrinking Middle Class and the down trodden working class, particularly those with no special skills or higher education about how the elites of America had, as Brooks, the Republican voice, admitted, brought in too many immigrants. Wow! And then Democrat Shields chimed in by noting that college grads were having trouble finding jobs.
My wife and I have been concerned for decades about the out of control immigration situation—we take in the more legal immigrants every year than any other nation on Earth and a lot of illegal aliens, always dubbed “undocumented immigrants” by most media outlets. This utter disregard for the interests of American citizens has now produced the latent anger that allowed that improbable presumptive Presidential nominee, Donald Trump, to surface. He brings a lot of warts, but his initial call for control of our borders was the trumpet sound that enabled him to beat out 15 other candidates and get the Republican nomination over the screams of the Republican elites who wanted no change in their continuing greedy requests for more and more, just as the Democrats felt that loading up on more minorities was a path to a permanent voting majority.
Of course to me the ultimate racist position of the Democrats is that while accusing American citizens of racial bias if they protested the vast incursion of immigrants, they asked American citizens to give endless benefits to aliens. At the same time, elites in and out of office failed to take seriously the dire effects on our poorer citizens such as inner city African Americans and millions of blue collar workers idled by the big businesses which have imported huge numbers of cheap foreign labor while at the same time sending so many jobs which our citizens could do to China and other lower cost countries.
Opinions of why the Brits voted as they did included Brussels’ alleged arrogant mismanagement, of the EU, but to me the main beef from the beefeaters was immigration. Yes, the inability to control almost anyone who wanted to come into the UK got under the skin of the white working class majority.
So let’s understand why so called populist sentiment is rising rapidly. The elites of both parties have ignored the pain of the little people and now as Shield noted when college grads are getting out and not getting the jobs they were trained for. Both admitted correction was needed, but when citing as a solution passing various versions of bills about Comprehensive Immigration Reform, they should have noted that the CIR legislation did not offer proper safeguards and was rejected several times as not providing the corrections needed.
Simple question: why did it take the Brexit vote before this illustrious pair of Brooks and Shield could clearly articulate what they must have understood long before, but ignored, was the seminal problem, buried, ignored and untreated?
Immigration is going to get focused on now big time and if these angry ignored Americans are not happy with the prospect for real change, the presumed political outcome in November may surprise those elites from both parties.
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About the Author: Collins, a freelance writer living in Washington, DC, is Co-chair of the National Advisory Board of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). His views, however, are his own.
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