As a blend of harsh and vicious Republican candidate ads saturate the airwaves of South Carolina in advance of the GOP 2012 Presidential primary, NumbersUSA elbows its way into the fight with this ad:
Jobs, jobs, jobs. Everybody talks about creating jobs, but who will get the jobs? Not one candidate is talking about why the government is ready to bring in another one million legal immigrants this year to take American jobs. Legal doesn’t make it right when there are millions of jobless Americans. Ask the candidates: Who should get new American jobs? Unemployed Americans? Or will they bring in another million immigrants? Paid for by Numbers USA at NumbersUSA.org.
This ad isn’t against the people that skip across our borders in the dark of night. It’s against all those that qualify for work visas in fields that Americans haven’t been getting enough education to fill, such as engineering, or in fields that require years of training yet pay modest salaries, such as medicine practiced in rural areas. Sure, some may edge Americans out of a job, but shouldn’t America try to employ the best and the brightest?
NumbersUSA doesn’t claim any party, but with the election all about the GOP, this ad can’t help but be taken as a GOP effort to push the candidates into their brand of xenophobia.
The Republican party has enough problems being wrongly seen as anti-immigrant instead of what they really are: anti-illegal immigration. This ad will only solidify that misguided view.
When I watch the NumbersUSA ad, all that I’m hearing is this:
We definitely need to fix our immigration policies for those in the lower income brackets, and tweak our policies relating to high-skilled workers, to allow the U.S. to continually admit the optimum blend of eager workers in areas that Americans can’t or won’t fill. But legal immigration will not be stopped, and should not be stopped.
Ginning up animosity towards legal immigrants as a means to displace anger over our high unemployment rate won’t solve our problems created by the government’s central planning, financial boondoggles and regulatory schemes. It will only exacerbate them.
I used to think I agreed with NumbersUSA, because I made the improper assumption they were focused on illegal immigration. Now that I know they don’t want any immigrants at all, I can’t support them.
The Republican candidates need to push back against this “they took our jobs” nonsense and work to get the government out of the way of job creation for Americans.
[...] However, chances are that it will be studiously ignored this time around, unless Numbers USA has purchased some ad buys in order to highlight the chronic unemployment that afflicts the Palmetto State. In any case, it [...]