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Quick quiz: Which prominent American politician wrote this?

“The number of immigrants added to the labor force every year is of a magnitude not seen in this country for over a century.  If this huge influx of mostly low-skill workers provides some benefits to the economy as a whole — especially by keeping our workforce young, in contrast to an increasingly geriatric Europe and Japan — it also threatens to depress further the wages of blue-collar Americans and put strains on an already overburdened safety net.”

Hint: He’s the prominent American politician who added this: “[T]here’s no denying that many blacks share the same anxieties as many whites about the wave of illegal immigration flooding our Southern border — a sense that what’s happening now is fundamentally different from what has gone on before.”

If you answered “John Boehner” or “Ted Cruz” or “Mitt Romney,” you’d be wrong. In fact, if you answered any Republican past or present office holder or office seeker, you’d be wrong. And since my question specified politicians, you can’t answer “Rush Limbaugh” or “Pat Buchanan” or any other popular targets of the Open Borders lobby.

The answer? Barack Obama.

And here’s the kicker. The President penned these thoughts in his autobiography, which came out in 2006. That’s an important date. It was the last full year before the American economy officially entered its worst recession since the 1930s. More specifically, it was the last full year before the economy entered a recession (and terrifying financial crisis) triggered by Washington’s strategy of buoying middle and working class Americans’ consumption by enabling them to borrow recklessly to compensate for incomes depressed largely by free trade and open immigration policies.

Eight years later, these incomes keep stagnating or shrinking in real terms. In fact, more than five years after the recovery officially began, polls repeatedly tell us that most Americans believe the last recession never ended. And goading most consumers to load up on more debt is no longer a viable option for juicing growth.

Yet President Obama is willing to risk more divisive political warfare in Washington with an executive amnesty that can only flood the U.S. labor market with ever greater numbers of mainly poorly educated and skilled newcomers – both through mass de facto legalization of illegal aliens already here, and through the open invitation this action will inevitably extend to perhaps of tens of millions of other foreigners counting on the same lenient treatment. And the bigger any executive amnesty will be, the louder the President’s party, and other avowed American progressives, apparently will cheer.

Since Jefferson’s day, Democrats have styled themselves “the party of the common man.” It seems it’s now time to add the clarification “someplace else.”

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