Talk radio host Laura Ingraham is so determined to keep the GOP from doubling the inflow of guest workers and immigrants that she pulled an overflow crowd of more than 600 people to a June 3 Richmond rally against the powerful Republican Majority Leader, Rep. Eric Cantor.
Cantor is backing businesses’ efforts to import more foreign workers, even though the current immigration rate provides two new immigrants or guest workers for every four Americans who turn 18.
That’s already enough to wreck the middle class and change America into a corrupt plutocracy, she told The Daily Caller.
“Do you want to live in a country where essentially a few dozen families make all the big decisions or one where the working people have a chance of a better life and the founding principles are respected and honored?” she said in a June 3 interview with TheDC.
She headlined the rally in Cantor’s district because she’s backing his primary rival, Dave Brat, who was the head of a business and economic department at a Virginia college.
“I want Dave Brat to win, but regardless of the outcome, I’m going to fight every day for these issues and principles, and for the survival of the country,” she said. Mass immigration is “completely harmful to American workers and legal immigrants.”
She’s also been using her radio program to showcase critics of mass immigration, and to push GOP candidates to sign an immigration pledge drafted by the Federation for American Immigration Reform.
That pledge — which only promises opposition to immigration increases, not support for decreases — has drawn sharp rebukes from some GOP advocates, including Grover Norquist. “It’s not a unifier for Republicans that the tax pledge is — it’ll divide people,” said Norquist, who is an advocate for increased immigration and heads the Americans for Tax Reform group
But many GOP candidates have signed that pledge, including all the GOP candidates in Georgia’s Senate primary.
Ingraham is battling against the many groups that want more foreign labor — the Chamber of Commerce, the farm lobby, the progressive leadership of the Democratic party, the Democrats’ ethnic lobbies, and the professionals in the media.
Those groups are backing the Senate’s June 2013 immigration bill, which would import four guest workers or immigrants for every four Americans who turn 18 during the next decade. That inflow, according to the Congressional Budget Office will stall salaries and boost investors’ already record share of the nation’s annual income.
She helped boost opposition to Rep. Renee Ellmers in North Carolina, who supports more immigration, and is now gunning for Cantor because he has periodically talked up major portions of the Senate’s immigration rewrite.
On June 2, for example, Cantor told a supportive radio host in Virginia that he had used his position as majority leader to block the Senate’s immigration bill. But he also said that the foreign-born children of illegal immigrants should be allowed to become citizens.
“There is biblical root and tradition in this country is that we don’t hold children liable for their parents’ acts… they should be allowed to serve in our military and allowed to become part of this country as a citizen,” Cantor stated.
Cantor is also pushing to boost the inflow of university-trained guest workers who could be hired by U.S. companies in place of U.S. graduates.
Even though the public is strongly opposed to immigration increases, Cantor won’t even complain while Obama releases new illegals into the country, and allows roughly 60,000 foreign criminals back into the country after they’ve served their time in jail, according to Ingraham.
“Eric Cantor and [House Speaker] John Boehner…[have] not shut down the immigration issue by using it against the Democrats,” she said. “They should be using this issue to build the GOP among blacks and Latinos,” she said.
The GOP establishment is becoming the party of crony capitalists and the very wealthy, she said.
Unless it changes, the “honest left and conservatives should unite to create a populist party similar to the United Kingdom Independence party,” she said.
In the United Kingdom’s elections last month for county and European legislative seats, UKIP caused a political earthquake by out-polling the long established left-wing and right-wing parties.
In the United States, “there are a lot of people on the left who are coming to the view that the hope of increased wages in the country will not be met if you keep having an influx of [foreign] workers,” she said.
Given the unpopularity of the business-backed push for more foreign workers, Cantor’s “silence is extremely telling — he’s Obama’s choice for the the seventh district of Virginia,” she said.
Ingraham’s support for American workers — whether they are male or female, white, black, brown, native-born or immigrant — makes her almost alone among professional journalists.
Most journalists covering the immigration beat support the arrival of more blue-collar workers for labor-intensive services, such as home-cleaning, dry cleaning, landscaping and the many restaurants that service the professional class. Few reporters describe the push by business groups to hire more foreign professionals, even though many of their fellow professionals’ salaries would be dragged down by a greater supply of foreign graduates.
“The media simply will not report the facts,” she said. Mass immigration increases violent crime and gang activity, and lower wages, but most reporters “are just being completely dishonest about it.”
Whatever her contribution, there’s less and less public support for any bill that would bring in more foreign workers.
Since last year, public opinion — and especially opinion among GOP-friendly voters — has moved steadily against the immigration increases sought by progressives and the Chamber.
A new June 1 Washington Post poll of 1,002 adults showed that 35 percent of adults, 59 percent of conservatives, and 27 percent of “moderate” adults “strongly” oppose Obama’s immigration policies, despite the almost-uniformly complimentary press coverage.
In contrast, only 17 percent of adults, 15 percent of moderates, and 11 percent of conservatives strongly support his rarely explained policies, the poll reported.
That’s significantly lower than in February 2013, when D.C. elites were united in declaring that Republicans have to endorse an amnesty or else see perpetual reruns of Mitt Romney’s 2012 defeat.
A CNN poll taken over the same period shows that 61 percent of adults oppose Obama’s immigration policies, while only 35 percent support them. Back in April 2013, a mere 50 percent of adults opposed his policies.
Obama’s immigration-boosting policies are opposed by 66 percent of adults without college degrees, 67 percent of political independents, 58 percent of adults in the mid-west, 63 percent of people who earn less than $50,000 a year, 54 percent of younger voters, 55 percent of women, 45 percent of non-whites, and 57 percent of adults in suburbia, according to the CNN poll.
But his policies are supported by 28 percent of independents, 39 percent of women, 38 percent of college grads, and 40 percent of urban adults, said the poll.