In Pointless Mission, anti-Trump Protestors Head to DC

By Joe Guzzardi
January 18, 2017
 
Memo to the Donald Trump protestors: you’re wasting your time, and hurting your chances of developing a good relationship with a man who can help you enormously in the future – the United States President.
 
The individuals marching, waving placards and belly aching, including most prominently the 60 or so U.S. Representatives and Hollywood’s celebrities, are doing themselves no favor. It’s foolishness and futility calling the new president nasty names, and chanting that Trump is “not my president.” Many other outrageous, inflammatory statements have been made in recent days, including this doozy from Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD): “We are not going to allow Donald Trump to bury the Statue of Liberty.” The Statue of Liberty is often incorrectly referenced as a justification for continuing unsustainable immigration.
 
Former Washington Post reporter and once Pew Hispanic Center director Roberto Suro, currently a University of Southern Californian Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism professor, wrote that Lady Liberty has “nothing to do with immigration,” but instead represents the nation’s highest ideals. Suro concluded that, historically, economic imperatives dictated who immigrated to the U.S., a valid premise recent administrations have discarded.
 
Outside of Maryland, most Americans don’t care what Van Hollen or marginal celebrities like Chelsea Handler, who absurdly blames the Kardashian family for Trump’s election, think. Americans do, however, care about the economy and their jobs. For decades, and under Republican and Democratic White Houses, past presidents have promised to create jobs while they have instead actively sent them overseas, given work authorization to an average of one million legal immigrants a year, and ignored illegal alien workers who entered because of lax border security. The jig is up. Trump has promised to create immigration policies that help, not hurt, Americans.
 
Immigration creates more job competition for less-skilled, less-educated Americans than for more fortunate or privileged Americans like the many who work inside the D.C. beltway. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights found that illegal immigration depresses wages and employment, particularly for black men.
 
Speaking of African Americans, the media has made much of Georgia U.S. Rep. John Lewis and his refusal to attend Trump’s inauguration. While Lewis has legitimate credentials as a civil rights hero, his congressional voting record on legislation that would reduce immigration, and in the process help unemployed blacks, is dismal.
 
True civil rights heroes expressed skepticism about immigration, specifically because of its adverse effect on black workers. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his widow Coretta Scott King rejected higher immigration levels. MLK’s biographer, Clarence B. Jones, said that King would be “outraged” over the ongoing cheap labor flow.
 
And after Congress proposed to end employer sanctions against hiring illegal immigrants, a condition of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, Ms. King reacted strongly. In her letter to Congress, Ms. King expressed concern that advocates of repealing the sanction wanted “to introduce cheap labor into the U.S. workforce,” despite “the devastating impact the repeal would have on the economic condition of un- and semi-skilled workers — a disproportionate number of whom are African American and Hispanic.”
 
In the end, protestors black and white would benefit from opening their minds to what Trump is actually saying, and not their self-serving interpretation of his words. Like it or not, Trump will be the U.S. president until at least 2020, and possibly longer if the dissenters keep pressing their radical agenda.
 

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Joe Guzzardi is a Senior Writing Fellow with Californians for Population Stabilization. Contact him at [email protected] and on Twitter @joeguzzardi19