Obama asked stock question about immigration, gives stock, uneconomic reply (smears e-Verify; Orange County)

Earlier today, Barack Obama held a townhall in Orange County, CA and the full transcript, including the audience questions and his answers, is here. Maybe some time before the decade's over someone will get around to actually taking my advice and asking him a tough question, but that didn't happen in this case.

As soon as I found out about the event, I posted here and at FreeRepublic urging people to go get tickets in an attempt to have someone ask him this question, without luck. Whether the questioners were hand-picked or not (and, since one of them was a union official, all or some of them might have been), you never know unless you try. And, if no one's willing to go out and confront Obama or his supporters, then they're going to keep on doing what they've been doing.

Reviewing the other questions and answers is left as an exercise; here's the extra-super-tough immigration question:

I'd like to ask you what are you planning to do on immigration, the broken system that we have? And when do you plan on doing this?

Obama has probably been asked questions similar to that dozens of times, and his reply was the same as it's always been, including the same old canards:

...ultimately, here's what I believe: We are a nation of immigrants, number one.

Number two, we do have to have control of our borders (see secure the border). Number three, that people who have been here for a long time and put down roots here have to have some mechanism over time to get out of the shadows (see living in the shadows), because if they stay in the shadows, in the underground economy, then they are oftentimes pitted against American workers.

Since they can't join a union, they can't complain about minimum wages, et cetera, they end up being abused, and that depresses the wages of everybody, all Americans.

I'm no economist, but I'm not so sure about that. Converting millions of illegal aliens into legal workers would put them on the same job footing as U.S. citizens, greatly increasing the competition for jobs that illegal aliens previously could not have applied for and lowering wages in those fields. Newly-legalized illegal aliens wouldn't make that much more than they'd been doing before, meaning they wouldn't greatly increase economic activity. So, we'd have a similiar amount of economic activity as before, with millions more legal workers. And, that's supposed to help U.S. workers?

Too bad there was no one there to point that out to him.

As a bonus, he also race-baited:

We have to make sure that there's a verification system to find out whether somebody is legally able to work here or not. But we have to make sure that that verification system does not discriminate just because you've got a Hispanic last name or your last name is Obama.

For those not familiar with this topic, Obama is smearing the EVerify system, pretending that it's designed to flag those with Hispanic names when in fact it uses Social Security numbers.

Comparing Obama's remarks to highly similar remarks made by George W Bush is left as an exercise; they'd be a very close match.

UPDATE: There's video of his remarks here.

Wed, 03/18/2009 - 23:43 · Importance: 4