Barack Obama spoke at Bell Multicultural High School in Washington DC yesterday at a townhall conducted in Spanish for the Univision network. The host was anchor Jorge Ramos, a U.S. resident who's a Mexican citizen, a Mexican partisan, and a strong supporter of illegal immigration.

And, of course, Obama was mostly aligned with him. After admitting the major problems caused by massive immigration, Obama took the side of illegal aliens and continued to promise them that he'd push for reforms. He also compared legalizing illegal aliens to the black Civil Rights and Women's suffrage movements.

A full transcript is at [1]. If there are other points not mentioned below, please leave them in comments.

1. He admitted the problems caused by massive immigration:

[Education particularly high school dropout rates] is an issue that’s not just important for the Latino community here in the United States; this is an issue that is critical for the success of America generally, because we already have a situation where one out of five students are Latino in our schools, and when you look at those who are 10 years old or younger, it’s actually one in four. So what this means is, is that our workforce is going to be more diverse; it is going to be, to a large percentage, Latino. And if our young people are not getting the kind of education they need, we won’t succeed as a nation... Now, here’s what’s also important -- that eight out of 10 future jobs are going to require more than a high school education. They’re going to require some sort of higher education, whether it’s a community college, a four-year college, at the very least some job training and technical training -- all of which means nobody -- nobody -- can drop out. We can’t afford to have anybody here at Bell drop out. We can’t have anybody drop out anywhere in the country.

While there are possible good signs from Florida (link), what Obama would never, ever mention are things like the chart here showing high school dropout rates by country. The OECD average is 20%, and the U.S. is currently at 23.3%. The rate in Mexico is 56%. And, he'd certainly never mention the "controversial" IQ chart at:
en.wikipedia . org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations (remove the spaces). If we could trade the millions of illegal aliens from Latin America with millions of immigrants from Asian and European countries, would we be having these issues?

2. On an ironic note, he said: "I want you guys to be studying hard because it is critical for all American students to have language skills". This was at a forum conducted in Spanish on a Spanish-language network.

3. The video below has Obama saying the following to an illegal alien who promoted the anti-American DREAM Act:

We have redesigned our enforcement practices under the law to make sure that we’re focusing primarily on criminals, and so our deportation of criminals are up about 70 percent. Our deportation of non-criminals are down, and that’s because we want to focus our resources on those folks who are destructive to the community... And for a young person like that young woman that we just spoke to who’s going to school, doing all the right things, we want them to succeed.

4. The only possible bright spot is that he realize that he can't declare amnesty through an executive order or through Temporary Protected Status.

5. He took the side of illegal aliens against U.S. citizens for scarce education resources and at the same time compared legalizing illegal aliens to the Civil Rights and Women's Suffrage movements:

If you think of the history of the civil rights struggle, though even after Brown v. Board of Education, there were still struggles to ensure that ultimately everybody was treated with dignity and respect.

I think with respect to the DREAM Act, as I said, it was very close to passage. We didn’t get it passed this time, but I don't want young people to be giving up because if people in the past had given up, we probably wouldn’t have women’s rights, we wouldn’t have civil rights. So many changes that we’ve made had to do with young people being willing to struggle and fight to make sure that their voices are heard.

And one of the things just to reemphasize is if we’ve got talented young people here in the United States who are working hard, who aspire to college, in some cases want to serve in the military, want to serve our country, it makes no sense for us to send them away.

One of the strengths of America, compared to other countries, is that we’re always attracting new talent to our shores -- people who reinvigorate the American Dream. And that has to continue in this generation. And so they should know, these young people should know that they have a President who believes in them and will continue to fight for them and try to make sure that they have full opportunities in this country.

In some ways, even George W Bush wasn't that bad. On the other hand, Bush was enough of a quisling to pledge to push amnesty to the Mexican government, and Obama hasn't yet done that.

8/20/11 UPDATE: The video (Youtube ID 3eiZpN8gmxU, partial title: "Obama on Non-Criminal Illegal Aliens: We Don't") was removed. If anyone can find another copy, please leave a comment.

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[1] whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/03/28/
remarks-president-univision-town-hall