Who would be hurt by amnesty — also called “comprehensive immigration reform”? The answer is the most-vulnerable Americans: U.S.-born minorities, Americans with a high school education or less, including dropouts, legal immigrants, our teenagers trying to land that first rung on the career ladder, veterans and the disabled.

Before the recession, in the third quarter of 2007, U.S.-born American youth and people with lower levels of education were experiencing extra high unemployment — 11.6 percent for dropouts and 10.6 percent for those with only a high school diploma. “Comprehensive immigration reform,” or amnesty, would worsen those statistics significantly by adding untold numbers of job competitors to the U.S. labor pool. This policy runs directly counter to what we want, which is a tight labor market that leads to the development and maintenance of a strong middle class.

Legalizing the 7 or 8 million illegal aliens in the U.S. workforce and the 11 million total estimated unlawfully resident aliens — some say as many as 20-30 million — plus the myriad thousands of foreign workers brought in under the proposed “guest worker” program (lopped on top of the serveral existing guest worker visa programs) — would put them in head-to-head job competition with unimaginable numbers of foreign competitors with no way out. Don’t we, as American citizens, matter anymore?

Mike Gordon

Albert Lea