Coming soon: the global job fair

An unpopular truth

[Reprinted from Issues & Views September 20, 2004]

Scott McConnell, editor of The American Conservative magazine, covered events associated with the August Republican Convention in New York City. In the September 27 edition, he offers his impressions of the August 29 march, protesters and counter-protesters, social events, contentious confrontations and harmonious face-offs. Below he tells of one of the receptions he attended:

Monday evening: Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform reception at the New York Yacht Club. Grover is the Right's happy warrior, a man of good humor and unwavering principle and, in his persistent readiness to include Muslim immigrants in his low-tax "leave me alone" big tent, a Beltway figure of unusual courage.

I spoke to Phyllis Schlafly, author of the Goldwater campaign bestseller A Choice Not an Echo and some 19 other books, the gold standard for American social conservatives. Phyllis had spent a good part of her weekend battling the Bushies on the platform, specifically the White House's immigrant plank. Bush essentially supports an amnesty for illegal aliens, though he doesn't dare call it that, and he did get through a guest-worker program that would allow illegal aliens "to come out of the shadows."

In the platform negotiations, the White House pushed for full support of the president's January proposal, which included the provision that anyone, anywhere in the world with a job offer from an American employer could get a visa and be hired -- provided an American couldn't be found at the posted wage. In other words, let's see if poor Mexican workers can be underbid for labor by even poorer Bangladeshis.

Phyllis said to me, "Can you imagine how that must feel to an American who has just lost his job?" In the end, the global job fair didn't make it into the platform -- but not for lack of White House effort.

Copyright © 2008 Issues & Views