With President Obama’s much-rumored executive order granting amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants quite possibly on the horizon, Americans of all stars and stripes are beginning to speak out about how it will affect them. Case in point: Peter Kirsanow, a black member on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights warned President Obama in a letter this week that granting legal status to illegal immigrants would have “disastrous” effects on the black community.
“Any grant of legal status will serve as a magnet to prospective illegal immigrants and further depress employment opportunities and wages for African Americans. Given that the labor force participation rate is at an historic low, the unemployment rate is 6.2 percent, and there has been a precipitous decline in household wealth, the timing for such a grant of legal status could not be worse,” he wrote in the letter, which was provided to the Washington Examiner.
“Granting legal status to millions of people who are in the United States illegally will continue to depress the wages and employment opportunities of African American men and teenagers. It also will depress the wages and employment opportunities of African Americans going forward,” he added.
In closing, he also reminded the president how unfair amnesty would be for the people attempting to go through our immigration process legally, which he notes is “cumbersome, time-consuming, and expensive.”
“Most of the illegal immigrants who would benefit from your executive order have no skills, so they lose nothing by coming here illegally. Yet your proposed executive order is unlikely to make the visa process less cumbersome for legal immigrants or alleviate visa backlogs,” he said.
The entire letter can be read here.