Stung by Criticism He’s Abandoning Black Poor, Pres. Obama Ignores Easiest & Biggest Solution

Pres. Obama is under attack from some Black leaders for allowing Black poverty and unemployment to remain agonizingly high.

Blinded by the open-borders ideology that afflicts most of the nation’s political and media elite, Mr. Obama can’t see that he really could deflect the criticism and stick with his stated principles merely by being willing to reduce the importation of foreign workers.

President Barack Obama deflected criticism Monday that he has not been attentive enough to the African-American community, telling American Urban Radio Networks that he was unconcerned to see that kind of message coming from former supporters such as actor Danny Glover.

“Is there grumbling?” he asked rhetorically. “Of course, there’s grumbling, because we just went through the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.”

“We were some of the folks who were most affected by predatory lending. There’s a long history of us being the last hired and the first fired. As I said on health care, we’re the ones who are in the worst position to absorb companies deciding to drop their health care plans,” Obama said. “So, should people be satisfied? Absolutely not. But let’s take a look at what I’ve done.”

— “POTUS’s Outlook On Black America” by Carol E. Lee, Politico, 21DEC09

What he hasn’t done is reduce horrible joblessness among Black Americans whose U-3 unemployment rate is 50% higher than for the rest of Americans.

There are limits to what a President can do about such calamities. But one thing Mr. Obama does not have to do is allow his Administration to give away 125,000 new work permits each month to new foreign workers.

Halting all new work permits would not solve unemployment problems for Blacks or the rest of America, but it would mean moving  hundreds of thousands more jobless Americans into jobs over the next year.

Because foreign workers are disproportionately in competition with Black Americans, reducing immigration would disproportionately help Black Americans, something Mr. Obama said he didn’t think he could do.

Obama repeatedly used the pronoun “we” in discussing America’s black community, but insisted that he shouldn’t be expected to target policies exclusively to African-Americans.

“The only thing I cannot do is, by law I can’t pass laws that say I’m just helping black folks,” Obama said. “I’m the president of the entire United States. What I can do is make sure that I am passing laws that help all people, particularly those who are most vulnerable and most in need. That, in turn, is going to help lift up the African-American community.”

— Politico

The great thing about the immigration solution is that anything that helps fight the jobs disaster among Black citizens will also end up helping Americans of all races and ethnicities.

Pres. Obama has repeatedly said he will consider any reasonable idea to put more Americans back to work. His refusal to consider reducing immigration shows that he is not really serious.  It shows that he has been infected with radical open borders ideology that causes him to inflict great political harm on himself and on the people he claims to care so much about — all unemployed Americans, including the most victimized Black Americans.

But until more Black leaders specifically point out that Mr. Obama is refusing to use the immigration solution to the problem, it is unlikely that the President will move to truly respond to the pain in too many of the Black communities of this nation.

ROY BECK is Founder & CEO of NumbersUSA