Hire Americans First!

September`s unemployment figures
were not only disappointing—they were grim. For the 21st
straight month, Americans lost jobs. Fifteen million are
out of work—5 million for more than six months.

But as
The Washington Times asserts,
"America`s
jobless crisis is much worse than the 9.8 percent
unemployment rate." [EDITORIAL:
Jobless rate hits
17 percent, October 6, 2009]

The U.S. economy

actually lost 785,000 jobs in September, which
should have pushed the 9.7 percent August unemployment
figure far higher than just 0.1 percent to 9.8 percent.

What kept the increase to 0.1
percent?

Over 800,000 people quit the labor
force in September. They packed it in. They stopped
looking for work. That is six times the number who quit
looking in August and five times the monthly average of
those who have given up the search for work in the year
since

Lehman Brothers died.

Adding to the near 15 million
unemployed those who have given up looking for work and
those who have taken

low-paying part-time jobs, the Times
estimates the
true employment rate at 17 percent. We used to call that
a depression.

Yet, with nearly 25 million
Americans unemployed, or no longer looking for work, or
in low-wage part-time jobs, 8.5 million U.S. jobs are
believed to be held by illegal aliens who broke into the
country or overstayed their visas.

Why is this not a matter of
national outrage?

For every job opening in the
country, there are six unemployed Americans. With this
surplus of idle labor and shortage of jobs, the

men who do the hiring are in the
catbird`s seat. They can cut wages in the knowledge
that desperate Americans will have to accept what is
offered.

Comes the rote response: Immigrants
and illegal aliens only take jobs Americans do not want
and will not do. But, last month, a front-page article
in USA Today
demolished that argument.

When a

2006 raid on six Swift & Co.

meatpacking plants rounded up 1,200 illegal aliens,
10 percent of the workforce, Swift was up and running at
full staff within months. How? Native-born Americans in
the hundreds came out and took the jobs.

Says Vanderbilt University
Professor

Carol Swain,
"Whenever there`s an immigration raid, you find white,
black and legal immigrant labor lining up to do these
jobs that Americans will supposedly not do." [Immigration
raids yield jobs for legal workers, By Alan
Gomez, USA TODAY, September 15, 2009]

At one of the Swift plants out
West, a workforce that had been 90 percent Hispanic,
legal and illegal, before the raids is now a mixture of
white Americans and Hispanic-Americans. Illegal aliens
lost the jobs, and American citizens got them.

A House of Raeford Farms plant in
North Carolina that was more than 80 percent Hispanic
before a federal investigation now has a workforce 70
percent African-American.

Illegal aliens gravitate to jobs in

construction, farming, fishing and forestry. Yet
native-born Americans outnumber immigrants three to one
in construction and two to one in farming, fishing and
forestry, according to

Steve Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies.
Illegals are thus taking jobs Americans not only will
do, but

Americans are doing.

The crackdown on businesses that
hire illegals that has only just begun is not only
enforcing federal law, but ending the exploitation of
illegal aliens and opening up jobs for Americans—black,
white, Asian and Hispanic alike.

Since the 1960s, there has been a
bitter battle—breaking down along ideological and
racial, ethnic and gender lines—over

affirmative action, quotas, preferential hiring,

promotions and admissions to

college and graduate schools, and

contract set-asides.

Conservatives have insisted that if
discrimination is wrong, it is not made right by making

white males the victims and women and minorities the
beneficiaries. Liberals argue that to advance economic
equality and ethnic diversity, and compensate for past
injustices, temporary discrimination against white males
is an unfortunate necessity.

White fireman like
Frank Ricci must be denied promotions they have won
in fair competition, as African-Americans were not among
those who passed the tests.

As votes on referenda in

California,
Washington and Michigan have shown, the American
people reject affirmative action and preferences in
hiring, promotions and admissions that are based on
race, ethnicity or gender.

Americans believe no discrimination
should mean no discrimination.

But there is a form of
discrimination, a form of preferential treatment, which
left and right, it would seem, may both support. It is
based not on color or creed, but on
nationality and citizenship.

If jobs are available in the United
States, Americans should go to the front of the line to
get them, ahead of illegal aliens. And as there are six
Americans out of work for every job opening, it is
time to call a

moratorium on immigration. Why are we bringing into
the United States over a million

legal immigrants a year to compete for jobs against
15 million to 25 million Americans who can`t find work
or full-time jobs to take care of their families?

Who is America for—if not for
Americans first?

COPYRIGHT

CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Patrick J. Buchanan
needs

no introduction to VDARE.COM readers;
his book State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, can be ordered from Amazon.com. His latest book
is Churchill,
Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its
Empire and the West Lost the World,
reviewed

here by

Paul Craig Roberts.