Watch Live: Obama’s Immigration Speech

Source: America's Voice

Watch Obama's immigration speech live at 3:30 EDT.

Speech has started now 3:21 EDT.

Read more: http://americasvoiceonline.org/blog/entry/watch_live_obamas_immigration_speech

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-obama-immigration-speech-20110510,0,2035186.story?track=rss


President Obama looks toward the U.S. border with Mexico during a visit to El Paso, Texas.

President Obama visited the southern border Tuesday to push for an overhaul of the immigration system, part of a renewed effort to shore up his standing among Latinos and paint Republicans as hostile to a minority group that is a growing force in U.S. politics.

In a speech at the Chamizal National Memorial, Obama also sought to link the challenge of illegal immigration with another major political concern: economic anxiety. He said immigration reform "is an economic imperative."

"One way to strengthen the middle class in America is to reform the immigration system so that there's no longer a massive underground economy that exploits a cheap source of labor while depressing wages for everybody else," he said.

In his appearance, Obama said his administration has made great strides in stopping immigrants from illegally crossing the southern border, even as Republican critics say he can do more. ... But he said that illegal immigration requires a "comprehensive" solution that would also provide a path to legal status for the 11 million people living illegally in the United States. He also made another pitch for the Dream Act, which failed in the lame-duck session of Congress in December.

The question is: is he willing to take on the outsourcing of jobs that is presently the alternative to utilizing immigrant labor? If all he does is increase the cost of labor while continuing to give tax breaks to corporations who fire their US workers and move their operations offshore to third world sweatshops, and continuing to invite unrestricted imports of goods produced in third world sweatshops, American consumers will simply cease to buy American products in favor of cheaper imported ones. And if no one buys the goods, those businesses won't last very long. And if the production jobs disappear, then all of the management, distribution, marketing, and sales jobs associated with those products disappear with them.