Hard-left MSNBC host Ed Schulz is worried that Democrats will be hammered by voters if President Barack Obama uses his executive authority to distribute work-permits to millions of illegal immigrants.
“Hold the phone — this would be a mistake if the president were to do this,” Schultz told his audience July 29.
“Politically, there is no way Democrats can go home and campaign on across-the-board amnesty for millions of undocumented workers… it could be an electoral death knell for the Democrats,” he said.
White House officials have repeatedly said that Obama will soon use his executive authority to give millions of illegals work-permits that would allow them to compete for good jobs against hard-pressed American workers, including African-American and Latino youths.
But the White House may not be focused on the Senate’s elections this year. Instead, Obama may be using the pending amnesty to create a emotional wedge issue that helps the Democratic president candidate win Latino votes in 2016.
Since 2001, Obama has used a variety of management decisions to effectively exempt roughly 12 millions illegal immigrants from immigration law. In the 2012 election, he announced a plan that has provided work-permits to more than 500,000 younger illegal immigrants.
A series of recent surveys shows that Obama’s pro-immigrant policies are strongly backed by as little as 18 percent of Americans, while strong opposition rises to almost 60 percent. In fact, Obama’s immigration policies are so extreme that they’re even persuading more Americans to publicly denounce the current high rate of legal immigration.
Even Democratic politicians are speaking out against Obama’s plan, but so far, only those facing the voters in November.
“I don’t like government by executive order,” Arkansas Sen. Mark Pryor told The Hill. “I just don’t, generally, so I’d have to look and see specifically what he’s proposing and what he’s talking about,” he said.
“I think this is a congressional issue… I do support congressional action over executive action,” North Carolina Sen. Kay Hagen told The Hill.
“We want him to be careful not to go too far,” said Alaska Sen. Mark Begich told Politico. But Begich suggested he’s OK if the president distributes fewer than 8 million work-permits.
Other Senators are in hiding, or else equivocating. “I’m not going to speculate… Once I see what he is proposing, I will be in a better position to comment,” New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen told Politico.
Schultz, however, spoke freely.
“I think that handing out permits for [foreign] workers to compete against legal workers in America is a bad idea [and] I don’t think the American people would float with that at all,” he said.
“I do believe that if the president starts arbitrarily handing out work permits, it is going to create more problems than it is going to solve [and] it is going to give the right wing more ammunition against Democrats who, right now I believe, have the wind at their back as they go home in August,” he said.
“The Brits don’t just hand out work permits, the Germans don’t do it. I can tell you the Canadians don’t do it, the Japanese don’t do it… They don’t do that and I think the president would create a great deal of rift within the Democratic Party,” he continued.
“I don’t think that’s a political winner for the Democrats.”
