Obama on Immigration, Now and Then

Instead, he focused on the bill`s provisions for high-skilled immigration, claiming that they would “modernize the legal immigration system so that, alongside training American workers for the jobs of tomorrow, we`re also attracting the highly skilled entrepreneurs and engineers from around the world who will ultimately grow our economy.”

The president ended the speech with a warning about those who will “try to gin up fear and create division and spread the same old rumors and untruths that we`ve heard before.” Prescribing an antidote to such fear, he said, “I want you to think about your own parents and your own grandparents and your own great-grandparents, and all the men and women and children who came here.”

The president wasn`t always so dismissive of concerns about immigration, particularly of the unskilled and poorly educated who have made up many of the legal immigrants and most of the illegal immigrants who have come to the country in recent decades.

In his 2006 book The Audacity of Hope then-Sen. Obama declined to divide the issue along partisan and racial lines when he wrote this observation, which is just as relevant today as it was back then:

[T]here`s no denying that many blacks share the same anxieties as many whites about the wave of illegal immigration flooding our Southern border — a sense that what`s happening now is fundamentally different from what has gone on before. Not all these fears are irrational. The number of immigrants added to the labor force every year is of a magnitude not seen in this country for over a century. If this huge influx of mostly low-skill workers provides some benefits to the economy as a whole — especially by keeping our workforce young, in contrast to an increasingly geriatric Europe and Japan — it also threatens to depress further the wages of blue-collar Americans and put strains on an already overburdened safety net.

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