Surprise: Obama Once Knew Law of Supply and Demand Applies to Immigration

In his 2006 book The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama anticipated the current Republican critique of his plan for amnesty and a drastically increased flow of low-skill immigration. The Daily Caller reports:

“[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,” then-Senator Obama wrote in his 2006 autobiography, “The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream.”

”Not all these fears are irrational,” he wrote.

“The number of immigrants added to the labor force every year is of a magnitude not seen in this country for over a century,” Obama noted. “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.”

Here is Obama from the audio book of Audacity. Warning: An ad will play before the video, and it may continue playing other videos unless paused.

If Obama will start acknowledging the law of supply and demand, maybe someone can convince him that raising the minimum wage hurts job opportunities for entry-level workers.

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