Wednesday, at a meeting with Hispanic activists, President Obama vowed to keep pushing for what he calls “comprehensive immigration reform.” The “reform” Obama wants is one that will enable illegal immigrants to become legal residents, and that will place no meaningful obstacle in the way of others who want to join them.

Obama’s comments would be bad enough at a time of economic prosperity. They are little short of astonishing now, at a time when millions of American cannot find work. As VDARE.com‘s Ed Rubenstein has long documented, immigrants are displacing Americans in the workplace and driving down wages. And it turns out that just as the jobs our trade policy creates are largely overseas, the jobs our immigration policy creates are largely among immigrants. The Center for Immigration Studies recently reported that, despite all of Rick Perry’s bravado over job creation in Texas, 81% of all jobs created in Texas since 2007 were filled by immigrants, both legal and illegal. A government serious about reducing unemployment would be introducing legislation to curtail immigration, not expand it.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for all his faults, never suggested in the depths of the Depression that America needed to bring more foreigners into the country, to compete with Americans for the remaining jobs and to drive down the wages for those jobs. If he had, Roosevelt would have faced a firestorm of controversy, because Americans then thought of their country as a real country, where the economic interests of Americans came first. Today, most of our elites have come to think of America as little more than a shopping mall with a flag, and decades of globalist propaganda has convinced millions of Americans that they are right. So, at a time of deep and painful unemployment, both parties continue to pursue immigration and trade policies that destroy American jobs and drive down American wages, with relatively little controversy.