President Barack Obama may be days away from signing an
executive order that would allow up to 5 million illegal immigrants to stay in the country, but he was singing a different tune eight years ago as he prepared for his first presidential campaign.
The Daily Caller reports that Obama sounded a lot like those criticizing his plans now when he wrote his 2006 book, "The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream."
"[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," Obama wrote. "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," Obama said in the book.
"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," Obama wrote then.
That is the same argument currently being made by Republicans who oppose what they call his plan for "executive amnesty."
Obama also voiced the concerns of critics who fear an influx of immigrants who are not assimilating to U.S. culture.
"Native-born Americans suspect that it is they, and not the immigrant, who are being forced to adapt," Obama wrote. "And if I'm honest with myself, I must admit that I'm not entirely immune to such nativist sentiments. When I see Mexican flags waved at pro-immigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I'm forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration."
"Here's the danger of not knowing your boss' previous statements," Dana Perino, former press secretary for President George W. Bush and current Fox News host, said Monday on
"The Five."
With Capitol Hill switchboards lighting up in the offices of Democrats and Republicans from constituents demanding they stop Obama's executive action, the White House has a "monumental task" ahead of it without having stories about his past positions leak out, she said.
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