Obama Sees that Immigration is to Blame for Lack of Jobs in Recession

By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

Overpopulation is, according to this humble observer, the source of so many U.S. problems. Most of them are overlooked or ignored by politicians and by the media. From my perspective, I've blogged ad nauseam about U.S. population growth's negative impact on our environment, on suburban sprawl, on the underground economy, on pay scales for low income workers and so on.

But over the weekend, none other than President Obama told an interviewer at CNN he blames population growth for the jobless recovery:

Obama told CNN he believes the economy will be creating jobs through the end of 2009—but not enough to keep pace with population growth nor to make up for steep losses in employment that occurred earlier this year.

"I think we'll be adding jobs, but you need 150,000 additional jobs each month just to keep pace with a growing population," the president said. "So if we're only adding 50,000 jobs, that's a great reversal from losing 700,000 jobs [a month] early this year—but, you know, it means that we've still got a ways to go."

Finally we have a president of the United States blaming immigration (the vast majority of population growth here in the United States is due to immigrants themselves and the fact they tend to have more children than native-born Americans) for something major: a lack of jobs.

Conservative proponents of mass immigration used to say that immigrant consumers created more jobs (by spending lots of money) than they held. But in this recession that theory has gone out the window and has become patently untrue. You heard it from the president—the economy can't possibly create enough jobs to keep pace with the rate of population growth, and that's why many Americans are jobless and will remain so in the near term.

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