Here's something you don't see everyday -- someone on Fox lets one slip and accidentally tells the truth. I've heard a lot of arguments against allowing immigrants to become American citizens, but this is the first time I've heard someone say it would be a bad thing because they'd "no longer be willing to be exploited."
Fox Guest Decries Immigration Reform: Naturalized Immigrants Can't Be Exploited:
Fox News guest Michael Cutler argued immigration reform would hurt the economy and American workers because naturalized immigrants "will no longer be willing to be exploited."
On the July 15 edition of Fox News' Your World with Neil Cavuto, Stuart Varney hosted former Center for Immigration Studies fellow Michael Cutler to discuss immigration reform. Cutler argued against what he called "amnesty," saying that after naturalization and employment, immigrants "will no longer be willing to be exploited" and "legally cannot be discriminated against." Cutler went on to warn that, if immigration reform is passed, immigrants "will have the right to expect that they will be treated equally as Americans":
CUTLER: I had a front-row seat to the '86 amnesty. If you give lawful status to a bunch of illegal aliens who are being exploited, guess what, they will no longer be willing to be exploited. They will demand to be paid on the books, they will have the right to expect that they will be treated equally as Americans, but more importantly, they will have an equal standing in a labor pool that's already unable to find work. An alien who is naturalized or given employment authorization legally cannot be discriminated against, so they could get the same jobs that Americans desperately need to avoid losing their homes to foreclose.
Cutler has taken part in the Black American Leadership Alliance (BALA), which People for the American Way has described as "the latest incarnation of a shifting series of front groups for the anti-immigrant nativist group FAIR [Federation for American Immigration Reform] which has been trying for years to drive a wedge between African-Americans and Latinos." Read on...
The SPLC has much more on FAIR here and we've done our share of stories on the group as well.
As Media Matters noted in the conclusion to their post:
The right-wing media continues to promote inflammatory rhetoric by hosting members of anti-immigrant groups such as Cutler.
