A new video was unearthed of then plain old Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) railing against anchor babies in 1993, introducing a bill to end birthright citizenship for children of illegals.
Transcript:
If making it easy to be an illegal alien isn’t enough, how about offering a reward for being an illegal immigrant. No sane country would do that. Right? Guess again. If you break our laws by entering this country without permission and give birth to a child, we reward that child with U.S. citizenship and guarantee a full access to all public and social services this society provides, and that’s a lot of services.
Is it any wonder that two thirds of the babies born at taxpayer expense in this country’s county-run hospitals in Los Angeles are born to illegal alien mothers?
Since this news has come to light, Reid apologists have rushed forward to say Reid said he was sorry from the Senate floor back in 2006, a full 13 years after offering the bill.
“I do want to tell… my friends in the Senate, that is a low point of my legislative career, the low point of my governmental career,” Reid said from the Senate floor.
Reid also said the anchor baby legislation was introduced at the request of a “group of people [who] came and talked to us and convinced us that the thing to do would be to close the borders between Mexico and the United States.”
What “group of people” was so virulently opposed to illegal immigration in 1993 and had such influence on the senator from Nevada? Labor unions.
The tide didn’t turn until 2005. The battle was raging within the ranks of the labor unions over illegal immigration. The AFL-CIO strongly opposed temporary guest worker permits citing wage depression as a primary reason. The SEIU supported expanding worker permits and split from the AFL-CIO in 2005.
In January, 2006, the SEIU announced its support for expanded guest worker programs.
The Washington Post reported on the split and the entrenched union positions:
The AFL-CIO, a federation of 54 unions, calls guest-worker programs exploitative and wants immigrants who enter the country to do so as permanent residents, not temporary workers.
Eliseo Medina, executive vice president of SEIU, which broke from the AFL-CIO in 2005 over strategic differences, said his union recognizes "the reality of the marketplace and the economy." A guest-worker program could give immigrant workers the right to unionize and eventually petition for citizenship, he said.
There’s no big mystery about the timing of Reid’s flip-flop on illegal immigration in 2006. Amnesty became the Big Labor position. And when the unions tell Harry Reid to jump… well, you know the rest.
