Demagogue

This past weekend, Senator Rick “Two Terms Is Enough” Santorum (R-Pa.) launched the first television ads of his re-election campaign. The subject of those ads? The Associated Press explains:

… [The Santorum TV ad] argues he's been tough in cracking down on illegal immigration. In the 30-second ad, the senator said his father and grandfather immigrated to western Pennsylvania from Italy, and his grandfather worked in coal mines for 30 years.

“Unfortunately today, some enter our country with more sinister intentions,” Santorum said. "That's why I fought so hard to add thousands of new guards, to beef up our borders and for critical high-tech surveillance.”

Yet Santorum's ad doesn't mention his support for President Bush’s proposed guest worker program. Such a program, of course, would enable thousands of foreign workers to enter the country legally, then stay illegally.

Back in May, Santorum’s office issued this news release stating that he would support an immigration bill that “establishes a guest worker program as strictly temporary, never permanent ...” Santorum’s use of the term strictly temporary is a tip-off that even he knows that guest worker programs are not temporary.

Michael Teitelbaum of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation recently offered this assessment of guest worker programs:

“I think the general conclusion of everybody who has studied guest or temporary worker programs is that they are never as advertised. They are never temporary programs, nor are the workers temporary.”

Vernon Briggs, a labor economist at Cornell University labor economist, calls guest worker programs “a disaster” because they “encourage [foreign workers] to keep coming.”

In other words, Santorum brags about fighting illegal immigration even though he supports a huge loophole that would bring thousands of foreign workers into the country. And I suspect the only reason Santorum supports a guest worker provision is because his major donors in corporate America want access to a cheap labor pool.