Former Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum said the permanent political class’s embrace of illegal immigration and amnesty is reflective of their lack of care for American workers.
“There is no growth for opportunity for people in the middle of America because the labor markets are being flooded,” he said on Breitbart News Saturday. “The establishment of neither party has an interest in helping the American worker.”
Santorum stated that Democrats want illegal and legal immigration because they think it is “politically to their advantage,” and they want power.
“If all those people are voting Republican, they would not be for it,” he added.
Santorum said that on the Republican side, the Chamber of Commerce and big-business interests only “see labor as a commodity,” and their sole mindset is to “increase the supply of labor; then you have cheaper labor available to you.” He cited evidence that all the net increase in jobs have gone to foreign-born people since 2000, and both parties want more unchecked immigration to force native-born Americans to compete for the same jobs.
Emphasizing that Republicans need to focus more on manufacturing and energy jobs, Santorum said that the “real war on women is not having jobs, where only one person can work to support the family.”
A bigger and more fundamental problem, according to Santorum, is that Democrats have their activist base and donors “perfectly aligned,” while Republicans do not. He said, “The funders for the Republican Party” are in liberal cities, which Santorum called “little dark-blue areas.”
Santorum said these elite donors do not “want to get beat up in liberal newspapers and country clubs,” so “they change their views” and tell conservatives that they “need to tone down” their rhetoric and embrace more moderate policies. As a result, he argued, Republicans want to run away from social issues and values and not even challenge liberals–President Barack Obama included–on their extreme views on late-term abortion and infanticide. Democrats, on the other hand, gin up social issues even more when they know Republicans will not even contest them.
Santorum asserted that the Republican leadership has to understand what made conservatives successful in Ronald Reagan’s era. He said American workers would see their faces in the pictures Reagan painted. And Republicans stood up for family, faith, values, and the social issues about which average Americans care.
Santorum charged that the GOP does not have a message “for people who don’t have college degrees.” He said the party cannot just focus on people who own small businesses, which is less than ten percent of the population, but must find a message that appeals to more American workers. He also stressed that the GOP will never get out of its rut if it does not realign and find that broader blue-collar message.