Rep. Paul Ryan's "consistency" on immigration isn't helping jobless Americans

Wisconsin GOP Rep. Paul Ryan is quoted in The Hill as saying, “I’ve had a pretty consistent record on the (immigration) issue . . .”

Let's take a look at how this "rising star" in the "Party of Lincoln" has voted on immigration legislation. He has earned an overall "B" grade from NumbersUSA, a 1.4 - million member immigration restrictionist organization based in Arlington, VA, that advocates for reduced levels of legal immigration and enforcement of immigration laws that were created - Hello! - to protect American workers. (You remember those people, right?)

In the following categories, Ryan gets an A+: Reduce Illegal Jobs and Presence; Reduce Visa Lottery; A- for reducing illegal immigration at the borders; and only a C for challenging the status quo.

But here is the very troubling aspect of Ryan's "consistency": He has a D+ when it comes to "reducing amnesty enticements."

In case you haven't heard, Ryan openly supports Sen. Marco Rubio's amnesty proposal that unlike Obama's one-size-fits-all amnesty, would come in stages.

Here's a quick refresher course for those of you don't know what an amnesty is. To put it in simple street language, let's say that somebody steals your car and is later arrested and brought before a judge. The judge fines that person but allows him/her to keep your car. Yes, that person was "punished" for breaking the law but achieved his/her objective, right? Not a bad day's work, yes?

To put this in perspective with the upcoming amnesty "push" by the Obama administration to garner even more Hispanic votes, 7 million illegals would get to keep their jobs in transportation, construction, service and hospitality, and construction, while 20 million American are left to wonder when they will ever find full-time employment.

Let's get back to Ryan's "consistency." Any role that he plays in "reforming" an immigration policy that over the years has been systematically "broken" by the very same people in Congress who crafted it is worthless unless Ryan asks why the federal government would allow illegal aliens to keep their jobs when millions of Americans are out of work.

The likelihood of Ryan raising this question this year will be about as remote as it was when he was Mitt Romney's running mate. Oh, sure, both acknowledged the existence of 11 million illegal aliens residing here, but neither of them made the link between illegals holding jobs and out-of-work Americans. In fact, Ryan now has distanced himself from Romney's "hard-line" approach to dealing with illegal immigration, most especially the idea of "self-deportation," which begs the question: Does Ryan support the Legal Workforce Act (H.R. 2885) that makes E-Verify mandatory for all employers and would permit them to eventually remove all illegal workers from their payrolls so those jobs could be given to Americans?

Or does Ryan approve of the idea of making E-Verify mandatory only AFTER all illegals have been legalized?

What we at the Midwest Coalition to Reduce Immigration are asking is this: Who's side is Paul Ryan on? That of his unemployed constituents or those represented by illegal alien poster-boy Rep. Luis Gutierrez?

"Reaching across the aisle" is not a bad thing when trying to fashion legislation that would benefit the most people. But everything we've seen so far in the latest effort to "reform" our immigration system would, as past amnesties have, leave illegal aliens as the primary beneficiaries of a package that would again require that Americans be thrown under the bus.

And that, sadly, is exactly what we think Paul Ryan is preparing to do. These days, apparently, one must do whatever it takes to achieve "rising star" status, including back-stabbing the very people who put you in office in the first place.

To recap: Illegal aliens again would be the big winners of amnesty, regardless of who puts it together, followed by the Democratic Party, whose ranks will swell with its newest members. In the losers column, America's jobless and the Republican Party, which seems very comfortable with its new status of being on the outside looking in.