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.” FAIR has been designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which noted:
FAIR leaders have ties to white supremacist groups and eugenicists and have made many racist statements. Its advertisements have been rejected because of racist content. FAIR's founder, John Tanton, has expressed his wish that America remain a majority-white population: a goal to be achieved, presumably, by limiting the number of nonwhites who enter the country.
Participants in the BALA march have a history of inflammatory anti-immigrant rhetoric, including Cutler himself who used the Boston Marathon bombing investigation to attack a program that would provide asylum for undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States before age 16.
The right-wing media continues to promote inflammatory rhetoric by hosting members of anti-immigrant groups such as Cutler.