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By Taylor Armerding
CNHI News Service

Supposedly, it is all about jobs – American jobs.

One of the worst things a corporate executive (who, by the way, is already a rancid human being simply for the job title) can do is “ship jobs overseas.”

One of the worst things a member of Congress can do is to vote against President Obama’s $450 billion Stimulus Jr., which has been re-branded the “Jobs Bill,” because that is prima facie evidence that the congressperson doesn’t care about American jobs.

One of the worst things a corporation can do is “sit on” gazillions of dollars instead of spending it on creating American jobs.

The Occupy Wall Street party/protest, while it is picking up on Obama’s continued encouragement to resent the rich, probably wouldn’t be happening if unemployment weren’t a problem. True, many of the “occupiers” are students, who seem to be able to take or leave their classes as they please; or union members who seem to be able to get off work whenever they like, whether they’re employed or not. But if there were a few million more American jobs, people wouldn’t have so much time on their hands to focus on the crime of income inequality. They’d be going to work, not to a camp out.

All of which is more than a little ironic, because you don’t have to look all that deeply to see that it is not just corporations that put “profits over people,” as one of the slogans goes. It is the government as well.

This is more about money – tax money – than it is about American jobs.

It is more than a little ironic that the lefty occupiers railing about the lack of American jobs are the same people who are just fine with American jobs going to people living on American soil who are not Americans – who are here illegally. They are the same people who freak out if states decide to enforce immigration laws that the federal government refuses to enforce.

Reportedly there are about 12 million people living in the U.S. illegally. Let’s say only half of them have jobs. That’s six million jobs being “shipped” to people who are not Americans. How is that so different from opening a factory in India or China?

How would six million more American jobs look? It would cut the number of unemployed Americans from 14 million to 8 million, or 43 percent. The unemployment rate would fall below 6 percent. That would be enough to sweep Obama back into the White House, carrying the title of “employment miracle worker.”

Ah, but it’s not that foreigners are doing the jobs. It’s that they are not doing them here, where even if they avoid income taxes by working under the table, they still end up paying things like sales taxes. Not to mention that they are an increasingly potent political force, even though, you know (wink, wink) none of them vote.

In other words, it’s really not about American jobs.

If it were, Arizona would not be portrayed as a state full of knuckle-dragging bigots for its law that requires local police officers and sheriff’s deputies to inquire into people’s immigration status if there are reasonable grounds for believing that they are in the country illegally. There would not have been a federal injunction against it.

Same for Alabama, with a law that goes even further, requiring schools to publish the costs of educating illegal aliens, prohibiting landlords from knowingly renting to them, and barring illegals from enrolling in public colleges.

If it were, the Secure Communities program, which runs the fingerprints of arrestees booked into local jails against federal immigration data bases, would not be being gutted in response to lobbying from “immigration advocates” (notice they leave out the “illegal” part).

If it were, José Antonio Vargas, the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist turned illegal-alien activist would not be a hero for bragging about all the fraudulent IDs he had accumulated, even though he has obviously been holding jobs that otherwise would have gone to an American. After all, making false claims of citizenship is a felony offense. Document fraud is a felony offense. Supposedly.

If it were, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) director John Morton would not have expanded the authority of federal prosecutors to dismiss deportation cases against illegal aliens who don’t have “serious” criminal records,

Yes, we’ve all heard, endlessly, that illegal aliens are only doing the jobs that Americans refuse to do. But there is no proof of that. In an economy where unemployment remains stubbornly at 9.1 percent, a lot of Americans might find those jobs worth doing, if they were available.

If the government were serious about American jobs, one of the things it would be doing would be to insure that American jobs were available only to Americans.

It’s not. That is something the “occupy (insert your favorite city)” protesters ought to be thinking about as well.

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Taylor Armerding is an independent columnist. Contact him at t.armerding@verizon.net