Santorum: Reduce Legal Immigration of Unskilled Workers by 25%

Republican presidential candidate and former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum argued in favor of reducing legal immigration of unskilled workers by 25% at Saturday’s Family Leadership Summit in Iowa

Santorum, while explaining his support for increasing the minimum wage by 50 cents an hour for three years, talked about wage stagnation. He said that you would need things like a minimum wage increase that could attract Democratic supports to get conservative accomplishments like abolishing the IRS, tax cuts, regulatory reform, and immigration reform.

Santorum then stated, “It’s also about legal immigration. Over the last 20 years, we’ve seen 35 million people come into this country legally and illegally combined. Over 10% of the population of this country has come in just over the last 20 years. We have more people living in this country were not born here than any time in history this country. And you can say, well, that’s a good or bad thing. That can can be good, it can be bad, but we have to look at what is in the best interest of American workers? What are we going do to get those salaries up? And what we’ve seen is the vast majority of the people coming into this country are unskilled workers competing to keep wages down. And what I’m proposing is, we need to hold the line and stop illegal immigration, but also reduce legal immigration of unskilled workers by 25% so we can bring wages up in this country and that’s really going to make a change.”

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