Despite the fact the Center for Immigration Studies has proven itself to be less than unbiased with it’s ties to hate groups, that hasn’t stopped mainstream news sources from citing them and fanning the flames of anti-immigrant sentiment this time using the Obama stimulus program as it’s jumping off point.

CIS latest rallying cry is that 300,000 undocumented workers will “steal” jobs created under President Obama’s stimulus plan. See how they connect the dots:

CIS asserts that the stimulus bill will create two million new construction jobs based on a 2007 estimate by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) on how many “construction- oriented” jobs are directly created by each $1 billion of “federal highway expenditures. ” Yet “construction- oriented” jobs include technical and management positions for which undocumented immigrants, who tend to be less-skilled, are unlikely to qualify.

CIS then claims that 15% of these two million new construction jobs (roughly 300,000) will go to undocumented workers because an estimated 15% of construction workers were undocumented in 2005-before the economic collapse and before the huge job losses in construction.

See! So if undocumented workers were working in construction before, you know that they will now. Right? Never mind that the stats used are old stats and don’t take into account CIS’s own stats on how undocumented workers are leaving the country. So que? They are all going to run back over the border to take the new jobs?

This build of fear serves one purpose, to stir hate in tough economic times, to distract our vision from why the economy is failing and the why has nothing to do with the undocumented.

Via / Immigrant Solidarity Network