Neil Munro, the Daily Caller reporter who interrupted Obama’s DREAM Act Lite speech yesterday by yelling, “Why do you favor foreigners over American workers?” is himself a so-called foreigner working a job, here in America. This isn’t breaking news: He identifies as Irish-born on his Twitter bio, and he is currently living in D.C. on a green card. It is, however, somewhat notable and ironic when you consider the agenda behind what he maintains was “a conventional, obvious question.”
After all, Munro didn’t ask Obama about favoring illegal immigrants over unemployed American workers. Rather, he implied that Obama favors foreign workers over American ones, full stop. He and many of his right-wing colleagues are characterizing the president’s decision as some kind of employment guarantee for a group of foreign-born young people (many of whom have lived in this country longer than Munro), when all it does is grant those with a high-school degree or military service a two-year reprieve and the legal right to get a job. Whatever jobs they actually land are the result of either A) an employer, and not the government, favoring them over an American applicant, or the (more likely) B) an employer deciding they were the most qualified applicant. In both scenarios, it is the free market favoring foreigners, not Obama.
For example, we’re pretty sure that if you asked Munro how he got his current job, he wouldn’t say that the Daily Caller had favored a foreign reporter (him) over an equivalent American one; he’d point instead to the “few good articles” he wrote while at National Journal in the aughts, and to his particular brand of in-your-face journalism.
