Politics & Power Quote by Spencer Bachus

Bachus’s line performs a neat bit of political engineering: it turns immigration into a roaming pressure system that won’t stay contained at the border, then frames that movement as an economic disturbance migrating inland. The phrase “cities halfway across America” is doing heavy lifting. It’s vague enough to let any listener supply their own threatened hometown, but specific enough to imply a new, abnormal spread - the border problem metastasizing into a national one.

The causal story is equally strategic. By starting with “the number of available jobs has decreased,” he positions immigrants as rational job-seekers rather than criminals, then uses “illegal immigrants” as the moral hinge. That label recodes an economic narrative into a law-and-order one without changing the underlying facts. “In search of employment” sounds almost sympathetic; paired with “illegal,” it becomes accusatory: understandable motives, unacceptable presence.

The subtext is competition. Bachus doesn’t argue that immigrants commit crimes or drain benefits; he suggests they follow work and therefore follow wages, implying that Americans everywhere are now in a zero-sum contest. It’s a way to nationalize an issue that often gets treated as regional, and to make enforcement feel urgent to voters who don’t live near a border crossing.

Context matters: this is a politician from Alabama speaking into an era where recession-era job anxiety and national debates over Arizona-style enforcement were reshaping immigration politics. The line is built to translate diffuse economic fear into a target with a route map.