Politics & Power Quote by Dana Rohrabacher

A neat bit of populist jujitsu is happening here: the target isn’t just undocumented workers, but employers who get to play villain and victim at the same time. Rohrabacher frames “illegal labor” as a tool of wage suppression, turning immigration enforcement into a labor-market moral crusade. The line “falsely claim” is the dagger. It casts business leaders as cynics manufacturing a narrative (“Americans don’t want to do the jobs”) to launder a cheaper workforce into respectability.

The subtext is triangulation. He’s speaking to blue-collar voters who feel squeezed and dismissed, offering them a flattering premise: you’re not lazy, you’re being undercut. At the same time, he avoids the more openly nativist register by centering the critique on corporate behavior. In rhetorical terms, it’s a way to sound pro-worker without sounding anti-business in principle; the villain is not capitalism, it’s cheating. “Should no longer be allowed” signals a readiness for state intervention, but only against a specific kind of market actor: the employer who breaks the rules and rigs the wage floor.

Context matters: this argument has long been a conservative bridge between restrictionism and working-class economics, especially in periods when immigration debates spike and wages stagnate. It also strategically shifts attention away from consumer demand for low-cost services and toward enforcement at the hiring point, where political accountability can be pinned to someone with a logo and a payroll.