Leadership Quote by Dave Reichert

Numbers are doing the moral work here, quietly, and that is the tell. Reichert stacks two trends - immigrant growth and a “6 year low” jobless rate - to short-circuit a familiar panic: that newcomers automatically mean fewer jobs for everyone else. The sentence is built like a rebuttal brief. Immigrants up 42 percent; unemployment down. Case closed.

The specific intent is political triangulation. By foregrounding hard percentages (8 to 10.6) and a time box (2000-2005), he signals sobriety and managerial competence, not sentimentality. He’s speaking to an audience trained to treat immigration as an economic threat and offering them permission to relax without asking them to become multicultural idealists. It’s the rhetoric of reassurance: you can accept demographic change because your paycheck is still intact.

The subtext is about whose anxieties are worth addressing. Reichert doesn’t argue that immigrants deserve welcome on human grounds; he argues they can be tolerated because the labor market looks healthy. That framing is strategic, but it also reveals a transactional standard of belonging: immigrants are defended not as neighbors, but as variables in a prosperity chart.

Context matters: the early 2000s were years of post-9/11 securitization, heightened national immigration debates, and shifting regional economies. In that climate, a politician invoking state-level data is making a quiet federal critique: local reality is messier - and often less alarming - than national talking points. The quote works because it doesn’t moralize; it pressures opponents with their own preferred language: jobs, rates, outcomes.