Just how serious is the Obama administration about its hands-off approach to illegal immigrants who do not commit crimes? Serious enough to turn it into non-legislative amnesty. We already know how the White House feels about Alabama and Arizona passing laws that refuse to legitimize non-criminal illegal immigrants. America is all about equality, so in the interest of fairness we should be deporting non-criminal illegals alongside their criminal counterparts.
The shift to a criminals-only approach has been in the works for a long time (see: Criminal Aliens: An Unaffordable Luxury). The Obama administration has turned the enforcement change into a victory, boasting in a White House blog post that:
Under the President’s direction, for the first time ever the Department of Homeland Security has prioritized the removal of people who have been convicted of crimes in the United States. And they have succeeded; in 2010 DHS removed 79,000 more people who had been convicted of a crime compared to 2008. [1]
The author of the blog entry, White House Director of Intergovernmental Affairs and former La Raza Vice President Cecilia Munoz, never mentioned how many of the removed aliens were in the country illegally. “Criminal aliens” includes both illegal and legal immigrants. According to DHS, 18.7% of those removed in 2010 were removed for an immigration offense, including alien smuggling. [2] Amnesty advocates have been lamenting a rise in deportations since Barack Obama took office, but total removals dropped from 2009 to 2010. [3]
Common sense tells us that criminal illegal immigrants have had at least one contact with law enforcement, or they would not be considered criminals. Why are they still here? It is a clever PR move to turn the government’s ongoing failure to remove all criminal aliens eligible for deportation into a win, and it is outrageous for the administration to insist that this has any bearing on the status of non-criminal illegals.
There have been rumors since last summer that the White House would come up with some sort of non-legislative approach to amnesty, and this week’s policy statement appears to confirm exactly that:
And they [Homeland Security and Department of Justice] will take steps to keep low-priority cases out of the deportation pipeline in the first place. They will be applying common sense guidelines to make these decisions, like a person’s ties and contributions to the community, their family relationships and military service record. In the end, this means more immigration enforcement pressure where it counts the most, and less where it doesn’t – that’s the smartest way to follow the law while we stay focused on working with the Congress to fix it. [4]
President Obama has been making stump speeches promoting the rebuilding of America’s infrastructure as a means to put construction workers back on the job. The administration claims that scant Homeland Security resources require us to focus on criminal immigrants, but refuses to put people back to work by hiring the personnel necessary to enforce our laws. Instead, the lack of manpower and resources is being used as the reason to pass de facto, non-legislative amnesty.
This is a disgraceful abuse of power to skirt the legislative process. This administration has given us many reasons to be ashamed of what our government has become, but this trumps them all.
1..The White House Blog. Immigration Update: Maximizing Public Safety and Better Focusing Resources. Cecilia Munoz. August 18, 2011. http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/08/18/immigration-update-maximizing-public-safety-and-better-focusing-resources, retrieved August 18, 2011.
2..Homeland Security. Annual Report. Immigration Enforcement Actions: 2010. June 2011. p. 4.
3..Ibid.
4..The White House Blog, op. cit.
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