America's Self-Made Immigration Disaster
07/11/14
W. James Antle III
Domestic Politics, United States
"We have ceded our immigration policy to conditions abroad beyond our control."
Since October, at least 52,000 children have been taken into custody for entering the United States illegally. Most of them are from Central America and many of them were unaccompanied by adults.
This
has created yet another humanitarian crisis on a U.S. southern border
that has already seen far too many. It has also raised uncomfortable
questions for President Obama, who has tried to balance an image as a
reluctant but tough immigration enforcer—his administration touts, and
activists decry, what they describe as record deportations—with pleas
for leniency toward illegal immigrants.
In
Obama’s telling, those pleas have fallen on congressional Republicans’
deaf ears. This goes doubly, he says, for young people who are Americans
in every way except “on paper” and whose status could be regularized
through common sense reforms those same Republicans stubbornly refuse to
enact.
Failing
to break their hearts of stone, our president is left with no choice,
he tells us, but to fight for these young people, armed only with a pen
and a phone. As far back as August 2011, Homeland Security Secretary
Janet Napolitano acknowledged in a letter to twenty-two Democratic
senators that removing from the country illegal immigrants who had not
committed other crimes was not an “enforcement priority” of the Obama
administration.
This
was dubbed “prosecutorial discretion.” But as time went on, it became
clear through public pronouncements and internal DHS memos that a
broader administrative amnesty—particularly for younger people who would
have benefited from the stalled DREAM Act—was being contemplated.
“In
the absence of Comprehensive Immigration Reform, CIS can extend
benefits and/or protections to many individuals and groups by issuing
new guidance and regulations,” advised a memo to the director of United
States Citizen and Immigration Services, uncovered by Pro Publica (which is not exactly a conservative media outlet).
Read full articlehttp://nationalinterest.org/feature/americas-self-made-immigration-disaster-10854
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