America's Self-Made Immigration Disaster

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