President Obama, The Washington Post reports, is currently deliberating whether or not he should grant temporary executive amnesty to as many as 8 million illegal immigrants. And according to Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) he must do so in the next 30 days if he "is going to determine his legacy with the immigrant community."
Gutierrez never explains why Obama must act on executive amnesty with in the next 30 days, and the Post never explains either. Neither does the Post explain exactly where Obama plans to get the money to pay for his new executive amnesty program.
Obama and his media allies will try and claim that Obama's new amnesty program will save the federal government law enforcement resources by allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials to focus their resources on new arrivals and violent criminals.
But the 2011 Morton Memo already accomplished that. ICE is already ignoring the vast majority of illegal immigrants who already live in the United States. Former-ICE acting director John Sandweg even told The Los Angeles Times, "If you are a run-of-the-mill immigrant here illegally, your odds of getting deported are close to zero - it's just highly unlikely to happen."
So if Obama has already set immigratlaw enforcement priorities so that most illegal immigrants face no threat from deportation, then why he did he create the DACA program and why he is looking to grant temporary amnesty to another 8 million illegal immigrants?
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Work permits. Amnesty advocates don't just want an end to deportations. They want all illegal immigrants to be given work permits too.
But granting work permits takes time, effort, and money. As The Washington Examiner's Byron York notes, the Department of Homeland Security grants about 1 million green cards every year. So when Obama offered work permits to up 2 million illegal immigrants through DACA, it was completely unsurprising that the normal immigration process ground to a halt. The New York Times reports:
Many thousands of Americans seeking green cards for foreign spouses or other immediate relatives have been separated from them for a year or more because of swelling bureaucratic delays at a federal immigration agency in recent months.
The long waits came when the agency, Citizenship and Immigration Services, shifted attention and resources to a program President Obama started in 2012 to give deportation deferrals to young undocumented immigrants, according to administration officials and official data. …
Until recently, an American could obtain a green card for a spouse, child or parent — probably the easiest document in the immigration system — in five months or less. But over the past year, waits for approvals of those resident visas stretched to 15 months, and more than 500,000 applications became stuck in the pipeline, playing havoc with international moves and children’s schools and keeping families apart.
Since Obama's new executive amnesty program also completely bypasses Congress, just as DACA did, DHS will be given no extra resources to administer Obama's new executive amnesty program.
So where will Obama get the money to give out work permits to 8 million new illegal immigrants?
The White House should be forced to answer this question. Millions of legal immigrants are waiting on an answer.
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