By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, November 27, 2014
There is a humane, transparent, truthful — and
constitutional — way to address illegal immigration. Unfortunately, President
Obama’s unilateral plan to exempt millions of residents from federal
immigration law is none of those things.
Obama said he had to move now because of a dawdling
Congress. He forgot to mention that there were Democratic majorities in
Congress in 2009 and 2010, yet he did nothing, in fear of punishment at the
polls.
Nor did Obama push amnesty in 2011 or 2012, afraid of
hurting his own re-election chances.
Worries over sabotaging Democratic chances in the 2014
midterms explain his inaction from 2012 until now. He certainly wouldn’t have
waited until 2015 to act, because Republicans will then control Congress.
Given that he has no more elections and can claim no
lasting achievements, Obama now sees amnesty as his last desperate chance at
establishing some sort of legacy.
Obama cited empathy for undocumented immigrants. But he
expressed no such worry about the hundreds of thousands of applicants who wait
for years in line rather than simply illegally cross the border.
Any would-be immigrant would have been far wiser to have
broken rather than abided by federal laws. Citizens who knowingly offer false
information on federal affidavits or provide false Social Security numbers
would not receive the sort of amnesties likely to be given to undocumented
immigrants.
Obama has downplayed Americans’ worries about social
costs and competition for jobs, but studies show illegal immigration has
depressed the wages of entry-level American workers while making social
services costly for states and burdensome for U.S. citizens.
Obama says he has the legal authority to rewrite immigration
law without working with Congress. Yet on more than twenty occasions when it
was politically inexpedient to grant amnesties, Obama insisted that he would
not — or that such a move was prohibited by the Constitution.
Obama not long ago warned us about the dangers of
granting amnesties by fiat. “The problem is that I’m the president of the
United States, I’m not the emperor of the United States,” he said. On another
occasion, he lamented, “Believe me, the idea of doing things on my own is very
tempting. . . . But that’s not how our system works. That’s not how our
democracy functions. That’s not how our Constitution is written.”
By setting aside settled immigration policy and ignoring
statutes he finds inconvenient, Obama has set a new precedent that a president
can arbitrarily declare what is valid and what is not valid immigration law.
Should his successors make up their own versions of any federal statutes they
choose, in areas ranging from abortion and gun control to drug enforcement and
environmental protection?
Obama claims he has the legal authority to grant amnesty
because Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush did it. But again, Obama
predictably misleads. Both of those presidents worked with Congress to ensure
that new immigration legislation would not split apart families. The amnesties
they granted were in accordance with the Immigration Reform and Control Act of
1986 and had only a fraction of the impact that Obama’s executive order would
have.
More importantly, even those congressionally sanctioned
and narrow amnesties were largely seen as failures. Past non-enforcement of
immigration law helped lead to the explosion in illegal immigration of recent
years.
Obama says Congress is stalling. But his characterization
of congressional inaction simply means that the Congress does not wish to pass
Obama’s version of immigration reform. In 2015, if the Republican Congress
submits an immigration bill to Obama, he will likely veto it. Would he then
term his own opposition “obstructionism”?
Obama has claimed that under his administration,
deportations have increased. That, too, is untrue.
The fraudulent statistics used to make this claim
redefine how deportation is measured — in much the same manner that other
federal statistics like unemployment rates and GDP growth were recalibrated for
partisan purposes. Under Obama, Mexican citizens who are apprehended after
crossing the border and returned to Mexico are classified as having been
deported.
Obama carefully omitted key details about qualifications
for amnesty. He cited a criminal background check, but does that mean
immigrants convicted of crimes such as driving under the influence or other
serious misdemeanors will be deported? What about filing false federal
affidavits or Social Security numbers — crimes that are usually felonies?
The president suggested that all undocumented immigrants
are here to work. Most are. But recent statistics still suggest that almost 40
percent of undocumented immigrants rely on some sort of state or federal
welfare assistance.
Obama will immediately reward millions of undocumented
immigrants with exemption from immigration law. But does that mean those who do
not qualify — those who committed felonies or serious misdemeanors, who have no
sustained record of work, or who have been in the United States for only a year
or two — will now face deportation that is as rapidly applied as amnesty?
Because Obama has serially misled the American people on
key issues such as Obamacare, the Benghazi attacks, and his own prior
constitutional inability to grant amnesty, there is no reason to believe him on
the details of his new immigration move. Assume instead that Obama sees his
executive order simply as a first step in a continual unilateral effort to
dismantle immigration law that he finds incompatible with his own larger
agenda.
For Obama, federal law is inconvenient — and therefore
irrelevant.
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