George Rebane
We’re back in illegal alien season again. The lamestream has turned up the volume on referring to them as ‘undocumented immigrants’. This invokes images of old photographs of European refugees in shabby clothes, holding their few suitcases and bundles, waiting patiently and hopefully in line for one last screening by US officials before being granted entry into America. This scene was repeated for decades at ports of entry like New York (Ellis Island and Brooklyn Navy Yard), Boston, and San Francisco. Not everyone made it, hence the worried looks on most faces; some were put back on ships and sent home.
In the latter part of the 19th century immigration in America became a formalized business as the country was filling up and US citizens became concerned about the economic, public health, and cultural impact of millions of foreigners coming into the country without any controls or even permission from those already here. America was one of the last countries to acknowledge that ‘immigration’ is a two-party transaction involving the petitioning immigrant and the welcoming country. At that time European and various Asian countries had long ago started controlling their borders and requiring some legal basis for aliens to live and work among them.
Today that kind of immigration has gone by the board to the extent that we have over 11 million illegal aliens living here. And during the last forty or so years, our country’s America Last contingent has not only redefined immigration to be a one-party affair, but its legality has pretty much been made optional. We are taught to view the illegal aliens as those in the old photographs, with one slight and not so important exception. Today’s illegals are not really illegal, they are viewed just like all the other immigrants who came here, save that somewhere along the line these ‘undocumented’ people lost or didn’t pick up some paperwork to make it all hunky dory.
Viewing them in that light, it is easy to sell gruberized Americans on the “executive action” fix that Obama has now announced and is in the process of implementing. The fix is to give amnesty to almost half the illegals in this country on the basis of gaming the Constitution abetted by soft-headed thinking. Birthright citizenship was meant to facilitate the franchise of succeeding generations of people who arrived here legally, not to enable the wholesale violation of our borders and immigration laws. But how can anyone deport the mama or papa of a young one who looks and speaks like a ‘regular America’ just because they don’t have some bureaucratic piece of paper?
With the problem posed this way, the gruberized voter never thinks to ask what impact this will have on all the other ‘huddled masses’ still waiting on their ‘teeming shores’ eagerly looking to see how we fix this mess. In this emotional and emoting environment the obvious solution will have a hard time surfacing – FIRST ‘seal’ the border and then take time to sort out the means to allow law-abiding families to stay together in America. No one is suggesting today that all 11M+ illegals be deported, it is too late for that. But of that cohort there probably are still several million who should be, and it is they who need to be discovered and duly processed. However, all of that is an exercise in futility if the border remains as porous as it has been.
And Obama’s pre-emptive executive action flaunts both logic and law in claiming to deal with our illegal alien problem. He knows that nothing can be done in the public forum without correctly characterizing the problem which is definitely not a matter of filling in some missing paperwork. However, calling illegal aliens ‘illegal aliens’ invites immediate attack from the Left. Doing so will get you labeled as a racist, being divisive, mean-spirited, un-American (‘after all, we are a land of immigrants’), jingoist, … .
Both in science and public policy, asking the right question or viewing the problem correctly is almost always the key to finding a solution. Team Obama is well aware of this, and they have correctly characterized the illegal alien problem to provide them their desired solution, a solution which has ramifications way beyond the heart-rending anecdotes in which today our ‘undocumented immigrants’ are wrapped and portrayed.
(The political realities and ramifications of fostering illegal entrants has been discussed elsewhere in these pages, for example here and here. Exit question: Will enough good-hearted Republicans and Democrats find a way to come together and reject this president’s challenging and unconstitutional overreach to forge a real solution to the 11+ million illegals now in the US, while eliminating such future threats to our society and sovereignty?)
[24nov14 update] The Obama regime continues to bamboozle the nation’s gruberian voters with an explanation that the president’s ‘executive action’ regarding illegal aliens is legal in that it is based on the constitutional provision of “prosecutorial discretion” granted the executive. The lamestream (especially NPR and PBS) continues to report that bald-faced partisan proposition which has no basis in law. Let me explain.
First, there is no constitutional provision for prosecutorial discretion. However, the courts have granted prosecutorial discretion (PD) to the Executive Branch and various jurisdictions across the land in recognition of such jurisdictions having to enforce existing laws with limited resources. Exercising PD allows both the executive and the judicial branches to devote such limited resources to sectors of crime and areas of law enforcement they consider to have most benefits to society. But the key idea here is the enforcement of ‘existing laws’.
A relevant example of this is, say, for the executive through its ICE agency not to enforce the deportation provision of existing immigration law because the wholesale hunting down, incarceration, processing, and deportation of 11M+ illegal aliens is not practical. Something short of that must be done under existing law, and PD allows the executive to explore and implement alternative means – the prime legal alternative is to get Congress to pass more suitable immigration laws (starting with sealing the border) that will then enable us to deal with the ‘fixed’ population of resident illegals.
PD has never been ruled to suffice as the basis for the executive or the judicial branches to write new laws, that power is reserved for Congress and the legislatures of the several states. And most certainly taking an unprecedented ‘executive action’ that seeks to implement no existing law on the books is both unconstitutional and illegal.
Allowing President Obama a fait accompli on his executive action to give amnesty to 5M illegal aliens based on a cynical appeal to prosecutorial discretion is the biggest end-run of Congress and Constitution in modern times. The administration and its Democrat echo chamber is bold enough to attempt this only because they believe that Professor Jonathan Gruber nailed his assessment of the American voter and further demonstrated its correctness in the passage and execution of Obamacare.
For more on this from both the Left and the Right, and an excellent piece from The Library of Law and Liberty, please visit the linked sites. Also see Congressman Tom McClintock’s statement on the floor of the House.
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