President Obama did the right thing the wrong way last week. His decision to allow young adults illegally secreted into this country when they were young to stay without fear of deportation is a gross usurpation of Congressional authority.
Nevertheless, his action gives relief to about 1 million young men and women caught in the middle of America’s civil war over illegal immigration through no fault of their own.
But before all those teary-eyed liberal nodding heads drop to their knees to sing Hosannas to the Great Barack, they should take a closer look at how brazenly political it was.
Putting aside the argument about the action’s illegality, Obama could have done this two years ago when Congress last defeated the so-called DREAM Act. He didn’t.
He could have done this last year when he went to El Paso to give another of his “major” empty promises speeches advocating for immigration reform. He didn’t. He could have done it early this year before the Republican primary debates. He didn’t.
No, he waited until just a few months before the election when the election-year politics have the normally paralyzed Congress practically calcified (meaning it won’t be able to do anything about it before the election) and just days before he and his presumptive GOP opponent, Mitt Romney, were scheduled to give “major” immigration policy speeches before one of the most important Latino organizations in the country – the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials.
The move painted Romney into a box as his tortured “civil” speech to NALEAO this week demonstrated. He’s trying to appeal to the bloodlust in his party for “building the dang fence” and deporting millions of people in a redux of the 1950s Operation Wetback while at the same time trying to convince Latino voters that he’ll be nice about it. Face, meet palm.
But neither Obama nor Romney last week adequately addressed how they’re going to crack down on the other criminal in this it-takes-two-to-tango problem – American employers.
Americans are just as culpable as illegal immigrants for illegal immigration yet we overwhelmingly focus on the immigrant and not the hundreds of thousands of American citizens illegally employing them.
Just look at how many people we employ to stop illegal immigrants versus the number of people employed to investigate illegal employers. While you could fill every seat in the beleaguered Glendale Arena with Border Patrol officers, you could barely fill two Wackenhut buses with ICE investigators dedicated to busting employers.
Our immigration policy is like a three-year old who is caught taking a cookie from the cookie jar and then blames the cookie.
It’s time America grows up and tackles this problem sensibly and humanely.
And, in light of Obama’s new policy, you might as well throw in legally, too.
After all, two wrongs don’t make a right.