Immigration Snake Oil

Have you read the immigration bill being put forward by the Gang of Eight? Neither have I. One person who has read the bill is J. Christian Adams. He gives seven reasons why the bill should be defeated.

1. Legalization and Border Insecurity

The bill provides for legalization in six months as soon as the secretary of Department of Homeland Security does another worthless Washington, D.C., review of border security. Almost anyone who has been in the United States illegally since as recently as December 2011 is eligible to legalize. This exposes the public- relations lie of rewarding only those who have put down “roots” in the United States.

Even the last mass amnesty in 1986 required applicants to have been in the United States almost five years.

2. A False Sense of Security

Naturally, DHS has already failed to implement current biometric requirements. The bill builds on DHS failures and does not require the entry-exit system to be biometric.

Once the secretary of DHS says these easy triggers have been “substantially” met, the bill’s legalization opens a path to citizenship for illegals. With that comes massive government benefits, including food stamps, Social Security, Obamacare, medicare, and other entitlement programs for aliens and their dependents.

3. Undermining Immigration Enforcement

When it comes to interfering with front-line immigration officers, the bill goes from bad to worse. It ties the hands of law enforcement and prevents them from doing their jobs. It infers that the men in uniform aren’t to be trusted. That’s why the federal immigration officers’ union strongly opposes it.

4. Helping Criminal Aliens

Current immigration laws are strict toward aliens who commit crimes in the United States. The bill changes that by making it easier for criminal aliens to get bond and permanently remain in the United States. For example, it gives immigration judges and DHS broad new powers to waive actions which result in automatic ejection from the United States, such as for drug crimes, firearms offenses, domestic violence, stalking, marriage fraud, false claims to citizenship, and crimes involving moral turpitude (page 328).

The bill also makes it easier for criminal aliens to be released back onto the streets and to disappear without a trace. For example, it requires aliens to receive immediate bond hearings within 7 days or be released, even if DHS is still collecting their criminal records (page 653). For any aliens who are detained, even aggravated felons, immigration judges must hold bond hearings every 90 days even if nothing has changed to warrant another bond hearing (page 654).

The overriding theme of the bill is that what it takes with the one hand it gives with the other. The bill pretends to be tough on domestic violence and criminal gangs by allowing them to be deported for these crimes. Yet to be deported for domestic violence the alien must have served at least one year in jail (page 635).

5. Expanding Visas

Proponents falsely claim the bill would end chain immigration by stopping the grant of visas to extended family members. But like the phony border security we hear about, this is also all about the talking points.

The bill moves very slowly away from family entitlement visas and protects everyone in the queue now or who applies 18 months into the future so the current backlogs will multiply. It will be many, many years after enactment before family entitlement visas are reduced at all.

Businesses have also been hoodwinked by the politicians. The employment visas the bill creates will mostly be unworkable for average businesses because of the mandates and exceptions that were put in to satisfy leftists and unions. The agricultural visas will benefit connected agribusiness special interests, not small farms.

The bill is larded with special-interest provisions, such as one for cruise ship repairmen and another to give out free phones at the border. The bill also creates a special speedy path to citizenship for agricultural workers. Remember that one of the 1993 World Trade Center terrorists was a taxi driver who legalized his status through the agricultural program in the 1986 amnesty.

6. Expanding Asylum

The terrorists who committed the Boston bombings got permanent legal status in the United States from their parents being granted asylum after fleeing Dagestan, Russia. Even after gaining this permanent legal status, they simply moved back to Russia voluntarily to do heaven knows what.

The bill would make it easier for aliens to get asylum. It eliminates the one-year window to ask for asylum (page 551). Someone should know they are refugees on the first day they arrive in the United States. The bill even allows aliens denied refugee status in the past to reopen it and start all over (page 552). It also empowers the president to grant refugee status to entire classes of immigrants, not just individuals.

7. Creating Endless Waivers, Exceptions, and Exclusions

The 844-page bill has over 400 waivers, exceptions, and exclusions. It gives enormous power to the secretary of DHS to waive almost any requirements that the bill imposes.

Adams concludes,

Also, the bill guts most state laws that prohibit the employment of illegal aliens. The anti-Arizona crowd stuck that into the bill.

The bill says an alien can be deported for willfully refusing to comply with law enforcement and security background checks. But then it gives DHS the power to waive these checks, and allows DHS to do so not only for individual aliens but for broad classes of aliens (page 634).

Over and over and over the bill provides tough talking points – border security, background checks, and more. But hidden next to those talking points are off-switches that bureaucrats can flip to satisfy the leftist open-borders constituencies who wrote the bill.

The bill makes America less safe, not more. It does nothing to fix our immigration system. It makes it much worse.