Senate Budget Committee ranking member Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) responded to President Barack Obama’s announcement that he will seek executive options to aid illegal aliens by saying the president should care more about whether he is hurting Americans.
“It is astonishing that the President would order an ‘enforcement review’ not for the purposes of repairing enforcement but weakening it further,” Sessions said in a statement provided exclusively to Breitbart News.
Sessions said that the “lawlessness” of the Obama administration on immigration–specifically the refusal of the administration to enforce the nation’s interior immigration laws–hurts the wages and employment opportunities for American workers. A recent report from the Center for Immigration Studies shows that there are tens of millions of working age Americans not working right now, a statistic that has remained stagnant above 50 million since 2007. Bloomberg News also reported that unemployment in the illegal alien community may be lower than unemployment in America’s black community.
“This lawlessness is a large factor in the decline of wages for Americans, immigrant and native-born, alike,” Sessions said. “President Obama should demonstrate more concern for struggling American workers of all backgrounds. Indeed, in addition to decimating current immigration law, he is pushing to double the number of foreign guest workers who companies bring in to take jobs.”
The focus of the president’s executive authority review, according to the White House’s Thursday evening press release, is to conduct immigration enforcement more “humanely.” Obama “asked Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson to do an inventory of the Department’s current practices to see how it can conduct enforcement more humanely within the confines of the law” after meeting with three members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC), who expressed concern over deportations of illegal aliens.
According to BuzzFeed, CHC members are so pleased with Obama’s new executive authority promises that they are abandoning plans to introduce a congressional resolution calling for similar action to Obama’s announcement.
Amnesty advocates have portrayed the Obama administration as the most aggressive administration in recent history in deporting illegal aliens, but Sen. Sessions points to internal statistics from the agencies handling deportations to argue that is not actually the case.
“According to ICE’s own published statistics, the vast majority of those removed from the country have been convicted of a crime or involved with a serious crime,” Sessions said. “Illegal immigrants in the U.S. who don’t meet the Administration’s ‘priorities’–even if they come into contact with immigration enforcement–are largely exempt from federal immigration law. And approximately two-thirds of removals last year were in fact not deportations at all but were instead of apprehensions of those interdicted crossing the border.”
Overall, Sessions added, this latest movement from the White House proves that whatever Congress decides to pass in terms of any new immigration laws, the administration will not enforce it.
“This latest action further demonstrates that the Administration cannot be trusted to enforce any immigration plan from Congress,” Sessions said. “Congressional Democrats, who have helped empower this state of illegality, must be held to account for their actions.”
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