President Barack Obama’s new 181-page plan to award work-permits to at least 100,000 foreign college-grads also contains a convoluted section that would also sneak work-permits to a huge range of foreign migrants – even after courts have formally ordered their repatriation.
In plain English, the section in the rule would automatically provide updated work-permits to 15 categories of migrants who are appealing judges’ deportation orders.
In plain economics, the rule would increase the number of foreign migrants in U.S. workplaces and impose wage-cutting job competition on ordinary blue-collar Americans so that university-trained, white-collar immigration lawyers could be paid billable-hours by their due-for-deportation, work-permit clients.
“Obama is transferring the jobs and salaries of Americans to foreign nationals, including illegal aliens… [who will be] licensed to take middle class jobs,” said one Hill staffer. The pending rule “highlights the unholy alliance between progressive Democrats, progressive Republicans, and the Obama administration… [so] when it comes to finding a job in America, being native-born in America is a disadvantage,” the staffer said.
There’s little chance that establishment GOP leaders will fight Obama’s pro-migrant, anti-American rule.
For example, House Speaker Paul Ryan supported an amnesty-and-cheap-labor bill in 2014, and he sneaked a new rule into the December 2016 omnibus bill that allows companies to bring in at least 100,000 extra foreign workers for jobs sought by 100,000 blue-collar Americans. Ryan defended his pink-slip plan, while he and other GOP and Democratic leaders also rejected proposed amendments to the omnibus by pro-American legislators that would have constricted Obama’s legal ability to add more foreign workers to the U.S. economy.
If the rule is not struck down by the courts, the due-for-deportation migrants who would automatically get new work-permits include many categories of provisional immigrants, such as people who falsely claim persecution in their home countries. Most of the 250,000 Central Americans who have been allowed by Obama to migrate into the United States since 2009 have claimed in court hearings that they fear persecution in their home countries.
Other categories of migrants who would get Obama’s work-permits include migrants who lied to get work-permits, or children of migrants who accused their foreign spouses with domestic abuse back in their home countries, or the parents and children of foreign religious workers, such as Saudi-trained Imams.
The document even says the federal government has the authority to give updated work-permits to people admitted under a foreign emergency, such as West Africans who were allowed to stay in the United States until the Ebola crisis had passed. This “Temporary Protected Status” can be conferred by the DHS Secretary, without any review by Congress, and so could be used to invite large group of foreigners — such as Muslims from Islam-wrecked countries — to live in the United States.
The list of to-be-deported yet work-eligible groups is listed on page 112 and 113 of the pending rule:
“Aliens admitted as refugees… Aliens granted asylum… Aliens admitted as parents or dependent children of aliens granted permanent residence… Aliens admitted to the United States as citizens of the Federated States of Micronesia or the Marshall Islands pursuant to agreements between the United States and the former trust territories… Aliens granted withholding of deportation or removal… Aliens granted Temporary Protected Status … Aliens who have properly filed applications for TPS… Aliens who have properly filed applications for asylum or withholding of deportation or removal… Aliens who have filed applications for suspension of deportation…Aliens who have filed applications for creation of record of lawful admission for permanent residence… Aliens who have properly filed legalization applications… Aliens who are the principal beneficiaries or qualified children of approved VAWA self-petitioners.”
The new regulations will also be a giant payout to Obama’s allies in the immigration-law industry.
That’s because the offer of extended work-permits to people facing deportation— including criminals and fraudulent asylum-seekers — gives them them the incentive and the means to appeal and re-appeal their deportation orders for many years.
Nationally, the backlog of immigration cases has doubled from roughly 225,000 pending cases in 2009 to 450,000 pending cases in late 2015, according to TRAC Reports. In 2009, the cases took 439 days to complete an average case. By 2015, the cases took an average of 918 days to resolve.
The new regulation will likely extend these courtroom delays, so increasing the number of foreigners improperly living and working in the United States. Inevitably, those extra migrants drive up the labor supply, and force down average wages for Americans and legal immigrants. The last time wages rose for lower-income Americans was in 1998 and 1999, when companies had to compete for workers during the dot.com boom, and amid a low rate of illegal immigration.
Much of the current courtroom backlog is caused by Obama’s decision to reduce enforcement of immigration law, and to grant novel legal rights to illegal immigrants.
Since 2009, for example, Obama has allowed more than 250,000 Central Americans migrants to cross the U.S. borders and then to file for asylum and refugee status. This was a policy choice — because Obama and his border officials have the legal authority to reject and repatriate all migrants, including the many strong young men who claim to be “unaccompanied alien children.”
Similarly, in August 2014, Obama’s deputies agreed with the ACLU to let some deported migrants return to the United States to re-litigate their prior deportation cases.
Obama also backed Sen. Marco Rubio’s 2013 immigration rewrite, dubbed a ‘comprehensive immigration reform,” by Democratic and media allies. The bill would have tripled legal immigration to roughly 33 million people over a decade, flatlining wages and salaries. The bill also contained 400 legal loopholes, and would have allowed the DHS secretary to let deported migrants — including gang members — return to the United States.
This new pro-migrant rule reflects Obama’s preferences for large-scale immigration, and his frequent description of migrant foreigners as better than Americans.
At a December 2015 naturalization ceremony, Obama told a group of new legal immigrants that “I’m proud to be among the first to greet you as ‘My fellow Americans’… We can never say it often or loudly enough: Immigrants and refugees revitalize and renew America.”
“You are now American. You’ve got [political] obligations as citizens,” said Obama, the nation’s organizer-in-chief. “And I’m absolutely confident you will meet them. You’ll set a good example for all of us, because you know how precious this thing is. It’s not something to take for granted. It’s something to cherish and to fight for.”
In November 2014, Obama told supporters that Americans don’t have the right to restrict migration.
Part of what’s wonderful about America is also what makes our democracy hard sometimes, because sometimes we get attached to our particular tribe, our particular race, our particular religion, and then we start treating other folks differently. And that, sometimes, has been a bottleneck to how we think about immigration. If you look at the history of immigration in this country, each successive wave, there have been periods where the folks who were already here suddenly say, well, I don’t want those folks. Even though the only people who have the right to say that are some Native Americans.
Obama made his political strategy clear in 2006, when he wrote in his autobiography that immigrants can become the foundation of new political movement that transform Americans’ culture and politics, whether or not Americans want any transformations. “In my mind, at least, the fates of black and brown were to be perpetually intertwined, the cornerstone of a coalition that could help America live up to its promise,” he wrote in “The Audacity of Hope.”
But you’ve got to break some Americans to make transformational omelettes; “This huge influx of mostly low-skill workers provides some benefits to the economy as a whole… [but] it also threatens to depress further the wages of blue-collar Americans,” Obama admitted.
In 2013, Obama used the immigration laws to being in roughly 2 million foreign workers — plus women and children — in a year when 4 million Americans began looking for jobs. Unsurprisingly, wages flatlined while profits spiked and the stock market shot up to record highs.
Follow Neil Munro on Twitter, at @NeilMunroDC.
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