President Barack Obama’s “DACA” work-permit program is illegal because it violates the immigration laws that protect working Americans from losing jobs and wages to illegal migrants, a Texas judge wrote Friday.
“Even Defendants-Intervenors’ own experts could not escape the reality that DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals] congests the workforce,” wrote Judge Andrew Hanen of the United States District Court in Houston.
The pro-DACA team admitted that “[W]ork authorizations and deferral from deportation provided by DACA allow recipients to better compete with legally present workers,” Hanen wrote on page 19 of the July 16, 77-page decision.
The decision bars the award of additional work permits to DACA migrants but does not yet revoke the work permits held by roughly 650,000 illegals.
The judge’s emphasis on Americans’ workplace rights also prompted him to warn officials at the Department of Homeland Security against other amnesty-style programs that would threaten Americans, including policies that “parole” many foreigners into the United States.
The offer of parole, Hanen wrote:
…is designed to be awarded only “on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.” … Congress did not intend advance “parole authority as our immigration policy, or to supplement current immigration categories without Congressional approval.”
DHS chief Alejandro Mayorkas is now parolling thousands of foreigners into the country under the moral claim that they deserve reunification with their related migrants who are living in the United States.
Mayorkas has promised to put the “dignity” of migrants “foremost ” in his policies, despite the widely recognized harm of cheap migrant labor to Americans in their national labor market
Nearly all reports by establishment media outlets downplayed Hanen’s analysis of Americans’ right to a national labor market. Instead, those media reports lamented the loss of employment for illegal aliens, especially for the relatively few DACA migrants with university educations. The New York Times reported one example, July 16:
Sarahi Magallanez, a psychology student in Los Angeles, is among thousands of young immigrants still waiting for the approval of new applications.
On hearing the news, she cried: “Oh, no. No. No. This is just really bad.”
Ms. Magallanez said she had received a notification from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services on Tuesday that her application had been received and was being processed.
“I was banking on this to start my career,” she said, breaking into tears. “Now there is a chance I can’t. DACA is not safe, and we are at the mercy of whoever is in power.”
The New York Times did not mention that many Americans hope to earn decent salaries with their psychology degrees.
CBS News reported:
“I have not been able to stop crying,” [Marilu] Saldaña, who was brought to the U.S. as a 13-year-old, told CBS News. “It’s so frustrating because this was the year that I was going to go to college. I want to become a nurse. I feel like I’m going to have to wait again.”
Many Americans also want to get decently-paid jobs as nurses.
In 2020, roughly 92,000 Americans died from a toxic combination of poverty, drugs, loneliness, and hopelessness, often in heartland regions ignored by the coastal investors who prefer to hire the cheap immigrant labor that is delivered to the coastal states by the federal government.
Americans from many states – such as Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, and Sen. Joe Manchin’s West Virginia — lose jobs and wages when employers can hire illegals, Hanen wrote on page 55:
DACA’s work authorization also undermines the [1986] Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). The Supreme Court has “often recognized that a ‘primary purpose in restricting immigration is to preserve jobs for American workers.'” … In 1986, “Congress enacted as a comprehensive framework for ‘combating the deployment of illegal aliens.'” … IRCA made it “illegal for employers to knowingly hire, recruit, refer, or continue to employ unauthorized workers.” … Thus, it is illegal for employers to hire illegal aliens, including those eligible for DACA, but for the fact tax allows its recipients to obtain work authorization.
DACA actually goes further to undermine Congress’s intent to protect American workers as it requires applicants to apply for work authorization … The DACA program is therefore contrary to the immigration statutes and to Congress’s goal of “closely guarding access to work authorization and preserving jobs for those lawfully in the country.”
The judge noted that Texas and other states that filed the lawsuit also said the DACA giveaway damages Americans’ wages as well as their jobs:
According to the Plaintiff States, DACA bypasses Congress’s comprehensive immigration framework to grant lawful presence, and therefore work authorizations, to unlawfully present individuals. DACA recipients may then compete with legally present individuals for available jobs … (stating the presence of DACA recipients leads to an increase in competition among similarly skilled workers in the workplace, and impacts wages).
The public’s reliance on the workplace safeguards set by immigration laws was ignored by government officials when they set up the DACA program, Hanen wrote on page 74:
… for decades, the states and their residents have relied upon DHS (and its predecessors) to protect their employees by enforcing the law as Congress has written it. Once again, neither the DACA Memorandum nor its underlying record gives any consideration of these reliance interests.
That “reliance” claim is a jab at the U.S. Supreme court, which blocked President Donald Trump’s cancellation of DACA on the ground that his deputies did not adequately recognize the reliance of migrants on their DACA work permits.
On page 64, Hanen said the claims by DACA advocates would allow Presidents to award work permits to as many foreigners as he wishes:
Using the Government’s logic, echoed by the Defendant-Intervenors in this case, the Executive Branch could theoretically still give every illegal alien currently resident in the United States lawful status, if DHS were to do it in smaller numbers, group-by-group. This cannot be a correct interpretation of the law.
Each year, four million young Americans enter the workforce. They are forced by their government to compete against a growing population of illegal migrants, against one million new legal immigrants, and the resident workforce of roughly two million temporary guest workers.
For many years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.
This opposition is multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity Americans owe to each other.
The voter opposition to elite-backed economic migration coexists with support for legal immigrants and some sympathy for illegal migrants. But only a minority of Americans — mostly leftists — embrace the many skewed polls and articles pushing the 1950’s corporate “Nation of Immigrants” claim.
The deep public opposition to labor migration is built on the widespread recognition that legal immigration, visa workers, and illegal migration undermine democratic self-government, fracture Americans’ society, move money away from Americans’ pocketbooks, and worsen living costs for American families. Migration moves wealth from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to investors, from technology to stoop labor, from red states to blue states, and from the central states to the coastal states such as New York.
The case is Texas v. United States, No. 1:18-cv-00068 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas.
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