The Senate “Gang of Eight” plan for immigration reform – a bipartisan plan that was supposed to secure the border before granting a pathway to citizenship – has just imploded. It now appears that the Senate plan would give Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano the ability to declare border security marks hit for purposes of triggering the pathway to citizenship, an unpassable proposal that stands in stark contrast to the rhetoric from pro-immigration reform Republicans, who have loudly proclaimed that actual border security must be achieved before ramming through measures granting rights to illegal immigrants.
According to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), “What we’ve proposed is that the DHS secretary, whomever it is, will have final say on [whether] whatever metrics we proposes [sic] are met. We think those metrics will be quite objective.”
This is a non-starter for most Senate Republicans, who know that handing responsibility over border security to administrators who could not care less about border security is a recipe for disaster. “My constituents are not going to accept a Washington bureaucrat making a representation the border is secure when they know it’s not true,” Senate Republican Whip John Cornyn (TX) stated.
This is just the latest in a pattern of abdication by Congress, which throws more and more power to the executive branch in order to avoid responsibility for its own failure to properly mandate border security. Leaving a federal government that has completely failed in its most basic duties on immigration to determine when metrics have been met is a recipe for an open border.
But then again, the Democrats have know that all along.
Ben Shapiro is Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the book “Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America” (Threshold Editions, January 8, 2013).