In a little-noticed interview earlier this year with Univision’s Jorge Ramos, Marco Rubio declared that, as President, he would keep Barack Obama’s executive amnesty for DREAMers in place until it was permanently codified through legislation.
Rubio said, in part:
DACA…applies to young people that arrived in this country at a very young age before they were adults and I don’t think we can immediately revoke that… I’m not calling for it to be revoked tomorrow, or this week, or right away.
“I think it will have to end at some point and I hope it will end because of some reform to the immigration laws,” Rubio said in English.
So Rubio is pledging to carry Obama’s policy: leaving the executive amnesty for DREAMers in place until Congress submits to the order by legislatively ratifying amnesty. After a legislatively ratified DREAM Act, illegal aliens would be able to vote in U.S. elections and bring their relatives to work and collect entitlements in the United States.
The similarity to President Obama’s rhetoric is striking. President Obama told Congress: “if folks are serious about getting immigration reform done [they should be] passing a bill and getting it to my desk. And then the executive actions that I take go away.” Similarly, Obama told George Stephanopoulos after being pressed on his executive amnesty: “Well, my response is pass a bill.”
Most famously, Obama said: “To those members of Congress who question my authority to make our immigration system work better, or question the wisdom of me acting where Congress has failed, I have one answer: Pass a bill.”
In the interview, Ramos asked Rubio something that Rubio has not been asked in any of the Presidential debates thus far: “Would a President Rubio revoke Deferred Action and executive action by President Barack Obama?”
Rubio declared that he would not “immediately revoke” Obama’s 2012 executive amnesty for illegal minors [DACA]. “I’m not calling for it to be revoked tomorrow, or this week, or right away,” Rubio announced.
Rubio said:
We have two executive actions. The first was DACA which applies to young people that arrived in this country very young age before they were adults and I don’t think we can immediately revoke that. I think it will have to end at some point, and I hope it will end because of some reform to the immigration laws. It cannot be the permanent policy of the United States but I’m not calling for it to be revoked tomorrow or this week or right away.
By using the phrase “it will have to end at some point,” Rubio is presumably hoping the media will assume that he is drawing a distinction between his policy and Obama’s. But, again, this is precisely the same position as the President’s— namely, that he was forced into issuing an executive amnesty because Congress repeatedly defeated the DREAM Act. Now Rubio is saying that, if elected President, he would not respect the voters’ will on the DREAM Act’s defeat, but would leave the executive decree in place until a legislated amnesty replaced it.
This flips the normal legislative process on its head.
Over the years, the DREAM Act has been defeated on numerous occasions in Congress. For instance, it was rejected in the Senate when Sen. Richard Durbin pushed it in 2010, and it was rejected when the House blocked Rubio’s immigration bill in 2013. What Rubio and Obama are arguing is that, even though voters rejected it, that decision cannot be allowed to stand — and that the only two scenarios are to live under an executive DREAM Act or a legislative substitute.
Indeed, as Breitbart News exclusively reported, Rubio’s campaign said that he would push for the DREAM Act to be legislatively codified even before putting border security in place. The DREAM Act was central to Eric Cantor’s downfall in 2014–but not even Cantor talked about supporting the President’s executive-ordered amnesty.
Even Democratic law Professor Jonathan Turley has said that President Obama, “is becoming the very danger the Constitution was designed to avoid.” Under the DREAMer executive amnesty, illegal aliens are eligible for work permits, tax credits, Social Security and Medicare benefits funded by American citizens.
Moreover, the head of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Union, Chris Crane, has said that the non-enforcement protocols in Obama’s DREAMer amnesty are, “for the most part applied by ICE immigration agents to adults held in state correctional facilities and jails pending criminal charges. News has quickly spread through illegal alien populations within jails and communities that immigration agents have been instructed by the agency not to investigate illegal aliens who claim protections.”
Crane strongly opposed the Gang of Eight bill. Rubio “directly misled law enforcement officers,” Crane declared, “Senator Rubio left unchanged legislation that he himself admitted to us in private was detrimentally flawed and must be changed.” Rubio’s bill proved successful where Ted Kennedy’s had not— the Kennedy bill died in the Senate while the Rubio bill, which had a 4 times larger increase in temporary foreign workers, passed with 68 votes thanks to Rubio’s PR campaign.
Rubio’s support for the DREAM Act emerged publicly in 2012. This has been another source of conflict with law enforcement. Ken Palinkas, the former head of the nation’s immigration caseworkers— Citizenship and Immigration Services— warned that the DREAM Act would expand birthright citizenship to include the foreign-born (today it is applied to the US-born children of illegal aliens). Palinkas said that DREAMer amnesty “extend[s] birthright citizenship in the future to include the foreign citizens of other countries” and represents a promise of “perpetual amnesty.”
Palinkas is arguing that the concept of DREAMers was intended to create a permanent loophole to U.S. borders. In other Western countries all foreign nationals illegally residing in the country are subject to immigration laws. In the United States, however, the so-called DREAMer population was created in order to effectively carve out a sector of the illegal immigrant population — illegal minors — who are exempt from immigration law.
Thus, as long as anyone in the world can illegally enter American society if they are joined by a minor– or someone alleging to be a minor– there is effectively no border at all. As Sen. Jeff Sessions has explained, “It cannot be the policy of the United States that any of the 2 billion people in the world who have yet turn to turn 18 have a right to illegally enter the United States and claim residency.” Indeed, government reports have documented how the 2014 illegal alien minor surge on our southern border was caused, in large part, by the promise of amnesty for alien youth.
For this reason, Dave Brat, in his attacks on Cantor, described Cantor’s support for the DREAM Act as, “one of the most radical pro-amnesty statements ever delivered by a sitting representative.” Brat wrote, “In what was billed as a new agenda for the Republican Party, Cantor declared that citizenship for illegals was required by ‘the great founding principles of our country.’ With this remark, Cantor declared his support not only for amnesty now, but amnesty forever.”
Palinkas and Brat’s point was that if a nation cannot apply immigration rules to alien youth, then not only would we be forced to issue amnesty to today’s DREAMers (and by extension their parents), but all future DREAMers and all future DREAMer parents.
Similarly, during his 2013 stump for Rubio’s immigration agenda, Paul Ryan expressed the need for lawmakers to put themselves in the shoes of foreign citizens and specifically cited DREAMers:
Put yourself in another person’s shoes, which if you’re in elected office, that’s what you kind of have to do that almost every single day. The job we have–and what we do is we take different people’s perspectives. The gentleman from India who’s waiting for his green card. The DREAMer who is waiting. We take all these different perspectives. We process it through our values and our morals and our principles. And then we come up with the answer to try and solve this problem. That’s basically what we do in our jobs.
Rubio went on to explain that, while he would cancel Obama’s second 2014 executive amnesty— which, unlike the 2012 amnesty, is not in effect because it has been paused by a court— the only reason he would do so is to similarly replace it with a legislative amnesty. Similarly, Rubio did not call the 2014 amnesty “unconstitutional” or “illegal,” but merely “the wrong approach”:
Rubio said:
There is a new executive action that applies to adults to a broader population of people and that I believe is the wrong approach. I would revoke it because it’s hurting our efforts to reform our immigration laws. It is it is adding credibility to the argument that we cannot do immigration reform because the federal government is not serious about enforcing immigration laws.
“Immigration reform” is the phrase used by Senator Rubio throughout his push for the Senate’s Gang of Eight bill to describe a policy bundle that includes three major elements: citizenship for illegal aliens, a large expansion in foreign worker admissions, and a huge increase in the permanent rate of annual immigration. However, because 92% of GOP voters want future immigration cut, politicians who favor mass immigration use the innocuous phrase, “immigration reform” instead of describing their plan to grant amnesty and immigration expansions.
Rubio’s light treatment of the 2014 amnesty, along with his support of the 2012 amnesty, suggests that Rubio is leaving himself substantial space to run an aggressively pro-amnesty general election campaign if he wins the nomination. For instance, while Rubio’s main complaint about the 2014 amnesty is that it makes it more difficult to pass a permanent legislative amnesty, Senator Jeff Sessions has said that enacting the 2014 executive amnesty, and “refusing to carry out the laws of the United States in order to make his own, the President is endangering our entire Constitutional order.” Sessions said:
The President’s unconstitutional action is a direct threat to our Republican system of government and will have catastrophic consequences for the American people. It must be stopped…ongress has no higher duty than to protect the American people and our Constitution. The President’s action is a threat to every working person in this country—their jobs, wages, dreams, hopes and futures.
Rubio’s open support for the President’s 2012 executive amnesty, and his pledge to replace both the 2012 and the 2014 executive amnesties with legislated amnesties, seems to confirm the fears of Rush Limbaugh who has argued that with Paul Ryan as Speaker and Rubio as President, in the “first 12-to-18 months, the donor-class agenda [will be] implemented, including amnesty and whatever else they want.”
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