Catholic Archbishop of Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich says, “it would be a horrible injustice” not to give amnesty to the nearly 800,000 to 3.5 million illegal aliens shielded from deportation by the President Obama-created Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
During an interview with Obama political strategist David Axelrod, Cardinal Cupich said it is the responsibility of lawmakers to give amnesty to DACA illegal aliens, without mentioning the expense such a decision would be for Americans.
Cupich said:
I think it would be a horrible injustice not to fix this problem. We have 800,000 young people who came here not of their own volition but by their parents, know no other country and culture, and now to say that they’re going to be deported simply because there is a failure … to humanely deal with this issue would be a great tragedy.
We’re fighting every day for this and trying to get this on the agenda for the House and the Senate to deal with. It has to be fixed. And if it’s not by March, we’re going to have thousands of young people every week who are going to be liable for deportation and the government has the information on them. That should not be. We have to rise up and make sure that we do not allow this to happen. This problem should be fixed. And as far as I’m concerned, there really is no alternative but to fix it right away.
Cupich’s comments come just before Congress passed a spending bill for the end of the year to avoid a government shutdown that did not include a DACA amnesty, as the issue became increasingly unpopular with Americans.
In September, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the end of DACA, stating that the executive amnesty program created by Obama would officially end in March 2018. Since then, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), the open borders lobby, corporate interests, the Republican establishment, and Democrats have pushed to pass an amnesty plan despite its negative impacts on America’s working and middle class.
For example, this week, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) concluded that nearly one in five DACA illegal aliens would end up on food stamps at the expense of American taxpayers should lawmakers pass the DREAM Act, one of the most expansive amnesty plans filed in Congress.
Additionally, the influx in legal immigration to the U.S. that a DACA amnesty could cause would further drive down the wages of American blue-collar workers and provide multinational corporations with another never-ending flow of cheap, foreign labor.
Under the process of “chain migration” — which makes up more than 70 percent of all current legal immigration to the U.S. — newly naturalized immigrants are allowed to bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the country with them.
Should a DACA amnesty be signed by President Donald Trump and enacted, Americans would see potentially 9.9 million to 19 million foreign nationals arriving in the U.S. in the coming decades, with the prospects of exceeding four years of American births, as Breitbart News reported.
Likewise, chain migration importing the foreign relatives of DACA illegal aliens would potentially outpace the entire population of New York City, where more than 8.5 million residents live. The number of foreign nationals arriving in the U.S. as foreign relatives of DACA illegal aliens could also more than quadruple the population of Los Angeles, California.
While Catholic Bishops demand an immediate amnesty for DACA illegal aliens, Americans see tackling the opioid epidemic occurring across the U.S. as much more of a priority, with likely voters ranking it as the sixth most important issue facing the nation.
As Breitbart News reported, a startling new Center for Disease Control (CBC) report found that the age-adjusted rate of drug overdose deaths in 2016 was 21 percent higher than the rate of drug overdose deaths in 2015, which stood at 16.3 percent.
Drug overdose rates have increased considerably among American men. For men, the rate increased from 8.2 out of 100,000 men dying from overdoses, whereas now the rate has increased to 26.2 out of 100,000 men overdosing from drugs.
Adults between the ages of 25 to 54 years old had the highest rates of drug overdose deaths in 2016, with roughly 35 of 100,000 Americans dying due to opioids and other drugs. States with the highest number of drug overdoses in 2016 include West Virginia, Ohio, New Hampshire, Washington, DC, and Pennsylvania.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.