House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is betraying Americans and her constitutional duties by denouncing the police enforcement of Congress’ immigration laws and judges’ deportation decisions, say immigration reformers.
“In terms of interior enforce[ment], what is the purpose? What is the point?” Pelosi said June 25, just after her June 22 statement that the President’s promised enforcement of judges’ deportation orders is a “brutal action which will tear families apart and inject terror into our communities.”
Pelosi’s comment is shocking, said Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge who now works with the Center for Immigration Studies. “It undermines the rule of law in the U.S., it encourages people to enter the country illegally because they will be able to remain permanently without removal,” he said, adding:
Quite frankly, can you imagine any other context, such as parking tickets or speeding tickets would you see a politician say ‘What’s the point of enforcing the law? It is almost incomprehensible … What other laws should they ignore? Should we stop giving parking tickets in handicapped zones? Or blocking hydrants? Should we not enforce wage-and-hour law, or health-and-safety rules?
President Donald Trump promised and then delayed the small-scale deportation effort following leaks which identified the cities where Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials planned to focus their deportation efforts. The few hundred people targeted for the planned operation are part of the 1 million illegals who have already exhausted their legal appeals and have been ordered home by immigration judges, said Arthur. “They’ve received their full measure of due process, and the only thing they are waiting for is to be removed from the United States,” he said.
Rosemary Jenks, policy director at NumbersUSA, said Pelosi’s denunciation is irresponsible. Also, elitist, decadent and out-of-touch, she said, adding that Pelosi is endorsing a policy that keeps foreign criminals in Americans’ communities. According to Jenks:
She is basically saying that people who kill, rape, or assault Americans, who are here illegally, should not be deported … She is representative of the elites, the arrogant media, academics, all the open border people. She is their voice, apparently. The first time one of them gets assaulted or attacked by an illegal alien, they will change their tune.
The huge list of foreign murderers who entered the United States in the last 20 years include many illegal migrants, many migrants who have been ordered home, and several of the 19 Islamic murderers who committed the 9/11 atrocities which killed 3,000 Americans. At least one of the Islamic murderers was detected — but not deported — prior to the mass murder attacks.
Pelosi is ignoring her responsibility as the third-ranking government official, just below the President and Vice-President, said Jenks, and continued:
She is basically saying she does not believe in the rule of law [regardless of political agendas], and therefore she does not believe in America or our constitution. These [deportation] laws were set by Congress, according to the process laid out in the constitution, they are enforced by the process laid out in the constitution, and she is saying ‘It is not worth it, it is not a big deal.’
“There are plenty of laws that people don’t like seeing enforced,” said Arthur. Pelosi “is in a position to change the law if she does not like the law, but it is irresponsible to say ‘Don’t enforce a law I don’t like.'”
At her New York press event, held in the largely Asian district of Democrat Rep. Grace Meng, Pelosi slammed Trump’s decision to enforce judges’ final deportation decisions as “outside the circle of civilized human behavior,” and insisted that “a violation of [legal immigrant] status is not a reason for deportation, that’s just not so.”
Pelosi’s open repudiation of federal law has been ignored by the establishment media, which has spent the last 30 months denouncing Trump’s supposed disregard of U.S. election laws.
The widely distributed Associated Press coverage ignored the “What’s the point?” comment in the most-posted article about Pelosi’s comments. As reported by the Washington Post:
WASHINGTON — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called President Donald Trump’s threatened coast-to-coast deportations of migrants “outside the circle of civilized human behavior” and the Senate’s top Democrat labeled the warning “the very definition of callousness” on Monday in remarks that underscored the gap between the two sides over immigration.
The Washington Post ignored the Pelosi quote, instead posting a video with Pelosi’s comments buried under a headline saying, “Pelosi on Trump’s immigration raids: ‘It’s outside the circle of civilized human behavior’.”
Politico ignored Pelosi’s “What is the point?” question in its description of her speech, headlined “Pelosi: Trump’s delayed ICE raids run counter to ‘civilized human behavior'”
The Hill also ignored the quote, in an article headlined “Pelosi to Trump: ‘You’re scaring the children of America’.”
Pelosi’s anti-enforcement, open-borders comments were echoed by other Democrats. Sen. Dick Durbin, for example, said that after Trump delayed the enforcement of the judges’ deportation orders that “I think people finally convinced him what a disaster this would be. … How about kids coming home to an empty house? Cruelty. Open cruelty involving families across this country instead of prioritizing those who may be a danger to us.”
The AP reported that “Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., described Trump’s “chilling, nasty, obnoxious threats” and said the president “seems far more comfortable terrorizing immigrant families” than addressing immigration problems.”
But wealthy people are not losing from Pelosi’s opposition to the enforcement of popular immigration laws, said Arthur. Migrants “are not coming to take her job — the jobs that are being lost are being lost by the most disadvantaged members of society.”
Immigration by the Numbers
Each year, roughly four million young Americans join the workforce after graduating from high school or university.
But the federal government then imports about 1.1 million legal immigrants and refreshes a resident population of roughly 1.5 million white-collar visa workers — including approximately one million H-1B workers — and approximately 500,000 blue-collar visa workers.
The government also prints out more than one million work permits for foreigners, tolerates about eight million illegal workers, and does not punish companies for employing the hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants who sneak across the border or overstay their legal visas each year, despite the rising loss of jobs to automation.
This policy of inflating the labor supply boosts economic growth for investors because it ensures that employers do not have to compete for American workers by offering higher wages and better working conditions.
Flooding the market with cheap, foreign, white-collar graduates and blue-collar labor also shifts enormous wealth from young employees towards older investors, even as it also widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, and hurts children’s schools and college educations. It also pushes Americans away from high-tech careers and sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions. The labor policy also moves business investment and wealth from the Heartland to the coastal cities, explodes rents and housing costs, shrivels real estate values in the Midwest, and rewards investors for creating low-tech, labor-intensive workplaces.