Obama’s Amnesty "Outline" Indicates Little Attention to Detail

The time honored Washington D.C. tradition is to use late Friday afternoon to announce news that it knows will be unpopular. When the Friday in question arrives during the summer months, so much better for those who bear grim tidings. In this case Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Alejandro Mayorkas were up to promoting their usual pro-alien, anti-American agenda.

Unless you’re attuned to the non-stop brazen, unconstitutional pronouncements that President Obama has routinely issued about prosecutorial discretion, you might have fainted had you been at Mayorkas and Napolitano’s August 3 press conference.  In his June executive order that removed the possibility of deportation and authorized work permits for about 1.2 million aliens age 16-30, Obama shamelessly threw 20 million unemployed and underemployed Americans under the bus.

The latest is not that DHS has identified rigid qualifying standards for the aliens that might include diplomas, birth certificates or proof of date of arrival in the United States. After all, Americans deserve to know who’s benefiting—don’t we? And, if nothing else, we should be protected against the possibility of identity frauds or hardened criminals wandering freely among us.

But lo and behold, according to a DHS “outline,” identify frauds will not be excluded from receiving work permits. Neither will unlicensed drivers who have nevertheless been operating vehicles nor certain prisoners including those that the justice system had approved for deportation.

If fact, since no applicant will be required to show up in person for an interview, identifying criminals, gang members or terrorist would be impossible.

Alarmingly, an administration official commented that the goal is to “maximize participation” and that “an independent assessment of the volume” [numbers of work permits] has not been performed. Obama has not indicated the slightest concern about unemployed Americans and the detrimental impact that issuing 1.2 million work permits to aliens would have on them. [Obama Immigration Policy Opens Work Permit Door to ID Thieves, Jailed Aliens and Uninsured Drivers, by Neil Munro, Daily Caller, August 3, 2012]

The Federation for American Immigration Reform, noting even more egregious offenses, blasted Obama. FAIR president Dan Stein:

“In addition to a massive amnesty that Congress never legislated, the announcement that work authorization will be granted to anyone who can 'demonstrate an economic necessity to work' – in other words virtually everybody – is a unilateral move on the part of the Administration to nullify a critical immigration law Congress did enact." [DHS Amnesty Guidelines Outline Shed Light on the Open-Ended Nature of this Illegal Power Grab, Charges FAIR, by Peter Schrag, Sacramento Bee, August 5, 2012]

In my June 21 column and July 5 blog (read them here and here), I predicted that the Obama administration would soon disregard even the pretense of performing even cursory due diligence and simply process the aliens’ applications. This is one of those times when I wish I had been wrong.