Another Delay – But, No Surprise

By Rick Oltman
June 4, 2009

One year, four delays. Is there another Presidential Executive Order that has been delayed, ever? I don’t know of one.

On June 6th 2009, it will be one year since President Bush signed Executive Order 12989 making it mandatory for the federal government and its contractors to use E-Verify to ensure that they are employing only American Workers (American citizens or legal immigrants with work visas). E-Verify is 99.5% accurate and answers most inquiries about legal status in seconds.

So why the delay in using this fine new screening tool? Is the reason that we must await the outcome of the lawsuit brought against the Executive Order by the Chamber of Commerce of the United States of America, Associated Builders and Contractors, Inc., Society for Human Resource Management, American Council on International Personnel and the HR (human resources) Policy Association? Or does the Obama Administration have no intention of enforcing our immigration laws, except those against the most heinous lawbreakers, for whom there is no big money constituency…yet.

If you are a violent criminal alien, a murderer, sexual predator, child molester, drug trafficker, etc., you can expect to feel the full weight of federal and local law enforcement. And, with every violent alien they find, the feds will be shouting from the rooftops about what a good job they are doing of protecting us and, yes,we can be grateful for that. But this activity is a no-brainer and doesn’t even warrant an "attaboy" because the feds and all local enforcement officials should have been zealously pursuing this class of criminal all along.

In the meantime the flow of illegal aliens and drugs will continue to increase and little will be done to stop any of it. Expect to hear impressive accounts of border enforcement, but it will be mostly a sham. This administration and the last one have both already failed twice to do anything substantial regarding border security in the face of this very real crisis.

One recent failure was the pathetic response to the primitive violence in Mexico. Heads were literally rolling in the streets of Mexican towns and Phoenix, AZ became the kidnapping capital of North America–mostly perpetrated by Mexican cartel thugs. Yet there was still no effort to secure the border against drug traffickers, people smugglers and kidnappers and certainly less attention to the chronic law-breaking by illegal aliens desperately fleeing a failed nation that seems in a perpetual state of circling the drain.

The second failure to secure the border was at the beginning of the swine flu outbreak in Mexico. The Center for Disease Control in Atlanta now estimates there are over 100,000 cases of swine flu in America. Thankfully it isn’t the deadly infection that it might have been. Regardless, the only government response at the border was to order U.S. Customs inspectors at the ports of entry to remove their masks, before reversing themselves within 24 hours.

And now the most basic requirement of having the federal government simply check to see if the workers they employ actually have a right to those jobs has been delayed again.

It seems ridiculous to point out that in the present economic crisis there isn’t a single federal job that would go unfilled if all illegal aliens vanished tomorrow.

Illegal aliens have a friend in the White House as they have had for the last seventeen years. But where in the ranks of the political elite is the leadership for immigration law enforcement? Is there any effort to reverse the open border policy that benefits no one except the individuals and businesses that hire illegal aliens and sell them products?

There are still a few patriots in positions of authority but not nearly enough. And that is why pressure for change must come from voters sending the message that giving away jobs while Americans are unemployed will no longer be tolerated.

Please remember that the real reason E-Verify is being held up is because it is fast and accurate and we finally have a tool that actually works.

Rick Oltman is the National Media Director for Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS).