Obama's Amnesty and the Five Million Work Permits It Creates

By Joe Guzzardi
January 18, 2015

The Pew Research Center recently released its study titled “Unauthorized Immigrants: Who They are and What the Public Thinks.” For the record, the term “unauthorized immigrants,” displaced “undocumented immigrants” which, in turn bumped “illegal immigrants,” all of which pro-amnesty advocates have use instead of the correct U.S. Federal code language: “alien.”

Pew’s report is glued together by the selective use of statistics and push polling, wherein the participant is asked questions designed to evoke a specific response. For example, Pew found that 70 percent of Americans favor giving illegal immigrants a path to citizenship assuming they meet “certain requirements,” which include submitting to a rigorous background check, paying back taxes, and fines for unlawful entry. But those requirements have been attached to previous amnesties and ended up being either waived or ignored. Don’t count on them being enforced in 2015.

The report also makes much out of the discredited Obama as deporter-in-chief argument. But the figures the White House releases to the public about deportations are a shell game of jumbled data that includes returns from the border, formerly a separate category, with removals from the interior to reach the inflated totals the administration circulates.
Interior removals are, according to former Immigration and Customs Enforcement acting director John Sandweg, close to zero for non-criminal aliens.

Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) agrees with Sandweg’s conclusion. McCaul, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee that oversees immigration enforcement, predicts that Obama’s lax interior enforcement will encourage more illegal immigration. Said McCaul: “We essentially tell citizens of other countries, ‘If you come here, you can stay. The reality on the ground is that unless you commit multiple crimes, the chances of your being removed are close to zero.’”

Immigration agents removed 315,943 people in the year that ended Sept. 30, a 14 percent drop and the lowest total since Obama took office, according to an ICE draft report the Los Angeles Times obtained. About two-thirds were returned to their home countries after being caught at the border, down 9 percent from 2013. Although the White House promised to send the thousands of last summer’s Central American border surgers home, most stayed.

As part of its report, Pew included statistics about employed illegal aliens.  Although it is against the law for aliens to work and for employers to hire them, one-in-20 illegal immigrants are in the labor force, 8.1 million total. In many cases, they have displaced American workers. Of the 472 Bureau of Labor Statistics-recognized civilian occupations, only six are majority immigrant, legal and illegal. Those six occupations account for one percent of the total U.S. Workforce; native-born Americans comprise 46 percent of those employed in the six immigrant-majority job categories.

At the heart of Obama’s executive action are the five million work permits he’ll issue to previously unemployable, because of their unlawful immigration status, aliens.  Once work authorized, they’ll be able to compete legally for jobs with 20 million unemployed or underemployed Americans.

If Pew had emphasized in its polling the issuance of five million work permits as well as the accompanying social security numbers, and federal benefits, its findings would have been different. Obama’s amnesty hurts all Americans, but especially under-represented Blacks and Hispanics. For them, the last thing they need is more job competition.

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Joe Guzzardi is a Californians for Population Stabilization Senior Wring Fellow. Contact him at [email protected]