Obama’s New, Devious Scheme to Displace American Workers

By Joe Guzzardi
November 4, 2015
 
When it comes to ignoring immigration law, circumventing Congress, thumbing his nose at the judicial system, and undermining American workers, President Obama is unequaled.
 
Well-placed Capitol Hill insiders recently learned that on a taxpayer funded Department of Homeland Security summer “Regulations Retreat” the Obama administration plotted devious ways to work around the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals injunction on the president’s deferred action for parents of American citizens and legal permanent residents (DAPA).
 
As he revealed in his op-ed published by The Hill, the Immigration Reform Law Institute’s Ian M. Smith learned from a leaked internal DHS memo that “different options” for “open market Employment Authorization Document (EAD) regulatory changes” were on the retreat’s agenda
 
In other words, instead of allowing the Fifth Circuit to issue its final ruling on the constitutionality of Obama’s DAPA program, DHS instead embarked on an aggressive plan that would grant EADs, colloquially known as work permits, to millions of aliens, nonimmigrants and visa overstayers.
 
The four options to undermine American workers under consideration, would each have a devastating effect on unemployed and under-employed Americans. The first of the four would provide work permits to “all individuals living in the United States,” including illegal aliens, visa-overstayers, and H-1B temporary guest workers. The fourth option would grant EADs only to those on certain unexpired non-immigrant visas. Issuing work permits to any of the proposed recipients, however, directly violates Congress’s Immigration and Nationality Act. In the Obama White House, the Constitution and Congress are apparently meaningless.
 
Directly rejecting Texas federal court Judge Andrew Hanen’s ruling that DAPA and an expanded deferred action for childhood arrival program (DACA) be temporarily halted, DHS would not only distribute unrestricted EADs to temporary non-immigrant visa holders, such as H-1Bs whose work authorizations are tied to their employers, but also to another 5 to 6 million illegal aliens not included in any of Obama’s deferred action amnesties.
 
Bottom line: in an unprecedented power grab, Obama wants to give work permission to anyone living in the United States whether present legally or not. DHS justified its position by claiming that working aliens have already “tested” the U.S. labor market,” and outrageously claims that official government work documents which will make employment easier for aliens to obtain “won’t adversely affect U.S. workers.”
 
As DHS shamefully spins its deceptions, the 92 million Americans detached from the labor force (including minorities, women, teens, returning veterans and the disabled as well as the employed who haven’t had a wage increase in years) won’t suffer from the sudden infusion of millions of newly authorized workers. Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that real after-inflation wages have been flat since 2009. The reasons include off-shoring, and huge increases in visas for overseas workers, as well as continued high levels of legal and illegal immigration. 
 
The long-term DHS goal is, in the agency’s own words, to help aliens to stay in the U.S. “until they are ready and able to become immigrants.” Translated, this means that DHS, the nation’s largest federal law enforcement agency, seeks to reward those who’ve flagrantly broken immigration laws and violated U.S. national sovereignty.
 
Even Obama’s staunchest supporters would have difficulty arguing that the president hasn’t put illegal immigrants’ agenda ahead of American citizens’ futures. All the evidence points to the administration’s total disregard for the historic American nation, as well as its apparent eagerness to dismantle it.