Tag Archives: immigration

Illegal Aliens and Amnesty

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Late last week, President Obama signed an Executive Order wherein he announced his decision to shirk his Constitutional duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”  This also violates his personal promise to do so—not a campaign promise, but his oath of office:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

His EO does this: it protects from immigration law enforcement those illegal immigrants who came to the US before they were 16, are younger than 30, have committed no major criminal offenses, have been in the country for at least five continuous years, and have a US high school diploma or a GED or served in the US military.

This seems like a good idea, and it even has elements of Congressman Luis Gutierrez’ (D, IL) and Senator Marco Rubio’s (R, FL) plans for handling the children of illegal aliens.

However.

John Yoo, Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Bush the Younger administration, had this to say about the Obama Amnesty Program:

President Obama’s claim that he can refuse to deport 800,000 aliens here in the country illegally illustrates the unprecedented stretching of the Constitution and the rule of law.  He is laying claim to presidential power that goes even beyond that claimed by the Bush administration, in which I served.  There is a world of difference in refusing to enforce laws that violate the Constitution (Bush) and refusing to enforce laws because of disagreements over policy (Obama).

Under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution, the president has the duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”  This provision was included to make sure that the president could not simply choose, as the British King had, to cancel legislation simply because he disagreed with it.  President Obama cannot refuse to carry out a congressional statute simply because he thinks it advances the wrong policy.  To do so violates the very core of his constitutional duties.

As  Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales notes, the move is both “political” and “well short of what we need as a country.”  He told Fox News in a recent interview,

Substantively…it fails to deal with securing the border, visa over-stayers, enforcing tougher work place enforcement, and the millions of adults that came into the country illegally as adults.

Procedurally…it’s bad timing because it’s being done during what [Gonzales] calls “political silly season.”

“Rightly or wrongly, it is viewed as political, given the fact that we’re in an election season, and this is something that he could have done, certainly, well before now,” he said.

It is political, though; it doesn’t only look like one.  It’s naked vote pandering.  This “fix” is only temporary, as Obama himself admits; one President’s EO can be rescinded by another.  Moreover, what is it that Obama is saying to Americans and to those who come here from other countries?  He’s saying, as Gonzales emphasizes, that laws are what Obama says they are:

…by selectively failing to enforce the law faithfully he’s not doing his job making sure all laws are faithfully executed.

There’s that violation of a promise thing, again.  And

…there are things that should be done in conjunction to reassure everyone that not only are we a compassionate nation in taking care of these kids, but we’re a nation of laws, and that we enforce our laws.

Gonzalez is being polite, though.  Obama’s vote pandering by giving amnesty to some illegal aliens does nothing actually to address wither of the nation’s problems in this context: our immigration difficulties or our problem of what to do with the existing population of illegal aliens.

No effort has been made at all by Obama to address that overall problem of immigration into America: securing our borders (although, he is actively suing states to prevent them from doing so within the framework of existing Federal law); making it easier for foreigners to enter our country legally, and to stay here longer (e.g., once they’ve graduated from college, they have to leave; when the time limit on any other entry permit has expired, they must leave; when their work visas have expired, they must leave; etc.  In the meantime, it takes weeks to months to get a green card or to convert an existing visa to one, and other visas are shamefully quota-ed); or to deal with the existing population of illegal aliens—a problem for which Congressman Gutierrez and Senator Rubio, as I mentioned above, have good beginning ideas.

Nor does this address the millions of Americans—citizens all—who are out of work today, or are badly underemployed.  This Obama Amnesty Program adds an additional roughly 800,000 individuals to that pile (they are “required” by his Amnesty Program to apply for work permits, which are good for two years; although, in truth, there seems to be no requirement actually to apply for work with those permits)—where will they fit in the millions-long queue?  If they go to the end of the line, what good will the work permit do them beyond allowing the fiction of their remaining in the US “legally?”  Will the work permit then make them eligible for 99 weeks (nearly those two years) of unemployment insurance (or the reduced duration, should the Democrats actually allow the current 99 weeks to expire without extension)?  On the nickels of the states forced to harbor these people?

And there’s more.  Whose definition of “significant misdemeanor” will apply, and what is an example of such a thing?  The illegal aliens already have committed one significant illegal action: they’re in the country illegally.

In the context of this post, that they were brought here without the capacity to decide for themselves whether they wanted to commit this offense certainly might be cause for mitigation.  But we can’t forget that, having reached their age of majority, they certainly did have the capacity to decide for themselves whether they wanted to continue the (now their own) offense.  However, we also cannot forget the power of family ties, the developed community ties, their childhood histories, and so on.  Plainly, for the children and young adults in this situation, a solution will not be easy.  But that puts a premium on solving the illegal alien problem as a whole, and not just layering on epicycles of special case treatments whose aggregation will doom the whole orrery to catastrophic failure.

Finally, as Senator Lindsey Graham (R, SC) said,

I think it’s pretty clear there are 10 million illegal immigrants not affected by this.  What about them?  I don’t think it’s a brilliant move for a president of the United States to tell a federal agency to stop enforcing a law.

And as Governor Mitt Romney pointed out, in an echo of Gonzales,

If he felt serious about this he should have taken action when he had a Democrat House and Senate, but he didn’t.

In the end, though, I don’t think Americans of Hispanic heritage are as stupid as Obama thinks they are.

Marco Rubio’s Immigration Reform

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Senator Marco Rubio (R, FL) has an idea for immigration, one that focuses on the children of illegal aliens:

The first step I’m trying to make is to deal with children basically that were brought here at a very young age through no fault of their own, find themselves here undocumented.… All I’m trying to do is to help these kids do right what their parents did wrong.

and it looks like this.  The time durations, at this point, are vague as Senator Rubio says these still are being developed as he works toward enough Senate sponsorship to bring it to the floor for debate.  If these general criteria are met,

  • high school graduate
  • no criminal record
  • been in the US for a certain period of time and came here before a certain age
  • invested in our society

then these children, now high school graduates, would be eligible to apply for a non-immigrant visa.  This visa would enable the holder to obtain a driver’s license but not to vote.  This visa also would enable the holder to stay in the US legally to complete his education—e.g., go to college.

The “certain age” requirement is intended to include young teenagers and children but exclude older teenagers and adults—i.e., those in a position to exercise a choice about whether to enter the US illegally would be ineligible, but those who were ” brought here by their parents or by circumstances” would be eligible.

Senator Rubio discriminates this from amnesty in a couple of ways.

There’s a difference that we’ve long recognized in this country, for example, in the case of refugees, between the people who have chosen to break the law and be here illegally and those who were either brought here by their parents or by circumstances[.]

Moreover, unlike amnesty, a green card would not automatically be awarded to a non-immigrant visa holder.  Only after the non-immigrant visa holder has been in the US, acting as a productive member of his community, for a number of years after obtaining this visa, would the holder would be eligible to apply for a green card, if he wished.  He would have to do so, though, through then-existing channels; there would be no special pathway either for the green card or for citizenship.

This is an outline of a plan, and as he notes, it’s a first step.  It doesn’t address the question of the adult illegal aliens, nor does it address the other two legs of proper immigration reform: securing our borders and making it far easier for immigrants to enter our country legally.  However, this is a good start, and it’s well worth supporting.

Another Musing on Immigration

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Juliana Gruenwald, in a National Journal piece, reports that Senators Mark Warner (D, VA), Chris Coons (D, DE), Jerry Moran (R, KS) and Marco Rubio (R, FL) are proposing an immigration bill—Start-up Act 2.0—that would create two new visas.

One visa would make it easier for foreign students who’ve gained American schools’ post-graduate STEM degrees to remain in the US after graduation.  These folks also would be eligible for permanent residency if they then remained employed in a STEM field for the next five years (and presumably eligible for citizenship, but this visa is separate from that).

The other visa would be for the roughly 75,000 skilled legal immigrants per year who start a business in the US, employ Americans, and invest or raise capital in the US.  This entrepreneur visa would provide another pathway to permanent residence and eventually to citizenship.

This is a step in the right direction; however, it isn’t enough by itself, and it’s muddled by inclusions that, while important in their own right, have nothing to do with immigration.

It isn’t enough because it only addresses one narrow aspect of one part of a three-part immigration problem.  I wrote earlier about those three parts; some of that is quoted here for convenience:

Most modern Conservatives agree that our borders need to be secured, including against illegal immigration.  This need is based on…the right of any nation—the right of any society in their social compact—to determine for themselves who they will allow into their nation: no foreign entity has an inherent right to enter another nation without that nation’s permission….

There are two additional aspects to immigration, and if these are not also solved, the immigration matter will continue to be a serious risk to our national security.  These two aspects are what to do about the population of illegal aliens currently present in the United States, and what to do about legal entry for immigrants into our country.

[W]e need to remove the impediments to legal immigration, we need to eliminate the quotas that put an upper bound on the number of talented who want to work here, on the number of foreign-born who are educated in our Universities and want to stay past their college days. … It simply shouldn’t be that hard to enter the United States legally.  There should be border crossing stations every mile along our border….

These visas are, as I said, a step in the right direction, but the idea falls short on two fronts: it adds to the breadth and complexity of the visa bureaucracy without addressing the overall problem of legal entry for all immigrants, and it doesn’t address at all the other two aspects of our immigration problem.

The muddle consists of tax and regulation clauses that the Senators consider politically necessary to get the bill passed—or at least publicly debated in Senator Harry Reid’s (D, NV) Senate.  Among these extraneous items are:

  • a tax credit intended to encourage start-ups to engage in R&D,
  • a tax exemption that would eliminate capital gains taxes on investments in start-ups held for at least five years, and
  • a requirement that any new regulation with an impact of $100 million or more be subject to a cost-benefit analysis prior to approval.

These are important in their own right, and the need to include these things, which are irrelevant to an immigration bill, in an immigration bill is a testament to the partisan, obstructionist nature of the Democrats’ hold on the Senate.

The tax questions are better handled in a tax reform bill that moves to a flat tax and maintains that flatness by eliminating subsidies of all types.  The isolated regulation item is better handled in a separate regulatory reform bill that eliminates most of the existing regulations (much of which are mutually conflicting, much more of which are obsolete) and that returns regulation generation to the Congress as the most direct means of forcing that body actively to satisfy in its regulatory oversight responsibility.

The Senators’ immigration bill is well worth supporting, but only if it’s made clear that this is only an opening salvo in the struggle seriously to reform our immigration process.

Immigration Promises

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President Obama said Saturday he would seek to tackle immigration policy in the first year of a second term.  He told Univision

This is something I care deeply about.  It’s personal to me.

On the other hand, Candidate Obama promised to tackle immigration policy in his first year in office.  In a September 2008 speech to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, he promised

This election is about the 12 million people living in the shadows, the communities taking immigration enforcement into their own hand. They are counting on us to stop the hateful rhetoric filling our airwaves, and rise above the fear, and rise above the demagoguery, and finally enact comprehensive immigration reform.

He then went on to spend the first year and a half of his term fighting exclusively for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Speaking of which, Obama secured passage of PPACA through his purchase of Congressman Luis Gutierrez’ (D, IL) vote and the votes of his Congressional Hispanic Caucus with a promise of immigration reform.  Congressman Gutierrez:

I’ve spent the past week speaking at length with the President and his staff.  …  I believe we have a commitment to move forward on a comprehensive immigration reform package as soon as possible.

Having welched on these two commitments, why should we believe him a third time?

Or is this another case of “Once I’m reelected, I’m no longer accountable, and I can do anything I want?”

Government and Innovation

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Government’s role is to create an environment within which men can prosper in accordance with their own efforts and the degree of those efforts.  Thus, legitimate government sets laws that prevent one from cheating another and laws that require each to honor the contracts to which they agreed.  Legitimate governments do very little more than that.  Government does not have, for instance, a legitimate role in determining what those contracts must accomplish, or how they must be structured.  Nor does government have a legitimate role in inuring any of us from the failure of our efforts: it is, in fact, from those failures that our enterprises grow stronger for the next effort.  It is in the fermentation vats of competition, unconstrained by government, that innovation occurs.

Why, then, is what used to be a uniquely American skill of innovation moving apace overseas and no longer occurring here?  Here’s an example of this failure, and it illustrates an answer.  Despite our need to become energy independent, for a range of reasons I’ll not go into here, and despite our Progressives’ push to move away from coal, oil, and gas as the primary source of our energy, nuclear power innovation is moving to the People’s Republic of China, at the behest of American innovators.  In this illustration, I’ll leave aside the question of helping the PRC obtain technological superiority over us (which is troubling in itself).

The Washington Post reports that a startup called TerraPower has developed a nuclear power breakthrough that involves traveling wave reactor technology and this technology’s ability to use depleted uranium to power a nuclear plant for decades without need of refueling or waste removal.  However, instead of looking to deploy this technology in the US, TerraPower, heavily backed by Bill Gates of Microsoft fame, is talking to the PRC government about selling its technology there.  How does this work?

For one thing—for the driving thing—innovators still are human, and humans still can go anywhere they like.  And humans, being humans, are going to go where it’s easiest to follow their dream, easiest to satisfy their own drives and imperatives.  With business, and especially high-tech business, those places are where the conditions conducive to development and growth are most available.

The US’ rules for permitting and environmental studies, especially for nuclear power, and the US’ litigation environment that encourages lawsuits over any perceived slight, whether environmental, social, or something else all serve to drive the costs of bringing innovation from the laboratory into the market to astronomical heights.  Although, in TerraPower’s case, this might be irrelevant: “Current U.S. rules don’t even cover the type of technology TerraPower hopes to use.”

Additionally, the US’ visa rules are outright stupid.  We educate highly talented and motivated engineers and scientists, and then, because they’re aliens, we send them back to their home countries, even if they want to stay—the quotas are too low and for the few allowed, it takes too long for the converted visas to be issued.  Then, getting talented, motivated, already educated—and experienced—foreign engineers and scientists (back) into the US also is a Herculean task, made worse by not having allowed those freshly trained to stay: the quotas are set too low, and the few authorized visas are slow to be issued.  In either case, why should we have quotas at all?  We should welcome these people with open arms, as we did with the German scientists after WWII, who built our space program.

On the other hand, the PRC has programs like “Thousand Foreign Talents” to attract the world’s best and brightest into China.  And they have an active, empirically visible interest in tech and in having an environment conducive to development—and deployment.  While the US is shrinking its satellite and exploration programs and withdrawing from manned space efforts, while hoping for small change from companies like SpaceX (which NASA is in the process of stiffing due to budgetary problems), China is accelerating its programs, including intending to put a man on the moon by 2020—a feat we’ve been too timid to think about trying for 40 years.

As the WaPo concludes

The lesson is clear: The U.S. government needs to be just as aggressive as the Chinese in creating incentives for entrepreneurs and technology start-ups to grow and mature. At a time when the U.S. is downplaying efforts to attract and retain foreign entrepreneurs and flirting with legislation that could slow the pace of digital innovation, it is strangely China that is proving to be more proactive in creating the conditions for innovators to thrive. Bill Gates is one of America’s great entrepreneurial legends. Something feels wrong about seeing him launch a new chapter in his tech career in China and not the U.S.

Hmm….