Anybody who has been following our federally-created immigration crisis for any length of time knows that Democrats years ago went over to the Dark Side from their previously held position as the champion of American workers.
Read more about Dave Gorak: Democrats don't want to end illegal immigration
Any DACA amnesty must come with safeguards to prevent another wave of illegal immigration, i.e. and an end to Chain Migration and mandatory E-Verify for all employers.
Legalizing 2 million illegal immigrant “Dreamers” would cost the government $25.9 billion over the next decade, as those now-legal people would claim more tax, education and other benefits they haven’t been able to get before, the Congressional Budget Office said Friday.
The CBO also said newly legalized Dreamers would sponsor 80,000 more immigrants to enter the country as part of “chain migration.”
Immigrant-rights activists have argued that legalizing Dreamers would be a financial boon to the country, but the CBOand the Joint Committee on Taxation suggested otherwise, saying that while they would pay somewhat higher taxes in to the government, they would take far more out of it.
The findings could be a blow to activists who have demanded the bill be included in any year-end spending deal. Congress already struggles to find offsets for other spending, and digging a hole more than $25 billion deeper could be difficult.
Jon Feere is the Legal Policy Analyst at the Center for Immigration Studies.
For months, some Republicans in the House of Representatives have been promising to introduce immigration legislation that would legalize a significant portion of illegal aliens living in the United States. Though no text has been released, one of the more high-profile GOP proposals is known as the Kids Act, an amnesty that would provide legal status to an as yet unknown number of presumably younger illegal aliens.
Many questions about how the Kids Act might operate remain unanswered. But if the amnesty is similar to the often-introduced but always-rejected Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, it may contain a number of problematic provisions that raise the following questions:
1. Will the Kids Act Amnesty Only Benefit Minors?Advocates of the DREAM Act and the Kids Act sell their amnesty by focusing entirely on sympathetic young children. But even though the "M" in the acronymous DREAM Act stands for "Minors", the amnesty has never been limited to people 17 years of age or younger and most beneficiaries would, in fact, be adults. While some versions of the DREAM Act restricted recipients to illegal aliens under age 35, the most recent version had no upper age limit. But advocates know that infants and toddlers make for better marketing and so children are exploited in the push to legalize millions of adult illegal aliens who are legally and morally culpable of various immigration-related crimes.
The age of initial entry is also an issue. While an infant has certainly not begun to identify with a nationality, teenagers certainly identify with their homelands and have embraced their languages and cultures, not least through attending school there for many years. In other words, their identities have already been formed. To suggest that such individuals "know no other home than the United States", as amnesty advocates do, is simply not accurate for those who enter illegally at an older age.
It is possible that the Kids Act will only benefit minors, but if it involves dishonest marketing it will make the amnesty a tough sell. Thus far, the proposal sounds like it is being designed to convert President Obama's lawless Deferred Action decree — which legalizes illegal aliens as old as 30 — into actual law. Instead of going after Obama for making an end run around Congress and the Constitution, the GOP is apparently following his lead, thereby encouraging similar lawlessness in the future.
