Dave Gorak: Chicago's business community and mayor dance to the music of illegal alien lobby

Missing in any discussion of President Trump’s executive order threatening to withhold federal funding to the nation’s 300 “sanctuary cities” like Chicago is this question:

Why has a nation of laws allowed itself to deteriorate to the point where people who have deliberately violated our immigration laws are able to arrogantly say to sovereign Americans, “We are here illegally and there is nothing you can do about it.”

You don’t have to be a NASA flight engineer to figure this out.

They are able to do it thanks to pandering elected government officials like Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who although sworn to uphold the law, prefer to dance to the music of a greedy business community that gluttonizes at the cheap-labor trough.

Equally complicit is a mainstream media that years ago abandoned their responsibility to give their audiences accurate coverage of a public policy issue that affects everyone, not just “immigrants.”

Mr. Emanuel, who is thumping his chest and promising that Chicago will remain a “welcoming city,” isn’t winning many popularity contests these days.  So it is only fair he be given a little slack and acknowledge that he is not responsible for initially hanging out the welcome sign for illegal aliens. The city’s sanctuary policy began in 1985, when Mayor Harold Washington signed an executive order prohibiting city agencies from enforcing federal immigration laws; four years later Mayor Richard M. Daley affirmed the order that went on to become law in 2006.

The Better Government Assn. (BGA) recently reported that this “immigrant friendly” city that is home to many of Illinois’ estimated 475,000 illegal aliens could lose $3.6 billion in federal money under Trump’s order.

Should Chicago be worried?  Well, that depends on your source of information.  A better way of putting it, perhaps, is something said by a former Chicago District Director of the old Immigration and Naturalization Service:

“If you want to learn about immigration, don’t read newspapers.”

Many mayors across the country are falsely claiming to media scribes that Mr. Trump’s order forces local police to enforce immigration laws.

Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett says local governments are being asked to be “border guards,” while the BGA is telling Chicagoans that the order will punish those “refusing to help . . . to identify and deport undocumented  residents.”

Among the worst examples of such distortion is this lead paragraph in the Christian Science Monitor: “President Trump on Wednesday essentially told police nationwide to start looking for undocumented immigrants and reporting them to federal immigration authorities for deportation.”

Why are these mayors knowingly engaging is such misrepresentation?  In simple terms, they are posturing in order to curry favor with their local “immigrant rights” groups that relentlessly harass and intimate them.

The truth is that the federal government cannot force local law enforcement to enforce immigration laws.

However, if a community prohibits its police from communicating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) e.g., requests for detainers to hold illegal aliens in their custody, or prevents federal agents from do their jobs in those communities, then, yes, it is violating federal law (8 U.S. Code Section 1324.)

But this is not the case in Chicago, so what’s all the media hysteria about other than to give unwarranted credibility to those employers who won’t think twice about replacing qualified American workers with foreigners in order to boost their profit margins.