Obama’s Tangled Immigration Web

NewsMax.com
Monday, 19 Mar 2012 12:32 PM
By James Walsh


Obama hopes to address immigration reform.
(AP Image)

President Barack Obama, in an interview on Univision Radio in February 2012, announced that he still had time in his presidency to figure out unresolved issues like comprehensive immigration reform.

His exact words were, “I’ve got another five years coming up. We’re going to get this done.” Can Hispanics trust the President’s latest boast, when his promises of comprehensive immigration reform and a pathway to citizenship for uncounted millions of illegal aliens have not come to pass?

As a campaigner in 2007-2008, Obama avowed to champion comprehensive immigration reform by legalizing illegal immigrants. To date, he has failed to deliver on his promises to lift immigrants and their children out of the Bush doldrums with the Barack vision of “Hope” and “Change.”

On a daily basis, White House spokespersons join liberal newsmedia in excusing the President’s broken promises by saying they are not due to his own failings but to a myriad of events, including his predecessor’s mistakes, Europe’s mismanagement of the Eurozone, and even the Japanese earthquake.

The failure, they insist, is never Obama’s.

To date, the focus of the President and Congressional Democrats has been on health care and “stimulus” legislation — both of which are proving to be costly failures with the unpaid bill going to struggling middle-class taxpayers. Increasingly, the president’s agenda resembles a sop to his campaign contributors and the liberal base of the Democrat Party, a sop detrimental to the struggling economy.

White House pay-offs to Democratic donors are being documented across the nation from Wall Street to the “Green” boondoggles, such as the Solyndra scam. Even The Washington Post reports that heavy Obama financial backers appear to be the chief recipients of his administration’s largess.

While federal funds flow to big donors, other supporters of the president have not been so fortunate. A prime example is the empty promise of Obama’s immigration reform now being repackaged in 2012 campaign rhetoric.

This time round, however, his empty promises are failing to captivate many Hispanics and other immigrant voting blocks, especially legal immigrants who pay income taxes.

The mounting costs of illegal immigration and its impact on education, health care, and social benefits are a growing concern for all taxpayers.

The president’s platform suggests an unhealthy reliance on redistribution of wealth, class warfare, marginalizing of people of faith, and re-structuring of U.S. culture by means of open-border immigration.

As one Washington, D.C., wag put it, “Deception is the better part of re-election.”

Take, for instance, the president’s education platform that condones the growing numbers of illegal immigrant students stretching school budgets.

Since President Jimmy Carter created the U.S. Department of Education, the agency’s budgets have cost taxpayers a trillion dollars. Many of these dollars are channeled through labor unions, especially the teachers union — the National Education Association (NEA).

Many of these dollars are designated for undocumented students, who according to one immigrant advocate are “economic migrants, not illegal aliens.”

Nevertheless, the “economic migrants” crashing U.S. borders are largely uneducated, unskilled workers, who continue to drain education, health care, and social welfare monies from federal, state, and local budgets.

Today, as President Obama expands federal control over local school districts, taxpayer parents are grading him with an “F” in efficiency but an “A” in governmental intrusion.

Meanwhile performance levels of U.S. public school children continue to fall. Student achievement, especially in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (the STEM courses), is declining to third-world levels.

Democrats complain that more money is needed, but businesses contend that U.S. students, rather than taking STEM courses, are encouraged to enroll in Gender Studies and Ethnic Studies.

Since many U.S. businesses depend on workers trained in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, and since a growing number of U.S. students are incapable of doing much of this 21st century work, employers are seeking exchange students with STEM degrees.

As a result, the nation has a new source of illegal aliens in the form of foreign workers with STEM degrees from U.S. universities, workers whose student visas have expired.

These qualified individuals, who wish to apply their acquired STEM skills in the USA, are finding it difficult to obtain work visas.

It is time to update U.S. immigration laws to accommodate STEM immigrant visa applicants.

In addition, for those foreign laborers willing to work and pay taxes, the United States needs to modernize a guest worker program. Instead, President Obama has announced plans that would enforce stiff visa quotas on skilled aliens while granting amnesty to unskilled aliens.

James H. Walsh was associate general counsel with the U.S. Department of Justice Immigration and Naturalization Service from 1983 to 1994.

source: Obama’s Tangled Immigration Web