HUMPHRIES: No seat at the table for taxpayers

HUMPHRIES: No seat at the table for taxpayers


By Rusty Humphries
Friday, August 1, 2014

I’m writing this from Peace Arch Park on the northern border of the U.S., about two hours north of Seattle and an hour south of Vancouver, British Columbia. Looking around, I don’t see a big wave of illegal immigrants trying to cross our border by the carload.Illegal aliens have been easier to find in Washington, D.C. They’re picketing the White House. They’re demanding a seat at the table during meetings about immigration policy. Naturally, they want more relaxed immigration enforcement and fewer deportations, which is a tough demand to meet, because deportations are pretty close to zero as it is. But there’s a lot of pressure for tougher measures in response to the massive surge of aliens coming across the border from Central America.


Why weren’t trucks deployed to scoop up these illegal alien protesters and deport them immediately? Well, nothing like that could ever happen, because we don’t really treat immigration policies as “laws” and we don’t treat the people who violate them as “criminals.”


Geraldo Rivera complained about that on the Fox News show “Outnumbered.” He said, “Every time you say ‘illegals,’ it’s like fingernails on a blackboard,” because the aliens are “essentially law-abiding, hard-working people,” and “the only law they’ve ever broken is to come across the border without documentation.” It’s time to shave the ‘stache, Geraldo. It must be sucking the blood and oxygen out of your brain!


So, do the rest of us get a “Get Out of Jail Free” card for willfully breaking a law?


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Faith leaders and activists participate in a demonstration in front of the ... more >

These Illegal aliens are foreign citizens and are demanding an active role in shaping American immigration law? When do taxpaying Americans get a seat at the table?
Maybe all of this wouldn’t be quite so frustrating if law-abiding citizens weren’t buried under a mountain of taxes, regulations, paperwork, and now lawless executive orders from the White House. It’s hard work to be law-abiding when there are hundreds of thousands of laws surrounding you. You probably violate some of them every day, albeit without realizing it. Our government is huge, and while it wastes a lot of the trillion dollars it spends, it also uses that money to expand its power and reduce your liberty.


Huge migrations across the border also might be a bit less of a problem if we didn’t have a huge welfare state. That’s one of the big differences between modern America and the old Ellis Island days.


Try telling the Washington elite that your taxes are too high, and you’ll be called “greedy.” Complain that heavy-handed regulations are preventing you from starting a small business, and you’ll be called a “predator” who just wants to screw over the little guy. Meanwhile, the big corporations that sometimes do give the little guy a bad deal are doing just fine, better than ever. They’ve got political influence, subsidies and bailouts.


The whole Washington racket would fall apart if the people who work hard and play by the rules had anything to say about the rules. Everything is presented to us as an offer we can’t refuse, a demand we can’t resist, a crisis we have to resolve, the “settled law of the land.” Everybody else gets to do as they please. Why not let people who ignore our immigration laws sit in on meetings with politicians who ignore the U.S. Constitution? The two groups have a lot in common. But nobody steering our ship of state has much in common with the people who are pulling the oars.


Do you think we can change direction or is it too late?

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Americans through apathy exercised for 30 plus years now have a rough row to hoe. We have to stay abreast of what is going on,, as well as what is not being attended to. We put the Houses feet close enough to the fire that they were able to feel the heat. That was a victory in one small battle. Victories as that one will have to be accomplished scores if not hundreds more times to cause a successful fruition of our goals! Do not allow your lance to lay idle!

Amnesty Isn't Free

http://media.townhall.com/Townhall//colpics/carroll.gif Conn Carroll | Aug 07, 2014

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The Washington Post's intrepid reporter Greg Sargent scored a big interview with one of the architects of President Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, former-Department of Homeland Security general counsel John Sandweg. Here is how Sandweg explains the legal justification for Obama's infamous temporary-amnesty program:

The president is doing what every single law enforcement agency across the country does: Put in place rational priorities to ensure that limited resources are focused on the populations that pose the greatest threat to public safety and border security. Every single law enforcement agency in America struggles with the fact that their resources are not conditioned to cover every single violation of the law. What prosecutors and police chiefs have done for years is implement enforcement priorities. That’s what the president has done.

So Obama's entire legal justification for his DACA program rests on the premise that a broad based invitation for illegal immigrants to apply for temporary amnesty ensures "that limited resources are focused on the populations that pose the greatest threat to public safety and border security."
But we already know, for a fact, that DACA did the exact opposite. Instead of conserving limited resources, DACA stretched DHS capabilities and degraded its ability to enforce good congressionally approved immigration law.
How do we know this? Well for starters, just look at the DACA application* which requires a $465 filing fee. If DACA is such a saver of DHS resources, then why is Obama charging generally cash-strapped illegal immigrants $500?
More importantly, we know from subsequent reporting that Obama underpriced the cost of administering his temporary amnesty program. The New York Times reports:

Many thousands of Americans seeking green cards for foreign spouses or other immediate relatives have been separated from them for a year or more because of swelling bureaucratic delays at a federal immigration agency in recent months.

The long waits came when the agency, Citizenship and Immigration Services, shifted attention and resources to a program President Obama started in 2012 to give deportation deferrals to young undocumented immigrants, according to administration officials and official data. …

Until recently, an American could obtain a green card for a spouse, child or parent — probably the easiest document in the immigration system — in five months or less. But over the past year, waits for approvals of those resident visas stretched to 15 months, and more than 500,000 applications became stuck in the pipeline, playing havoc with international moves and children’s schools and keeping families apart.

(emphasis added) In other words, instead of ensuring that limited resources were saved so that the DHS could better enforce good immigration law, Obama's DACA program shifted existed resources away from those programs thus degrading DHS's immigration law enforcement capabilities.
Amnesties are never free. They take huge sums of cash and employee time to administer. If DACA's legal justification is built on the premise that it enables DHS to better enforce the law by conserving limited resources, then it is built on a lie.
* Never before his any president ever created an application process to apply for deferred action, which all presidents before Obama used sparingly.


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