Mass Illegal Alien Amnesty Violates Our Founding Principles

By Michelle Malkin
MichelleMalkin.com

Stop them.

The Senate will continue debate on S.744, the Teddy Kennedy Memorial Open Borders Act, this afternoon. A vote on the Schumer-Corker-Hoeven amendment is scheduled at 5:30 p.m. Eastern.

These are the principles that must guide the federal government’s immigration, border security, and entrance policies.

The Preamble to the U.S. Constitution:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Article IV, Section IV of the U.S. Constitution:

The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.

The presidential oath of office in accordance with Article II, Section I of the U.S. Constitution:

“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.”

The Oaths Clause, Article VI of the U.S. Constitution:

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution….

The U.S. Constitution does not say that the paramount duty of government is to “Celebrate Diversity” or to “embrace multiculturalism” or to give “every willing worker” in the world a job. The Premable to the U.S. Constitution does not say the Republic was established to keep illegal alien families together, provide illegal alien college tuition discounts, or promote immigrant welfare magnets. It says the Constitution was established “to provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty.”

Our founding fathers recognized that fulfilling these fundamental duties is impossible without an orderly immigration and entrance system that discriminates in favor of those willing, as George Washington put it, to “get assimilated to our customs, measures, [and] laws.”

Assimilation, not amnesty, is at the heart of the American experiment.

And “secure the border, period” — not “secure the border first” as a pesky precondition to a mass illegal alien bailout — is an ongoing, never-ending obligation of our government.

Border security is not something you finish and hastily check off a list in order to move on to another politically correct campaign promise. It is the most basic duty of government and it remains the federal government’s biggest failure.

Reminder: Obama’s idea of “smarter enforcement” is no enforcement.

The bipartisan open-borders lobby bleats about “fairness” for the “11 million” living “in the shadows.” But America owes border violators and visa overstayers nothing. And it’s about time someone in Washington say it out loud.

I repeat:

President Obama and the bipartisan Gang of Eight in Washington who want to create a “pathway to citizenship” for millions of illegal aliens have sent a message loud and clear to those who follow the rules: You’re chumps!

Have you patiently waited for months and years for the State Department and Department of Homeland Security to slog through your application? You’re chumps!

Have you paid thousands of dollars in travel, legal and medical fees to abide by the thicket of entry, employment, health and processing regulations? You’re chumps!

Have you studied for your naturalization test, taken the oath of allegiance to heart, embraced our time-tested principle of the rule of law, and demonstrated that you will be a financially independent, productive citizen? You’re chumps!

Unrepentant amnesty peddlers on both sides of the aisle admit their plan is all about votes and power. Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain continues his craven, futile chase for the Hispanic bloc. Illinois Democratic Rep. Luis Gutierrez is openly salivating at the prospect of millions of new illegal aliens — future Democratic Party dependents of the Nanny State — who could be eligible for Obamacare and a plethora of other government benefits despite clear prohibitions against them.

These cynical pols insist that the rest of law-abiding Americans and law-abiding permanent residents must support Washington’s push to “do something” because “11 million people are living in the shadows.”

To which I say: So? There are 23 million Americans out of work. Why aren’t they Washington’s top priority anymore? Didn’t both parties once pledge that j-o-b-s for unemployed and underemployed Americans was Job No. 1? Why is the very first major legislative push of 2013 another mass amnesty/voter drive/entitlement expansion?

If Washington is really concerned about people “living in the shadows,” how about prioritizing the jaw-dropping backlog of 500,000-plus fugitive deportee cases. These are more than a half-million illegal aliens who have been apprehended, who had their day in immigration court, who have been ordered to leave the country, and who were then released and absconded into the ether. Poof!

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, pols pretended to get serious about fixing the broken deportation system and enacted absconder apprehension initiatives to track down these national security risks. But over the past dozen years, only 100,000 out of 600,000-plus fugitive illegal aliens targeted by the program have been found. Why isn’t the search and removal of these repeat offenders more important than giving “11 million people living in the shadows” a “pathway to citizenship”?

Question: If border security and immigration enforcement are truly a priority to our elected officials, why must these two basic government responsibilities be tethered to benefits for line-jumping illegal aliens? See whether any politician can answer without sputtering about “11 million people living in the shadows” or invoking the over-worn race card.

(By the way, we all know that moldy “11 million” statistic can’t be right. Open borders groups have cited it for nearly 15 years as amnesty measure after amnesty measure attracted new generations of illegal aliens to the country.)

You know who else deserves more attention and compassion than “11 million people living in the shadows”? The 4.6 million individuals around the world who legally applied for sponsored green cards and followed the established legal immigration process. They’ve been shunted aside while the Obama administration ushers illegal alien “DREAM” waiver winners to the front of the line.

As Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies points out: “It is clear that there is no way the roughly one million or more potential Dreamers can be accommodated by (the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service) without noticeably slowing down the processing of legal immigrants (emphasis added). The agency already processes six million applications a year without the amnesty add-ons.

There have been nearly a dozen major amnesty laws, affecting at least five million illegal aliens, passed since the Reagan 1986 amnesty. These beneficiaries and their families have crowded out legal immigrants and increased their application waiting times in untold ways. GOP Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas asked the Obama administration last summer to disclose data on how much the DREAM waiver amnesty alone has affected adjudication/processing times for everyone else. The White House has failed to answer the request.

Want a reality check? Not one of the past federal amnesties was associated with a decline in illegal immigration. Instead, the number of illegal aliens in the U.S. has tripled since 1986. The total effect of the amnesties was even larger because relatives later joined amnesty recipients, and this number was multiplied by an unknown number of children born to amnesty recipients who then acquired automatic U.S. citizenship.

Hopelessly naive (or stubbornly self-deluded) freshman GOP Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida insists that any new recipients of the Gang of Eight’s Grand Pander scheme will have to “go to the back of the line and wait behind everybody who applied before them, the right way.” Rubio emphasizes to conservative talk show hosts that there will be background checks and rigorous vetting.

But as I’ve reported for the past two decades, the background check process has been corrupted under both Democratic and Republican administrations. In the 1990s, the Clinton administration turned immigration policy into a massive Democratic voter recruitment machine through the Citizenship USA program. Naturalization officers simply abandoned background checks wholesale. In 2003, an INS center in Laguna Niguel solved the massive backlog problem by putting tens of thousands of applications through a shredder. And in 2006, I exposed how some high-immigrant regions rewarded adjudication officers with bonuses for rubber-stamping as many applications as possible without regard to security.

You want “comprehensive immigration reform”? Start with reliable adjudications, fully cleared backlogs, consistent interior enforcement, working background checks for the existing caseload, and efficient and effective deportation policies that punish law-breakers and do right by law-abiders.

And please don’t pretend that piling millions of new illegal aliens onto an already overwhelmed system is going to fix a darned thing. Chumps.

The lack of moral and constitutional clarity on this fundamental issue of national sovereignty is no accident. Open-borders obfuscation is calculated, deliberate, and treacherous. When you don’t stand for foundational principles, you will fall for anything.

Upholding the rule of law and the Constitution, not subverting it for electoral gain, is the sworn duty of our politicians in Washington.

That is the time-tested gold standard by which to judge the slush fund-packed, security-undermining pander package masquerading as “immigration reform” in the Senate today.

Tell your senators to abide by their oaths of office and act in America’s best interests, not George Soros’s or Grover Norquist’s or La Raza’s or the American Immigration Lawyers Association’s.

Tell your senators to stop making fools of themselves and our country.

Tell your senators to vote no on amnesty and get our house in order.

I repeat: SchMcGRubio and Company want us to trust them with a thousand new pages of phony triggers, left-wing pork, and make-believe assimilation gestures. Trust them? Hell, no. There’s only one course for citizens who believe in upholding the Constitution and protecting the American dream: Stop them.

CALL NOW: (202) 224-3121.