Obama’s Backdoor Amnesty

Matthew Vadum

The Obama administration’s new immigration amnesty is a purely political calculation intended to shore up the president’s sagging support among Latino voters.

President Obama has a habit of not enforcing laws he doesn’t like.

He doesn’t like the Defense of Marriage Act so he won’t defend it in the court. He doesn’t like energy exploration so he has ignored court order after court order that would allow deep-water oil drilling. He doesn’t like the free speech protections in the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC so he’s planning an executive order to undermine it.

Now we can add immigration laws to the list.

But Obama cannot come out and state baldly that he is ignoring the law of the land, a move that diminishes respect for the rule of law and shows prospective illegal immigrants that America doesn’t care if they respect the nation’s borders. He has to try to convince the American public that his refusal to enforce the law is somehow in the best interests of the nation. That’s exactly what he’s done.

Justifying the new, thinly veiled immigration amnesty, President Obama continues to draw on the teachings of Rules for Radicals​ author Saul Alinsky​.

Alinsky, the neo-communist father of modern community organizing whose tactics Obama taught in college, wrote that “you do what you can with what you have and clothe it with moral garments.”

According to Alinsky’s tenth rule “of the ethics of means and ends,” all great leaders lie and use moralistic propaganda in order to accomplish their goals. They invoke “‘moral principles’ to cover naked self-interest.” They must do this because “[a]ll effective actions require the passport of morality.”

It irritates President Obama that Congress has not passed his beloved Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act so he has decided to bypass the nation’s lawmaking body, ignore existing law, and simply decree it.
But in a constitutional republic like the United States of America, the chief executive dare not admit that he is usurping the power of the legislative branch. So Obama’s instrumentalities must maintain the fiction that he is not implementing the DREAM Act by executive fiat.

In a letter addressed to the principal sponsor of the proposed DREAM Act, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano dangled a moral garment. She made it clear her department will do nothing new about enforcing the nation’s immigration laws but argued that the resources freed up by granting amnesty to large swaths of illegals will allow the government to deport criminal aliens more swiftly.

Napolitano denied the administration’s action will “provide categorical relief for any group” and said it “will not alleviate the need for passage of the DREAM Act or for larger reforms to our immigration laws.”

Never mind that the criteria for relief from deportation largely mirror the DREAM Act.

The new rules cover those who have been apprehended and are facing deportation but have not been ordered by a judge to leave the country. It’s not yet clear how many illegal aliens will be affected by the decision but illegal immigrant students, who could have received green cards under the DREAM Act, are expected to be the main beneficiaries of the policy change.

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Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez (D-Ill.), a member of the socialist-dominated Congressional Progressive Caucus, practically admitted the DREAM Act is now the de facto law of the United States.

“Today is a victory not just for immigrants but for the American people as a whole because it makes no sense to deport DREAM Act students and others who can make great contributions to America and pose no threat,” Gutierrez said. “It is not in our national interest to send away young people who were raised in the U.S. and have been educated here and want only to contribute to this country’s success. “

Implementation of the DREAM Act has long been the goal of a galaxy of leftist pressure groups including National Council of La Raza, ACORN, George Soros​’s Media Matters for America, By Any Means Necessary, MEChA, National Day Laborer Organizing Network, and the Hugo Chavez-funded CASA de Maryland.

These radical groups will continue to press President Obama for a broader immigration amnesty. And the president will pull out his dog-eared copy of Rules for Radicals and figure out how to do their bidding.