Asserting a legal and constitutional authority he himself said he did not have, President Obama is going rogue, issuing an executive amnesty to 4 to 5 million illegal aliens. He will order the U.S. government not to enforce the law against these 5 million, and declare that they are to be exempt from deportation and granted green cards.
Where did Obama get his 4-5 million figure, not 2-4 million, or 5-7 million? Nowhere in law, but plucked out of his own mind, as to what he can get away with. Barack Obama just felt it was about right. Thus does our constitutional law professor-president “faithfully execute” the laws of the United States he has twice swore to uphold?
Our rogue president has crossed an historic line, and so has the republic. Future presidents will cite the “Obama precedent” when they declare they will henceforth not enforce this or that law, because of a prior commitment to some noisy constituency.
We have just taken a monumental step away from republicanism toward Caesarism. For this is rule by diktat, the rejection of which sparked the American Revolution.
The political, psychological, and moral effects of Obama’s action will be dramatic. Sheriffs, border patrol, and immigration authorities, who have put their lives on the line to secure our broken borders, have been made to look like fools. Resentment and cynicism over Obama’s action will be deeply corrosive to all law enforcement. Businessmen who obeyed the law and refused to hire illegals, hiring Americans and legal immigrants instead, and following U.S. and state law on taxes, wages, and withholding, also look like fools today.
Obama’s action makes winners of the scofflaws and hustlers.
Bosses who hired illegals off the books will also receive de facto amnesty. La Raza is celebrating. But, make no mistake, a corrupt corporate crowd is also publicly relieved and privately elated.
Immigrants who waited in line for years to come to America, and those waiting still, have egg on their faces. Why, they are saying to themselves, were we so stupid as to obey U.S. laws, when it is the border-jumpers who are now on the way to residency and citizenship?
When the world hears of the Obama amnesty, millions more from Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East will be coming. And if they cannot get in legally, they will walk in, or fly in, and overstay their visas. Why not? It works.
That this action will be as much a part of Obama’s legacy as Obamacare is certain. The unanswered question is how the Obama amnesty will be remembered by history. His aides think that it will be seen as a second Emancipation Proclamation. Perhaps.
But with this amnesty Obama takes custody of and responsibility for the entire illegal population. He is the patron saint of illegal aliens. And for what they do, he will be held accountable, as was Jimmy Carter for the Marielitos Castro sent and Carter welcomed.
If the amnestied illegals contribute to the drug trade and violent crime, that will be Obama’s legacy to his country. If they turn up disproportionately on the welfare rolls, exploding state and federal deficits, that will be Obama’s legacy. If this amnesty is followed by a new invasion across the border America cannot control, that, too, will be Obama’s gift to his countrymen.
One wonders. Will poor and working-class blacks and whites, Hispanics and Asians, welcome this unleashed competition from the amnestied illegals, for jobs where the wages never seem to rise?
In the four decades before JFK, the nation had a pause in legal immigration. During that pause, the Germans, Irish, Italians, Jews, Poles, Greeks, and Slav immigrants who had come in from 1890-1920, and their children and grandchildren, were fully assimilated. They had become not only U.S. citizens, but also identifiably American.
The Melting Pot had worked. We had become one nation and one people, almost all speaking the same language, and steeped in the same history, heroes, culture, literature, and faiths.
Today, in 2014, after an influx of perhaps 50 million in 50 years, legal and illegal, no longer from Northwest Europe, or Europe at all, but Latin America, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, of every race, color, creed, culture, and language we seem less a nation than some mammoth Mall of America. An economy, but not a country.
Running in 2008, Obama said he intended to become a “transformational president.” With this decision, he succeeds.
He has accelerated and ensured the remaking of America. Now when the wives and children of the illegals arrive, and their extended families apply for and receive visas, and bring their wives and children, we will become the Third World country of Obama’s dream, no more a Western nation.
But then the community organizer did not much like that old America.
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of the new book “The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose From Defeat to Create the New Majority.” Copyright 2014 Creators.com.