Is Obama Right to Grant Young Illegal Immigrants Work Permits? >
Work Permits for Young Immigrants Steal Jobs From Americans
President Obama's policy will hurt to an already struggling workforce
June 19, 2012
Congress approved seven amnesties for illegal aliens between 1986 and 2000. Focusing on compassion for those who broke the law without taking away the jobs magnet only led to more illegal immigration. Every Congress since 2000 has rejected the reward of amnesty.
Now in a constitutionally questionable move, President Barack Obama has decided just to ignore Congress and return to the bad old days of treating symptoms and not the jobs causes of illegal immigration.
[See a collection of political cartoons on immigration.]
The president says he was moved to act out of compassion for the illegal aliens under age 30 who were brought here illegally at a young age and who may not have much connection any longer to their home country because they have been here so long. But he has shown no recognition that the reason these illegal aliens are in this predicament is that the federal government allowed their parents to illegally take jobs from U.S. workers for five, 10, and 15 years.
Neither President Obama nor the congressional Republican leadership will press for a mandatory E-Verify bill to finally prevent illegal aliens from holding payroll jobs. So with the new Obama policy, parents world-round know they can continue to break into our country and steal jobs for long periods, building up compelling stories for the news media to report about their children in hopes of similar amnesties in the future.
Polls suggest that most Americans are sympathetic to suspending deportations of the young illegal aliens. But polling thus far has not asked how voters feel about the president offering work permits for 1-2 million illegal aliens to compete with the 20 million American workers who want a full-time job and can't find one.
[Read the U.S. News Debate: Should Foreign STEM Graduates Get Green Cards?]
Dramatically increasing the supply of legal workers victimizes the most vulnerable members of our national community who also have compelling stories that never seem to show up in the colorful human interest immigration stories filling the media.
Congress has acted three times to reject the DREAM Act-type of amnesty that the president has unilaterally created. If Mr. Obama thinks he can make a case for adding the illegal aliens to the workforce, then he ought to make his case to Congress along with offering offsets that would reduce the number of green cards (permanent work permits) given out each year to other foreign workers, thus reducing job competition for Americans.
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- Other Arguments
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Yes — President Obama is doing the right thing by halting deportations, but the actual effects of the policy remain to be seen
ALEX NOWRASTEH, Immigration Policy Analyst at the Cato Institute
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Yes — The president's policy is good news, but is not a long-term solution to the large immigration problem
TAMAR JACOBY, President of ImmigrationWorks USA
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Yes — Obama's immigration policy makes moral, economic, and political sense
MARSHALL FITZ, Director of Immigration Policy at the Center for American Progress
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No — Obama oversteps bounds of presidency with dreams of overriding Congress to pass his own policies
MATTHEW SPALDING, Director of the B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies at the Heritage Foundation
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No — We need a permanent immigration solution, but Obama's policy has too many unknowns
LUIS ALVARADO, Political Analyst for CNN Español and Telemundo
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No — Obama was threatened by Sen. Marco Rubio's bipartisan reform, so he undermined it
COLIN HANNA, President of Let Freedom Ring
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No — President Obama's immigration policy violates constitutional order
MARK KRIKORIAN, Author of 'The New Case Against Immigration, Both Legal and Illegal' and 'How Obama is Transforming America Through Immigration'
