So now he’s done it. Legalization for all, as long as you’ve been here five years or longer and have managed to procreate. The former will be easily open to fraud — after all, what sort of standard of proof would you require for someone who’s been living and working with a false identity? Presumably some kind of affidavit that you have, indeed, been working as “John Smith” since 2008. The procreation requirement is probably a bit trickier — though you can bet there’ll be a baby boom 9 months from now, and maybe a few single moms deciding to “help out” an illegal-immigrant man by putting his name on the birth certificate. (Can you do that retroactively? I would assume so, as just among garden-variety unmarried couples, there are surely plenty of cases where they had a fight prior to the birth but then reconciled.) Five years is also very, very recent — you just can’t make the claim that someone who arrived here five years ago is so well integrated into the U.S. that it would be a hardship to deport them, or that their children (who likely only speak Spanish, as they wouldn’t have entered elementary school yet) would face any similar hardship.
And this is really scary.
The reality is that most of the country would have been willing to sign on to a partial legalization program, if it had been paired with more certainty about enforcement measures, rather than the Gang of 8’s legalization-first, enforcement if we feel like it, plan. (Pollsters get to high majorities for a widescale legalization by presenting two options: either mass legalization or mass deportation.) But now? Obama cannot be trusted. Compromise between two parties works when there is a shared goal, and when each truly sacrifices something in exchange for the other party doing likewise.
Compromise is impossible when the other party has given a big FU and announced that any law he doesn’t like, he won’t implement.
Imagine a Gang of 8-style bill with immediate legalization in exchange for the administration increasing border security, implementing e-verify, and so on. Obama cannot be trusted to implement any of these enforcement mechanisms, when he has so clearly announced that he doesn’t have to enforce any law that he doesn’t like. Even after the “DACA” legalization program, he has made it impossible for Congress to craft a compromise bill when he’s made it clear that he will not compromise.
So all that’s left is Congress’s power of the purse — assuming that Obama can actually be stopped by lacking legal authorization to spend money, and won’t thumb his nose at Congress and spend it anyway. And it is simply twisted logic, and a frightening indicator of the political power of journalists, that the conventional wisdom is that, if Congress passes a spending bill which does not fund the processing of these work authorization documents, and Obama vetoes it, then it is the GOP, and not Obama, who bears responsibility for the shut-down.
Maybe the GOP could take to the airwaves, and fund advertisements making their case.
Or maybe the GOP leadership will be so ineffectual that they will just sigh and say, “we can’t do anything about it” . . .
Even my own little pet idea — a one-for-one compromise (each prospective legal immigrant processed requires one deportation) doesn’t work if it’s simply a given that the president is unwilling to deport. And it’s long established that actual interior deportations are way, way down, and even this summer’s swell from Central America are staying.
Will the GOP be able to pursue its legal and legislative plans? I don’t know. It certainly seems that Obama has made the country ungovernable due to his bad faith.
Mostly it just sucks that we have a president that’s just an [fill in the blank], and has set his own political games ahead of the welfare of the country.
UPDATE:
Here’s a document with the summary of the plan. Arrival before 1/1/2010, child already born, “pay a fee.” Any guesses on the size of the fee?
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