"The Obama administration will relax enforcement of deportation rules for young people brought to the United States without legal status...."It's a transparent attempt to pander to Hispanic voters and the open-borders crowd -- no doubt about that.
"U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said on Friday that illegal immigrants up to 30 years old who came to the United States as children and do not pose a risk to national security would be eligible to stay in the country and allowed to apply for work permits.
"'Our nation's immigration laws must be enforced in a firm and sensible manner,' Napolitano said in a statement. 'But they are not designed to be blindly enforced without consideration given to the individual circumstances of each case.'"
Despite what we're hearing from the Right, however, the move isn't illegal. It's not unconstitutional nor is it dictatorial. And although it does award de facto immunity to more than a million young illegal immigrants, granting them an official blanket exception to existing work-permit regulations, it's not amnesty per se.
Immigration law hasn't changed -- this is an enforcement decision. It's the federal equivalent of a local police department choosing how to allocate its finite resources, something that happens every day.
It's also shameful disregard for the will of the People.
The new DHS policy is wholly unacceptable to this independent citizen-patriot. It reflects the Obama administration's indisputably poor grasp of both economic issues and national security. Worse, it smuggles the ill-conceived DREAM Act through the back door.
In that sense, the action announced today is extra-constitutional, yet another example of the federal bureaucracy operating beyond the reach of representation.
That isn't in the best interest of our country -- but then, this is about election-year politics, not governing.
