House Border Crisis Plan: DOA
The price tag for the GOP’s plan is $1.5 billion in emergency funding they would offset with spending cuts. It stands in sharp contrast to the president’s $3.7 billion request that is best summed up by Center for Immigration Studies fellow Dan Cadman who analyzed the package. He called it a “closed circle of illogic” in which the government “takes a hands-off approach to the UACs being smuggled, and after a few days of detention and make-work processing, passes them over to the ones who initiated the venture.” Moreover, it scrupulously avoids addressing any changes to the 2008 law, as once again Democrats, lead by the president of the United States, insist their orchestrated humanitarian crisis be addressed before the border breakdown that feeds and worsens it.
And make no mistake: it is an orchestrated crisis because it is occurring even as crime rates in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador—that Democrats like to cite as the primary impetus for the surge—have been declining for the last two years, even as the number of UACs coming to America has skyrocketed in the same time frame. The real impetus behind the surge is what it has always been: President Obama’s unilateral legalization of Dreamers in 2012, coupled with just released data showing a marked decrease in the number of children turned away at the border. In 2008, the last year of the George W. Bush administration, there were 8,143 turn-a-ways. Last year there were only 1,669. There has also been a decrease from the 600 minors ordered to be deported each year from non-border states 10 years ago, to the paltry 95 deported in 2013.
Add the administration’s determination to conspicuously ignore an agreement between Mexico and Guatemala facilitating the passage of UACs through Mexico on their way to the United States—which Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto insists will be expanded to include Honduras and El Salvador “to make Central American migration more organized and safer”—and the message remains clear: if you get here, chances are excellent you can stay here.
In addition, Senate Democrats are formulating a $2.7 billion plan of their own that omits any effort to amend the trafficking bill. That means even under the best of circumstances, some sort of reconciliation process between the two chambers will have to take place before anything meaningful can happen. That reality pokes a giant hole in incoming House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) hopes that any bill will be voted on before Congress recesses in August.
It’s not going to happen.
Thus the massive influx of 57,000 UACs—along with the additional 240,000 illegals that have arrived here from April through June, yet somehow remain largely under the media radar—will continue. There is little doubt that under-reported reality would take much of the air out of the “humanitarian” balloon, as would multiplying the three-month influx by four to reach an annual total of nearly 1.2 million illegals who could come across our Southwest border, if the current rate remains constant.
And why shouldn’t it remain constant? We have a president who won’t even visit the border, much less act on a crisis of national proportions. We have a Democratic Party pushing that president to expand his Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) plan to include their parents, as well as halt further deportations. We have an Obama administration looking to put illegals in the military, even as it aims to cut the military to pre-WWII levels.
In short, the entire nation is being held hostage to a despicable leftist agenda, aided and abetted by an equally compromised GOP Establishment: either Americans embrace comprehensive immigration reform, or the Cloward-Piven-inspired, “crash the system” chaos at the border will continue. The dispersal of illegals, not just to questionable individuals, but to locations in towns and cities throughout the nation, will continue. The aiding and abetting of human trafficking by our own government will continue. The utter contempt for the rule of law and our national sovereignty will continue.
A letter signed by the governors of Alabama, Kansas, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Utah and Wisconsin was sent to President Obama this week. “The failure to return the unaccompanied children will send a message that will encourage a much larger movement towards our southern border,” it stated.
