Tag: Immigration
Jeb’s Father-in-Law Was an Undocumented Alien Who Retired on U.S. Social Security
One area where Jeb’s positions are famously out of synch with the extreme right, however, is immigration. Last year he outraged tea party types when he expressed compassion for those who cross the border illegally. The undocumented, Jeb said, come to the United States seeking employment as an “act of love … an act of commitment to your family.”
Now a report in the Washington Post may explain why Jeb’s position on immigration is an outlier from conservative orthodoxy. It’s personal. His wife Columba’s late father, Jose Maria Garnica Rodriguez, was a undocumented worker from Mexico:
GOP Angling Toward Irrelevance on Immigration
Rather than cursing the darkness, reflexively screaming ‘amnesty,’ and calling for deportation of a population the size of Ohio, they need to light a candle and show the way forward on this complex issue. And they must do this in a way that solves the problem and does not doom the Republican Party to political irrelevance in the future.
— GOP pollster Whit Ayres, quoted by the Washington Post.
Big Government GOP Bill to Deport Undocumented Families Would Add $285 Billion to US Debt
As its first major action in the 114th Congress, the GOP tea-party controlled House voted yesterday to deport the nearly 12 million people living in the United States illegally, including many families who have been U.S. residents for decades.
Republicans, who won additional seats in the House and control of the Senate in the midterm elections, claimed their action to overturn Pres. Obama’s executive action to stop mass deportations expressed the will of voters. In fact, the president did not issue his executive action until after the Nov. 4 elections. In their messaging about the bill, GOP representatives persistently referred to the president’s order as “illegal amnesty,” ignoring the fact that recent Republican presidents, including Ronald Reagan, issued 18 similar executive orders revamping immigration policies.
Despite the fact that terror attacks in Paris had drawn international attention less than a week earlier, Republicans gamed a crucial funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security with partisan ploys intended to force mass deportations. GOP amendments to the bill funding the government’s anti-terrorism activities targeted undocumented residents, especially the “Dreamers,” young people who were brought into the country when they were children or infants:
Republicans Warn That Immigration Order Will Foment Anarchy and Violence among Their Base – Obama Tells Them, ‘Pass a Bill’
Last night Pres. Obama unveiled his executive order to defer the deportations of 4.4 million undocumented residents, allow spouses of green-card holders to apply for legal status, make it easier for foreign entrepreneurs to get visas and more.
Today, predictably, Republicans are in full lather trying to shift public attention away from the fact that they have no alternative plan for immigration reform — and, worse, that for a year and a half House Republicans have been sitting on the immigration bill — Senate bill S. 744, the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill — that passed the Senate with bipartisan votes in June 2013.
Instead of proposing an alternative to the president’s order, the GOP strategy is to focus public attention on the process — Obama’s executive action — by claiming, falsely, that the order is illegal. In fact, presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush also signed executive orders deferring deportations, and Republican presidents Eisenhower, Ford and George W. Bush also made unilateral changes to immigration procedures through executive orders.
The Republican leadership is making a calculation that by ginning up rage at the president over the order, they can avoid having to take a substantive position on immigration, even if the derangement they foment drives their racist base to violence and anarchy, as Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn and others have predicted.
Obama Unveils Executive Order on Immigration Reform
Here are highlights of Pres. Obama’s executive order on immigration reform from the Washington Post:
GOP Senator: Facts about Legality of President’s Executive Order Don’t Matter to Republicans
In an interview with Susan Page at USAToday, Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., warned that the Republicans’ base might be provoked into violence, if Pres. Obama signs an executive order on immigration, as planned:
The country’s going to go nuts, because they’re going to see it as a move outside the authority of the president, and it’s going to be a very serious situation,” Coburn said on Capital Download. “You’re going to see — hopefully not — but you could see instances of anarchy. … You could see violence.”
Coburn appeared on on MSNBC’s right-wing gabfest, “Morning Joe,” to clarify his remarks. In doing so, however, he committed a classic Kinsey gaffe — meaning he inadvertently told the truth:
I just… you know .. Joe, I just think, ah, the President oughta walk into this a lot more slowly, especially after an election. This idea, the rule of law, is really concerning a lot of people where I come from. And whether it’s factual or perceptual, it really doesn’t matter. And the glue that holds our country together is this common belief in the rule of law. [Emphasis added.]
A Republican senator admitted on their show that facts were irrelevant to his party’s base. What was the reaction from Scarborough, his cohost Mika Brzezinski and Jeremy Peters, the New York Times reporter whose turn it was next to ask Coburn a question?
Impeachable? Here Are 18 Immigration Executive Orders Issued by Recent Republican Presidents
Republicans claim that that Pres. Obama’s plan to establish temporary legal status for undocumented immigrants by executive order is illegal.
Read the full report from the American Immigration Council: Executive Grants of Temporary Immigration Relief, 1956-Present
They have issued a series of threats against the president if he signs the order to stand up the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, including blocking the nomination of attorney general nominee Loretta Lynch, shutting down the government again and/or impeaching him.
According to a detailed report from the American Immigration Council, however, presidents have routinely altered immigration policies by executive order, including 18 such changes by five recent Republican presidents — Eisenhower, Ford, Reagan, Bush I and Bush II. None of these presidents was threatened with political reprisal for signing the orders, of course.
Here is an overview based on the AIC report:
