With news reports surfacing about President Obama’s 10-step plan to take executive action on immigration, it appears the president has decided to ignore the American people, Congress and current law in order to push through some sort of amnesty.
While the details are not yet clear, this administrative amnesty will likely shield as many as 5 million unlawful immigrants from deportation and grant them authorization to work in the United States legally.
>>> INFOGRAPHIC: There’s a Better Way to Fix Our Immigration System
This action flies in the face of current law. Despite claims that many presidents have used this authority on many occasions in the past century, never before has a president used his “discretion” to ignore so much of U.S. immigration law in such a massive way.
Rather than using his discretion for hard cases and to better administer the immigration system, Obama is planning on using his discretion to effectively nullify U.S. laws.
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Obama’s executive action will not fix our immigration system but will only make it worse by encouraging more illegal immigration, as we have seen with past amnesties.
His action will consume scarce Department of Homeland Security resources, focusing the department’s time and efforts on providing unlawful immigrants with pseudo-legal status while more important reforms to the department are shelved.
Obama will also shred the rule of law, the bedrock of American and Western jurisprudence. The rule of law says that laws should apply to everyone and should be equally and fairly enforced, not tossed out on the whim of the president.
Instead of this arbitrary and harmful plan, The Heritage Foundation has a better 10-step plan for the executive branch–one that upholds the rule of law, faithfully enforces current law and is the right first step to fix the U.S. immigration system.
Infographic: Kelsey Harris/The Daily Signal
