NDAA Should Be About Defense, Not Immigration

The House Armed Services Committee (HASC) narrowly voted to include a provision that supports President Obama’s harmful and unlawful immigration actions. The provision, Section 538 of the National Defense Authorization Act, does little itself but merely expresses support for what the president has already done.

First, President Obama unilaterally decided to give pseudo legal status, called DACA, to so-called Dreamers, or those illegal immigrants who were brought here as children. This action came despite the fact that Congress had rejected such provisions dozens of times in the past two decades and despite the fact that it works against the clear intent of U.S. immigration laws, if not the letter as well.

Then, last September, Obama ordered that DACA recipients be allowed to join the military through the Military Accessions Vital to National Interest (MAVNI) program. While the program is limited to only certain skill sets, it builds on Obama’s lawless actions and accepts illegal immigrants into the military at a time when thousands of American citizens are being cut from the military because of harmful defense budget cuts.

The National Defense Authorization Act should be focused on restoring funding for the U.S military so that it can face the real and growing threats in the world today. The NDAA and military are the wrong places to toy around with social and immigration experiments–and it also poor policy.