Republicans outraged as Democrats demand amnesty for millions of illegal aliens
With November midterms just days away, the Democrats appear to be fishing for the Hispanic vote as the House Minority Leader called on President Obama to not only end deportations of illegals, but let their families enter as well.
Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives, along with Democratic lawmakers Zoe Lofgren and Luis Gutiérrez, wrote an op-ed in Univision, the Spanish-language television website, which called on Obama – in Spanish - to grant amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants under the administration's “Dream Act” plan.
READ MORE: Top 10 ways Barack Obama has muzzled American media
The three Democrats demanded that families of the unauthorized immigrants on American soil be permitted to qualify for entry into the United States.
“Doing so would not permit family members to skip the line, but it would allow them to wait in line with their family until a visa number becomes available," the Democratic lawmakers wrote.
The Obama administration is said to be reviewing two conditions in determining whether an illegal immigrant can remain inside the United States: the amount of time a person has been in the country, and the person’s connections to other family members who may be in the country, according to The Wall Street Journal, citing “people familiar with the administration’s thinking.”
Those requirements, the right-leaning daily business publication said, “could offer protection to between one million and four million people” of the estimated 11 million illegals now living in the country.
Democrats, eager to attract voters ahead of midterm elections, want to ram through immigration ‘dream’ provisions in a bill passed by the Senate, which has never been brought to the floor for consideration in the Republican-led House.
See my op-ed in @Univision w/ @RepGutierrez & @RepZoeLofgren on why Pres Obama has authority to act on #immigrationhttp://t.co/d3tX2EiT65
— Nancy Pelosi (@NancyPelosi) October 30, 2014
Pelosi, Lofgren and Gutiérrez suggested that because the House refused to consider the legislation, the US president could exert his executive powers “to prevent family separation — this time of undocumented close family members of US citizens, lawful permanent residents, or DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals] beneficiaries.”
They added, “Similarly, he could recognize that it is 'essential for agriculture' that farmworkers who toil in our fields do so without fear.”
The Republican Party has lambasted the Democrats over their handling of the immigration crisis, saying that the weak US-Mexico border threatens national security at a time when the US military is fighting against the Islamic State [IS, formerly ISIS], an Ebola epidemic is lurking in the shadows, and, perhaps the most damaging accusation of all, hard-working Americans will lose good jobs to the new arrivals.
"The President is systemically stripping away the immigration protections to which every single American worker and their family is entitled,” said Republican Senator Jeff Sessions in a statement to be released by the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard said. “He doesn’t care how this impacts Americans’ jobs, wages, schools, tax bills, hospitals, police departments, or communities.”
Sessions came down especially hard on American CEOs, like Mark Zuckerberg of FaceBook and Bill Gates of Microsoft, who hope to “massively expand the number of foreign workers for IT companies…[Y]et we have more than 11 million Americans with STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering and Math education] degrees who don’t have jobs in these fields.”
The leading Republican cited statistics from Rutgers Professor Hal Salzman, who demonstrated that “two-thirds of all new IT jobs are being filled by foreign workers.”
“From 2000 through today, a period of record legal immigration, all net gains in employment among the working-age have gone entirely to immigrant workers.”
Sessions argued that thanks to such policies the “world has turned upside down.”
“Instead of serving the interests of the American people, the policies of President Obama and every Senate Democrat serve the needs of special interests and global CEOs who fail to understand the duty a nation owes to its own people,” he railed. “But the citizens of this country still hold the power, and through their voice, they can turn the country right-side again."
Other Republicans weighed in on the debate, including Sens. Marco Rubio, John McCain and Lindsey Graham who wrote in a letter that Obama should not act unilaterally on the immigration issue.
READ MORE: Senate refuses to blame Bush, senior aides in CIA torture investigation
“No action should be taken to legalize undocumented immigrants who are living and working in the United States until we have properly secured our southern border and provided for effective enforcement of immigration laws,” the senators said, as reported by the Washington Times.
According to the The Wall Street Journal, President Obama is planning to wait until after the November midterms to implement a “massive unilateral executive amnesty.”
