Obama did not mention it, but his plan will also allow millions of eligible illegal immigrants to receive work permits and compete for jobs alongside American citizens. Obama effectively codified the principle that bringing a child in the United States is a ticket to legal status, which will inevitably result in new waves of immigrants from South and Latin America sweeping across the border. The president declared millions of illegal immigrants, without much specificity, ineligible for deportation which expands the powers of prosecutorial discretion to a ludicrous degree. The executive has the power to accelerate or decelerate enforcement priorities, not to abjure the enforcement of the law entirely.
“Not really changing immigration law as much as erasing it,” The Washington Examiner’s Byron York observed, and he is right. But average Americans did not hear that. They heard the president wax poetic about the plight of the working illegal immigrant, an individual who is not theoretical construct but a person of flesh and blood to millions of good-hearted Americans. They heard him weave flowery prose into a compelling narrative, around which he proposed circumspect action to make an unfair system fairer. Looming, the president warned, is the threat posed by overzealous Republicans who will seek to challenge his self-evidently sensible measure in the courts, or even shut down the government in a fit of irrational pique.
Some men just want to watch the Republic burn.
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