We’re All Victims of the Obama Dream Act Amnesty

By Rick Oltman
Volume 23, Number 1 (Fall 2012)
Issue theme: "Victims of Immigration"


The Dream Act Amnesty that President Obama has illegally foisted on the country will produce even more victims than already exist from America’s open border policy. And, American workers will be the first victims of this scheme.

Known officially as the “Consideration of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Process,” it is more than the Orwellian Newspeak term “Deferred Action” suggests. It is a way to give millions of illegal aliens work permits. In fact it requires the illegal alien to apply for a work permit.1

From the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service website:

To request consideration of deferred action for childhood arrivals from USCIS, you must submit Form I-821D, Consideration of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals to USCIS. This form must be completed, properly signed and accompanied by aForm I-765, Application for Employment Authorization, and aForm I-765WS, Worksheet, establishing your economic need for employment. If you fail to submit a completed Form I-765 (along with the accompanying filing fees for that form, totaling $465), USCIS will not consider your request for deferred action.

It is mandatory that the applicant submit a completed Form I-765 Application for Employment Authorization (a work permit) along with the original I-821D.

The purpose of this Dream Act Amnesty is to give illegal aliens work permits, which will put them into direct competition with American citizens and legal immigrant workers!

This seems, at first, counterintuitive. But not when one considers the demographics of the nation.

The desire for massive legal and illegal immigration into our country comes down to one thing: customers. Regardless of everything else, it is customers that are wanted, and needed, and that is why the borders are unsecured and the law continually ignored.

The post-World War II Baby Boomers, once the fiercest consumers on the planet, are rapidly aging out of the consuming cycle. Retiring at a rate of 10,000 per day, they need to be replaced. The youngest turn 50 years old in 2014, an age where consumption begins to rapidly decline. By age 54, in 2018, the last of the Baby Boomers will be at an age where they are pretty much out of the consuming cycle. And since the Boomers, for reasons of environmental enlightenment or self-indulgence or for whatever reason, didn’t have large families that could take up the consuming slack, our economy needs to import new customers to keep the factories humming in China and the Big Box stores open in America.

But, to be a consumer you need to have a paycheck. Hence the Form I-821D, Consideration of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals also requires an application for a work permit. And those “Dreamers” will become competitors for those seeking to re-enter the job market.

National unemployment is reported as 8.3 percent. It is probably closer to 15 percent real unemployment if you look at the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics’ U-6 calculation.

U-6: Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force.2

When you add together the number of unemployed and long-term unemployed over age 50 you get 5 million, approximately one-fourth of the official number of unemployed in America.3

But from the point of view of the consumer society, even if this over-50 cohort does find employment, they are in a declining consumer trajectory. It is better to have recent young arrivals fill any available jobs, as they are guaranteed to consume.

It’s not rocket science, as they say, but simple math.

And that is the explanation for why Obama wants work permits for this crop of illegal aliens. The “Dreamer” aspect of it is only a cover for the real reason, and one that is sympathetic to many Americans. Those who have come to our country from a third world hell hole want to live and consume like Americans, and nobody can blame them for that. And as the word spreads around the world that America is, once again, going to allow illegal aliens to stay, the number surging across our borders and overstaying their visas will grow as never before.

The Profits over Patriotism crowd are greedy and don’t care about the ancillary impacts of massive illegal and legal immigration. Victims are only collateral damage. And, there are many.


Many victim classes

Tangible and intangible victims are created in every area of society by open borders and illegal aliens.

Crime, education, health care, employment, and the environment are the Big 5 areas that illegal immigration impacts. But every nook and cranny of our country and our culture is victimized to a greater or lesser extent. And this most recent “Dream Act” abomination will continue to produce victims.

The number of victims of illegal alien criminals grows daily. And even though many Sheriff’s Departments in the country now will not list ICE holds on their Internet booking logs, the charges can tell the tale. When an illegal alien drunk driver is booked as a DUI and also for driving without a license, it’s a good guess that he’s an illegal alien. When someone from the illegal alien part of town is arrested for molesting a 13-year-old girl, that is also a pretty sure bet that both victim and perpetrator are illegal aliens, especially as the age of sexual consent in most Mexican states is around 13 years old.

The education system becomes a victim of the progeny of illegal aliens: anchor babies or “dreamers” who flood the system with non-English- speaking students. The cost of students to the state taxpayer can exceed $10,000 a year. No illegal alien is earning enough to pay $10,000 in state taxes, anywhere.

Emergency Rooms are flooded with illegal aliens getting free emergency and non-emergency health care. The hospitals send the bill to the states but don’t usually get reimbursed enough to cover their costs, so they “cost shift” and charge the insured and self-insured more. In many communities in the past two decades hospitals have been forced to close, depriving citizens in their community of the kind of health care service that America was admired for.

Workers find themselves competing with illegal aliens for jobs that employers are only too anxious to make available, at lower wages of course.

The environmental damage done by historic population growth due to illegal immigration can be seen everywhere you look. High levels of legal and illegal immigration provide eager new consumers who have escaped the third world and want to become first-world consumers, with all the pollution that consumption from an abundant economy, even a struggling economy, can produce.

All of the afore mentioned damage has been described and discussed for over two decades. At every turn in our economy, everybody you know is paying a cost for illegal immigration.

And now, this Obama Dream Act Amnesty, if allowed to continue, will be devastating to our country and culture. This creeping amnesty supposedly limited to so-called “dreamers” between the ages of 15 and 30 will eventually grow, via fraud and executive diktat, to include almost every illegal alien currently in our country, and the millions who are on their way, encouraged by our federal government.

Original estimates, when President Obama made his announcement on June 15, 2012, were approximately 800,000, which had many scoffing. The number was quickly revised upward to 1.7 million.

The number of illegal aliens in our country can only be estimated. The federal government doesn’t know and hasn’t wanted to know. Estimates vary according to which source you consult, according to their own agenda.

If this so-called Dream Act amnesty isn’t stopped or rolled back, the number applying will be closer to 17 million than 1.7. It could be twice as high as 17 million, because in the end, nobody will be checking documents for any more reason than to see if it exists. There will be no checking of records, verifying of information…nothing.


The biggest victim

Probably the biggest victim of the Obamnesty is loss of faith in, and respect for, the U.S. government. Americans on the whole used to believe in the justness, the evenhandedness, the fairness of America. It’s not just the Obama amnesty; there have been other events that challenged American’s faith in America. But this lawless President, unopposed by anyone in government, with his illegal Dream Act Amnesty, really makes the point that without honor and without real checks and balances, even in the media-drenched age in which we live, a chief executive can basically do whatever he wants. And as Executive Order gets piled on Executive Order, and bureaucratic decrees are treated as laws and not opposed, Americans to lose faith in the system, the country, and the Constitution that the Founding Fathers created.

According to James McHenry, one of Maryland’s delegates to the Constitutional Convention, as Benjamin Franklin exited Independence Hall in Philadelphia at the end of the Convention of Delegates on September 18, 1787, he was asked, “Well Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” Franklin, with his typical wit replied, “A Republic, if you can keep it.”

In January of 2008, the final year of the Bush administration, I was invited to speak to The Golden Gate Minutemen at the Alameda Naval Air Museum. After giving a brief history of the anti-illegal immigration movement to approximately 200 Minutemen, I described how it started in California in 1989 with Muriel Watson’s Light Up the Border campaign in San Diego and how activists got organized all over California in the early ’90s.

I told them how we believed that all we had to do was show that the border was not secure, that illegals were pouring through and the damage that was being done, and that if we showed that it was happening the government would do something to stop it.

A roar of laughter went up from the audience, so loud you would have thought I was the biggest ass in Alameda County. And, I let them laugh. When the laughter died down I paused and looked around the room and said, “I know that sounds naïve today. But, we believed that… then.” And you could have heard a pin hit the carpet.

There have been in the past, and will be in the future, numerous examples of how our law-abiding culture is devolving into the corruption we see in so many third-world countries. But, as Americans see the corruption expand, and do not see the institutions of our society stop it and punish the law breakers, cynicism will eventually grow as faith in the system fades.

And the loss of faith in America is probably the worst victim story of all.


Endnotes

1. http://www.uscis.gov/portal/site/uscis/menuitem.eb1d4c2a3e5b9ac89243c6a7543f6d1a/?vgnextoid=f2ef2f19470f7310VgnVCM100000082ca60aRCRD&vgnextchannel=f2ef2f19470f7310VgnVCM100000082ca60aRCRD

2. http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm

3. http://www.nelp.org/page/-/UI/2012/NELP.older.workers.3.9.2012.pdf?nocdn=1

About the author

Rick Oltman has worked for immigration reform for almost twenty years. He has lobbied in Washington, D.C. and in dozens of state capitals for secure borders and immigration enforcement. He has been featured on the PBS News Hour with Jim Lehrer, MSNBC Reports, CNN, including Talk Back Live, Lou Dobbs, and Anderson Cooper 360, and the FOX Business Channel and FOX News Channel. In 1994 Rick was Chairman of the YES ON 187-SAVE OUR STATE campaign supporting Proposition 187. In 2004 Rick worked with Arizona activists to qualify Proposition 200, Arizona’s state initiative that required proof of citizenship when voting or applying for public benefits. Prop 200 won with 57 percent of the vote.