Vicente Fox’s DACA Amnesty Would Have The Same Result As SEVEN Previous Amnesties

Paul Nachman

12/11/2017

A quote that Allan took from the Fox op-ed is worth a second look:

America is so admired because of what it seems to represent: equality and opportunity and heterogeneity. Rescinding DACA would be a huge step backward for a nation that has always prided itself on its forbearance. The potential damage to hundreds of thousands of lives is unquantifiable, and the upside is nonexistent. This change would punish the people who wanted so badly to live in a country that they risked everything they had to get there.

So Fox thinks that the DACA-ites "risked everything they had to get [here]." But, but … the open-borders forces' party line is that DACA-ites "were brought to this country through no fault of their own" (e.g. see here, here, here, here, here, here … and on and on)!

Well, which is it? For most (not all) of the DACA-ites, it’s the latter. But a large fraction of them immediately started accumulating "faults of their own" when they applied for DACA:

There’s a “huge” rate of fraud in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, a former insider warns, and many of the people who are in the DACA program have provided false information in order to escape deportation and remain in the U.S.

As many as half of the approximately 800,000 people who now have work permits under DACA may have lied on their applications to get approved, said Matt O’Brien, an attorney and until last year a manager in the investigative unit of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS).

"Based on what I had seen and what I discussed with my colleagues, the fraud rate is 40 to 50 percent. It’s possible that it was higher," he told LifeZette this week.

O'Brien is now the head of research for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a think tank that advocates for a common-sense immigration policy that protects Americans.

[Fmr. USCIS Investigator: There’s a ‘Huge’ Amount of Fraud in DACA, by Margaret Menge, LifeZette, November 21, 2017]

Vaughan pointed out that 5,000 illegal immigrants who were being held in detention centers and who were on track for deportation at the time DACA took effect were released and granted DACA status.

"They were considered a public safety threat," she said. "Even under the Obama administration, they were being detained."

Said O'Brien: "I personally witnessed an alarming number of people who had gang affiliations applying for this program."

Most of them, he said, were approved.

The approval rate for DACA in the two most recent quarters of fiscal year 2017 was approximately 97 percent, with only 3 percent of applications denied.

Back to the quote from Vicente Fox: He says that rescinding DACA "would be a huge step backward" for the U.S. He either doesn’t know the history (and why would he?) or he’s dishonest. In fact, rescinding DACA would show that the U.S. could — at last! — learn from experience.

What experience? Here’s how I reviewed it in an email recently sent to a student journalist and DACA enthusiast at Montana State University:

By the mid-1980s there were several million illegal aliens residing in the country, because enforcement against illegal immigration had been erratic and haphazard. Further, although it was illegal to crash the border, it wasn’t illegal for American employers to hire illegal aliens, so they did (and encouraged more to come), the motive always being cheap, exploitable labor. The federal government recognized the problem and, after some fits and starts from 1982 on, Congress passed the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act [IRCA].

IRCA made it illegal to hire "unauthorized aliens." And, to clear up the problem once and for all, amnesty was offered to those illegal aliens here at the time who met certain criteria. Such people would get legal residency, which meant that they were on the "path to citizenship" that you hear so much about today. And IRCA was to be a one-time winking at the rule of law — there would be no further such amnesties because, now, with it being illegal to hire illegal aliens, they'd stop coming here and the problem would be over.

It was estimated that about one million illegal aliens would qualify for legalization under IRCA. The actual number turned out to be about 2.7 million, and the incidence of fraud was enormous. Further, the enforcement provisions in IRCA had been greatly weakened during the bill’s passage, so the enforcement-after-the-amnesty essentially never happened. (But the phony-documents industry saw boom times!)

Thus, after a pause that lasted until aspiring border crashers (primarily Mexican at the time) found out that we weren’t serious about enforcement, the large-scale illegal influx resumed. And instead of IRCA being the one-time-and-never-again amnesty that was promised to us citizens, there have been six subsequent mass amnesties, aggregating to another three million illegal aliens getting their status laundered to legal. You can see details about the six here: https://www.numbersusa.com/content/learn/illegal-immigration/seven-amnesties-passed-congress.html

Yet after all that, we now have something like 11 million illegal aliens in the country, waaaaaay more than when we started with this approach in 1986.

So why would we do it again?

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