OPINION:
President Obama’s active encouragement of the illegal immigrant invasion is community organizing writ large.
It’s also a genius application of Saul Alinsky’s revolutionary strategy: Stoke chaos to pave the way for a radical agenda.
To the leftists, the American people need to be browbeaten, sued, abused and attacked by their own government in service of their greater goal of “fundamentally transforming” the nation. If you don’t like it, here comes a Mexican drug lord with a Fast and Furious gun we gave him to convince you of the error of your ways.
This was the real point of Mr. Obama’s executive action on immigration.
Diluting American power and sovereignty is what Mr. Obama’s border and immigration policy is all about: Flood the zone and watch American exceptionalism melt away. If Mr. Obama’s goals are realized, America will look more like the United States of Yugoslavia. We know well how that hellhole turned out. Oh, that’s right; it doesn’t exist anymore. Mr. Obama’s goal is to turn America into a Balkanized polyglot mess, devoid of a national creed or purpose.
In 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton asserted that the drug cartels operating in Mexico, in Central America and at the border were beginning to look like an insurgency, and that Mexico was “looking more and more like Colombia looked 20 years ago, where the narcotraffickers control certain parts of the country.”
Within 24 hours, Mr. Obama slapped her down. “Mexico is a vast and progressive democracy,” he said, “with a growing economy, and as a result you cannot compare what is happening in Mexico with what happened in Colombia 20 years ago.”
The real reason Mr. Obama slammed Mrs. Clinton’s argument? If it were allowed to stand, then Mr. Obama would have to actually do something to enforce the southern border. Mr. Obama doesn’t take much action to secure the border because he needs the chaos it engenders.
The more illegals trespassing into the United States, the better: more votes for him and his party, more drain on essential services such as schools, hospitals and police, leading to demands for ever-bigger government and the spending to support it, and more diluting of American power.
The chaos of a wide-open border hits all redistributionist goals in one efficient swoop.
When confronted with its human and economic costs, the leftists invoke their patented emotional arguments: Who among us wants children of illegals to starve or to go without medical care or an education? After all, it’s not their fault they were brought to this country illegally. As for their parents, well, they’re just here looking for work and their home countries are basket cases, so can you really blame them for coming here?
This is why we need a path to citizenship, they say, and amnesty of different kinds, including unilateral presidential actions. In fact, when Congress rejected the Dream Act in mid-2011, Mr. Obama issued an implicit executive order for Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, lawyers and others to exercise “prosecutorial discretion” for these illegals. Sound familiar?
Before Mr. Obama’s most recent executive order, he encouraged thousands of unaccompanied minors to cross the border. Before that, he reduced the National Guard troop presence on the southern border from 1,200 to fewer than 300. He also enacted backdoor amnesty by end-running Congress on the Dream Act, issuing ICE memoranda that radically changed deportation policies, creating a shadowy interagency working group to dismiss pending deportation cases and moving to grant work authorization to some illegals.
He refused to stop sanctuary cities from impeding federal law enforcement and looked the other way as states such as New York, Massachusetts and Illinois stopped participating in Secure Communities, the Department of Homeland Security’s illegal immigrant information program. He essentially ended worksite enforcement operation except for auditing I-9 employment eligibility forms and didn’t include E-Verify in any of his “jobs” plans. He also sued Arizona for trying to enforce immigration laws when his administration would not.
Mr. Obama has said he wants “comprehensive immigration reform.” He actually wants a massive new voter base. In fact, in early 2012, the president chose Cecilia Munoz, a former senior vice president of the radical open-borders, pro-amnesty group La Raza, to head his Domestic Policy Council.
The leftists frame illegal immigration as a problem with the U.S. as the root cause, and because only they understand that root cause, they’re best suited to make these kinds of decisions for us.
That’s why Mr. Obama’s move had nothing to do with immigration reform and everything to do with seizing ever-greater power and control — for the state and for the leftists who run it.
• Monica Crowley is online opinion editor at The Washington Times.
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