In his post-decision statement, the president referred to our “broken” immigration system, a favorite cliché of supporters of amnesty. The brokenness of the system, though, is largely a function of the longstanding refusal by the federal government to enforce our existing immigration laws. If we didn’t enforce our tax or environmental laws, they’d be broken, too.
Obama is said by his critics on the open-borders left to be the Deporter-in-Chief, but this is a misnomer wrapped in an act of statistical legerdemain. The Obama administration began counting deportations differently to get the numbers up. Obama himself has admitted that this accounting gimmick is misleading.
The truth is that interior enforcement has been gutted. John Sandweg, former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has said, “If you are a run-of-the-mill immigrant here illegally, your odds of getting deported are close to zero.” Even the deportation of criminal aliens, supposedly the priority of the administration, has been declining.
The assurance that Obama issued after the Supreme Court decision that enforcement priorities won’t change is certainly correct — the enforcement priority will continue to be non-enforcement.
