Politics

Obama Judge Invites Repatriated Illegals To Return, Seek US Jobs

Neil Munro White House Correspondent
Font Size:

President Barack Obama’s government is inviting many repatriated illegal immigrants back to work in the United States under a deal approved approved this week by a federal judge.

The deal was finalized by Obama’s deputies and their ideological allies in the American Civil Liberties Union, via a courtroom negotiation under the supervision of an Obama-app0inted judge.

The deal also provided $700,000 to the ACLU for the lawyers’ fees.

The lawyers had claimed that illegals were unfairly and unlawfully pressured to sign so-called “voluntary return” documents as they were being deported. The illegals should have been invited to fight repatriation via the courts, said the lawyers’ group.

The returned illegals will likely seek jobs sought by Americans and will increase the labor supply, driving down incomes for Americans.

The inflow will increase competition for jobs, and likely increase public dependence on government, aiding Democratic candidates who offer more government support to low-income Americans.

Since 2009, Obama has offered work permits to at least 7.4 million people, above the normal inflow of 1 million legal immigrants per year. In November, he announced plans to provide work permits to an additional 4 million illegals living in the United States.

Roughly 4 million young Americans enter the labor force each year.

The new deal creates a legal precedent that can be used to argue for the return of millions more illegal immigrants.

From 2001 to 2012, roughly 8.8 million illegal immigrants were successfully deported under the same “voluntary return” process that is being challenged by nine Mexicans, according to a report by the Center for Immigration Studies.

So far, the new deal only offers a welcome to a subset of all “voluntary return” repatriations. It “will allow Mexican nationals with bona fide immediate relatives lawfully in the U.S. a six-month window in which they can file an application to return to the country and resume the status they were in before they” were repatriated, according to law360.com.

The deal is part of a larger push by progressive professionals — including immigration lawyers, political activists and union officials — to create many administrative loopholes in immigration law. The variety of loopholes increases the inflow of Democratic-leaning foreign migrants and workers, boosts the billable hours earned by lawyers and the political clout of activists.

That’s a very different policy from 1950s liberalism, which pushed laws intended to help Americans find well-paying jobs.

That new policy is strongly backed by Obama, who says he welcomes the political changes brought by immigrants, and recently threatened law enforcement officers to resist his effort to rollback enforcement of immigration law.

So far, the GOP leadership has failed to mount an effective or organized campaign to uphold the nation’s immigration law.

In the ACLU lawsuit, the illegal immigrants claimed they were unfairly pressured to sign “voluntary return” deportation agreements, which are similar to plea bargains in criminal courts.

But the voluntary return process offers some benefits to the immigrants. Prior to 2010, officials typically offered detained illegals a choice of two deportation options.

They could undergo a formal and lengthy deportation process that would keep them in jail until their case was decided. Once deported, illegals would be automatically jailed for years if they were again caught illegally in the United States.

The second option is the quick “voluntary return” process. By accepting a voluntary return, they would be quickly sent home without spending much time in jail. Also, illegals who leave via the voluntary return process do not face automatic jail sentences if they are later caught in the United States.

Since 2001, millions of illegals have accepted the “voluntary return” option.

Follow Neil on Twitter