Obama's Decrees Establish an Unconstitutional Alternative Immigration System

New report highlights importance of today's House hearings on executive amnesty scheme

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Dec 02, 2014, 07:17 ET

WASHINGTON, Dec. 2, 2014 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A new report by the Center for Immigration Studies outlines the illegality of the president's "deferred-action" program.

The scheme was announced in a series of memos last month from the Department of Homeland Security that would, among other things, allow an estimated four million illegal aliens to request a three-year deferral of removal and receive employment authorization. This builds on the president's earlier grant of amnesty-by-fiat in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

The report, authored by Temple University law professor Jan Ting, examines, and rejects, the three separate assertions of authority used to justify the program:

Prosecutorial discretion: Ordering ICE agents not to inspect and place into removal proceedings illegal aliens they encounter violates 8 U.S.C. § 1225, which expressly curtails the president's discretion concerning inspection and detention of aliens not lawfully admitted to the United States.
Advance parole: Granting "advance parole" to deferred action recipients so that they may travel back and forth between the United States and their native countries violates 8 U.S.C § 1182(d)(5), amended in 1996 specifically to prevent the use of parole to "admit aliens who do not qualify for admission under established legal immigration categories."
Employment authorization: Granting Employment Authorization Documents (EADs) to millions of illegal aliens ignores nearly a century of case law, including Supreme Court decisions, holding that the Executive Branch may not circumvent the statutory employment-based visa system by opening the labor market to aliens not eligible for such visas, thereby defeating "Congress' purpose of protecting American laborers from an influx of skilled and unskilled labor."

Taken together, the three illegal elements of Obama's executive amnesty plan amount to a usurpation of Congress's exclusive constitutional authority to formulate immigration policy.

View the entire report at: http://cis.org/Obama-Deferred-Action-Amnest-Executive-Action-Unconstitutional

The Center for Immigration Studies is an independent, non-partisan, non-profit research organization founded in 1985. It is the nation's only think tank devoted exclusively to research and policy analysis of the economic, social, demographic, fiscal, and other impacts of immigration on the United States

Contact: Marguerite Telford
202-455-8185, [email protected]

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SOURCE Center for Immigration Studies