Obama's Amnesty Plan Could Shield 5 Million from Immigration Laws

by Warner Todd Huston

AP

It is possible that President Obama's amnesty plan, being announced Thursday, will shield up to four million illegals from U.S. immigration laws. Reports also say that an additional one million will be afforded other levels of protections by the President's impending action. 

 

According to The New York Times, Obama's executive action will shield the four million from deportation if they have already been here for at least five years and have no criminal record.
An additional one million will get protections from deportation by a plan that will include wide expansions of the DREAMer program, allowing illegals more education and job training opportunities. One of the major, expensive changes to the DREAMer program is that it will no longer apply only to young people and will be opened to illegals of any age.
Sources also say that the amnesty will not afford illegals any taxpayer-funded subsidies for healthcare coverage under Obamacare. Nor will Obama's plan extend protection to illegals engaged in the farming industry. Both are issues that will anger advocates for illegals.
Still, activists for illegals are celebrating the President's move. Republicans, though, are calling Obama's threatened action more evidence of his lawlessness.
"President Obama will be exercising powers properly belonging to Congress if he makes good on his threat," Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) wrote in a letter to Harry Reid last week. Sen. Sessions said that Obama's amnesty would be "lawless" and would set off a "constitutional crisis."
Sessions is one of the most outspoken Republican senators on immigration and might soon be taking the chairmanship of the powerful Senate Budget Committee when the GOP takes control of the upper chamber in the next legislative session.
Sen. Sessions also rightly pointed out that the last election was a rebuke of just the sort of actions that Obama now wants to take. The November elections were a "mandate" to block Obama's lawlessness, he said.
"Republicans in the House and Senate campaigned against the Obama-Senate immigration bill and on the pledge to block President Obama's unlawful executive amnesty," Sessions said right after Election Day. "The immediate emergency facing our new majority will be fighting the President's disastrous planned actions, and we will have not only a constitutional mandate but also a popular mandate to do so."
One of the ways that Sen. Sessions said that Congress could stop Obama's amnesty is to defund the programs Obama needs to carry out the policy.