White House: Obama 'Bound And Determined' to Grant Amnesty to 34 million illegals

[HipKat]

Oh, I hate the Dems, too, but the Right is so far beyond rational these days, they're just the easier target.

Who's the Real Deporter-In-Chief

If you don’t follow the immigration debate closely, you may be a bit confused. The left is increasingly angry with President Obama, calling him the “deporter-in-chief.” That’s because the total number of deportations during Obama’s tenure recently passed 2 million. As Dara Lind wrote last week at Vox, that pace puts him on track to “have deported more people by the end of 2014 than George W. Bush did in his entire eight years.” Immigration groups like America’s Voice and publications like Mother Jones have made the same point.

The right is mad at Obama, too—but for the opposite reason. They say he’s deporting far fewer people than Bush, and has failed to adequately enforce the country’s immigration laws. Responding to Lind’s piece, and more generally to the arguments of the left, Sean Davis of The Federalist accused her of “deport[ing] the truth on immigration stats,” protesting: “Obama is most definitely not the leading deporter of all time. In fact, total deportations in 2012 were the lowest they’d been since 1973.” You can hear similar arguments from right-leaning places like The National Review and think tank the Center for Immigration Studies.

Under Bush, the majority of immigrants that the U.S. sent home were simply “returned.” Nobody took their fingerprints or put a permanent mark on their immigration records. Instead, U.S. authorities put them on buses and sent them back across the border. Between 2001 and 2008, there were over 8.3 million of these informal “returns,” according to the Department of Homeland Security. There were, by contrast, just 2 million “removals.” Those are the more formal deportations—the ones that go through some form of individual review, with an officer if not a judge, and become part of deportees’ permanent records.

Here is where the debate becomes more subjective, because it’s really about which actions are important and which ones aren’t. Obama critics on the left say it’s wrong to treat removals and returns equally, since removals carry permanent, more serious consequences. If you have one on your record, it’s a felony to cross the border again; reentering makes you a top target for DHS agents; and your chances of ever gaining legal status go down. “I don’t know why we’re having a conversation about the numbers—the question is, what are the results?” said Benjamin Johnson of the American Immigration Council. “As somebody who cares about immigration policy, it’s a weird and unfortunate construct. I think the people calling him deporter-in-chief are doing it because he’s punishing them through the immigration system.”

[Save Us]

Makes you wonder if the French knew what they were doing when they gave it to us

Population will exceed economic and physical resources in a closed system, which of course that is what the earth is.