Irony: Obama's Amnesty for Illegals Undermines His Obamacare Law

"In the president's zeal to rewrite yet another area of law—immigration—he's sabotaged one of Obamacare's primary goals: expanding employer-sponsored health care," argue constitution law professor Elizabeth Price Foley and former Justice Department attorney David B. Rivkin Jr.

Obama's executive amnesty to 6 million illegals would give them work permits, but it would not allow them to qualify for Obamacare. As a result, they would become "ideal" workers for employers to hire if employers are trying to avoid the massive "employer responsibility tax" — a $2,000 to $3,000 per-employee annual tax imposed by Obamacare on employers for each of their workers who qualifies for Obamacare subsidies through state exchanges.

Because the 6 million immigration beneficiaries aren't eligible for Obamacare tax subsidies, hiring them reduces employers' chances of triggering the employer responsibility tax. Employers have a powerful financial incentive to hire them in place of U.S. citizens and permanent residents. The president's unilateral grant of work permits, combined with the fact that these workers cannot trigger the employer responsibility tax, makes those workers significantly more attractive.  ...  The inevitable result is that more workers will lack employer-provided health insurance coverage. [snip]

The president isn't a one-person lawmaker. He doesn't have the power in our constitutional regime to fix laws he thinks are broken. When a president does so, he not only intrudes on Congress' power, but also creates unpredictable repercussions for other laws. It's no small irony, that, by unilaterally attempt to fix our immigration law, Mr. Obama has undermined his own signature legislative achievement.

Read When Bad Obama Policies Collide.

O's Immigration: Illegals Lose Public Support, States File Lawsuit

"Seventeen states are involved in a lawsuit filed Wednesday challenging President Obama's executive actions on immigration," reports Breitbart. "Texas, Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Montana, Nebraska, South Caroline, South Dakota, Utah, West Virginia, Wisconsin and the governors of Mississippi, Maine, North Carolina and Idaho filed the suit in U.S. District Court in the Southern District of Texas."

The lawsuit argues:

• The executive action on immigration conflicts with the President’s constitutional duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” The Take Care Clause limits the scope of presidential power and ensures that the chief executive will uphold and enforce Congress’s laws – not unilaterally rewrite them under the cover of “prosecutorial discretion.”
• The DHS Directive failed to comply with the Administrative Procedure Act’s required notice and comment rulemaking process before providing that legal benefits like federal work permits, Medicare, and Social Security be awarded to individuals who are openly violating immigration laws.
• The executive action to dispense with federal immigration law will exacerbate the humanitarian crisis along the southern border, which will affect increased state investment in law enforcement, health care and education.

Polls also find public support for illegal immigrants is falling.

• Quinnipiac reported "that support for immigrants is at its lowest level" ever measured by the poll:  48% now say illegals should be allowed to stay, compared to 57% a year ago.
• A post-Obama Economist/YouGov poll found that only "47% now favor providing those here illegally having a path toward citizenship ... In February, more than half favored some sort of pathway to citizenship."

Sources:
17 States File Lawsuit Challenging Executive Amnesty, Caroline May, Breitbart
Quinnipiac University Poll press release, Nov 25, 2014
Only Democrats Support Obama's Executive Order on Immigration, Kathy Frankovic, Economist/YouGov Poll, Dec 2, 2014

Obama's Amnesty Impact on Social Security

The long-term financial condition of Social Security and Medicare will vastly worsen as a result of Obama's executive order legalizing an estimate 5 million illegal immigrants.

• Most workers pay into the programs for their working careers, between 40 and 50 years. But millions of Obama's newly legalized are working-age adults with children, so many could be in their 40s or older.  Thus they could pay FICA taxes for the next, say, 15 or 20 years — less than half the average American worker — and be eligible for the full array of Social Security and Medicare benefits.
• In addition, most will be lower-income workers. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that foreign-born, full-time workers earn about 80% of native-born Americans ($33,500 vs. $41,900).  Social Security is a social insurance program and is structured to provide disproportionately more benefits for lower-income workers. Medicare pays the same regardless of how much a worker pays in.
• Given the demographic unknowns, estimating the amnesty's financial cost to our retirement programs — and so to U.S. taxpayers — can only be approximate. But using a basic simulation model, we believe the government will receive about $500 billion in payroll tax revenue (including Part B and drug premiums), and expect it to pay out some $2 trillion in benefits over several decades. 
• In one executive order Obama may have created his biggest income transfer scheme yet, and imposed the worst financial challenge to our two already-struggling retirement programs. And millions of Americans can expect to see their taxes go up in the future to pay for it.

Source: Obama's Amnesty Will Create a Fiscal Nightmare for Entitlements, Merrill Matthews and Marke E. Litow, Investor's Business Daily

Petition - Allow Fence Jumper to Live in White House

Reuters photo: Scene Outside White House Friday

The man who illegally jumped the fence on Sept. 19 to enter the White House is no different than illegal immigrants jumping the southern border to enter the U.S, and he should be allowed amnesty to live in the White House, argues "a tongue in cheek petition posted at the White House website" (reported by the Daily Caller).

Headlined "Grant Comprehensive Executive Amnesty & Residency to Migrant Omar J. Gonzalez & His Family," the petition continues:

We urge President Obama to immediately and publicly recognize that Mr. Omar J. Gonzalez, an oppressed migrant, was merely looking for a better life when he entered the White House after going over the classist, divisive and needless fence.

In the interest of White House diversity and what will surely result in adding to the rich tapestry of love and community, we further demand that the President reform the mean-spirited laws regulating access to the People's House. For justice and peace, upon his next return from the back-nine, Mr. Obama must award permanent lawful WH residency to Mr. Gonzalez and his family, along with a permit to work there.

Congress's Non-Priority Immigration Reform

"New polling data from Gallup shows that an overwhelming majority of Americans do not think handling immigration reform is even close to a top priority for 2014," writes Matthew Boyle at Breitbart. (See Gallup poll graphic below)

In fact, only three percent of Americans think the issue is a priority that must be dealt with this year.

Despite the fact that most Americans clearly do not think Congress or President Barack Obama should consider immigration issues a priority in 2014, House Speaker John Boehner and the rest of House GOP leadership are currently considering them a priority.

The immigration/amnesty legislative priority, argues IBD, stems from an unholy alliance of business (the 208 major U.S. companies in The Business Roundtable) and politicians in Congress ("including many in the GOP leadership").

It's hard not to be cynical about this. Businesses like cheap labor. And politicians like political contributions from business. So they've formed an unholy alliance to push the idea that the costs of amnesty for illegals would outweigh the benefits. But they don't.

Last year, economists Robert Rector and Jason Richwine of the Heritage Foundation toted up the fiscal costs to U.S. taxpayers of unlawful immigrants and amnesty. They're staggering.

On average, the study found, the average illegal immigrant household costs U.S. taxpayers about $14,387 a year. All told, in 2010, the U.S. had a fiscal "deficit" — that is taxes collected vs. welfare spent — of $55 billion for illegal immigrant households.

Well, the argument goes, after amnesty they would become taxpayers, and those costs go away, right?

Wrong. In fact, the deficit per illegal household goes up to $28,000 after amnesty, or nearly $160 billion nationwide. And that's just for those illegals already here.

"Amnesty would provide unlawful households with access to over 80 means-tested welfare programs, ObamaCare, Social Security and Medicare," the authors note. "The fiscal deficit for each household would soar."

Hispanics Vote Welfare - Not Immigration - Policy

Immigration policy isn't the key issue for Hispanics, explains Heather Macdonald at NRO. Welfare policy is. And conservatives can thank 'official and defacto immigration policy favoring low-skilled over high-skilled immigrants' for setting in motion a large wave of liberal voters seeking 'a more generous safety net, strong government intervention in the economy, and progressive taxation'.

MacDonald warns that the call for conservatives to 'discard their opposition to immigration amnesty' to enhance their electoral prospects is very misguided. She argues that California—a state undergoing a demographic revolution—is the wave of the future of the U.S., and it does not bode well for those who favor limited government and individual responsibility:

• U.S.-born Hispanic households in California use welfare programs at twice the rate of native-born non-Hispanic households;
• 1/4th of all Hispanics are poor in California, compared to a little over 1/10th of non-Hispanics;
• nearly 7 in 10 poor children in the state are Hispanic;
• 1 in 3 Hispanic children is poor, compared to less than 1 in 6 non-Hispanic children; and
• the idea of the “social issues” Hispanic voter is a mirage. A majority of Hispanics now support gay marriage, a Pew Research Center poll from last month found. The Hispanic out-of-wedlock birth rate is 53 percent, about twice that of whites.

In Immigration: Turning the Tide, Dr. Barry R. Chiswick explains how the demographic revolution began:

The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) was sold to the American public as having two major features—amnesty which was to “wipe the slate clean” of undocumented workers, and employer sanctions which was to “keep the slate clean”—along with some increased border enforcement of the immigration law. Employer sanctions were intended to cut off the “jobs magnet” that attracted undocumented workers to the United States. Half of the political bargain was fulfilled.

Under its two major amnesty provisions legal status was granted to nearly 3 million undocumented individuals, nearly all of whom were low-skilled workers, and millions more have subsequently been able to immigrate as their relatives. It is noteworthy that while in 1986 the word “amnesty” was used outright, in the current political debate the “A” word is anathema to the proponents of what is euphemistically called “earned legalization.” This by itself is testimony to public perception of the failures of the 1986 Act.

Can the 'snowball effect' of low-skilled immigrants be reversed? Yes, but only with substantial change in immigration policy. In testimony before a previous Congress, Dr. Chiswick — a University of Illinois at Chicago economist with international expertise in researching the economics of immigration and minorities — argued that the 'current legal immigration system is not serving the best economic interests of the United States', and recommended these among several changes to legal immigration policies:

• end the "nepotism" immigration policy system that encourages low-skilled workers to bring extended family to the U.S.; and
• replace it with "skills-based" immigration policies, such as those adopted by Canada, Australia and New Zealand, that give preference to immigrants who are most likely — by their age, schooling, technical training and proficiency — to add value and strength to the U.S. economy and tax revenues (rather than drain from them).

Don't expect such economy-boosting policy changes to be made in the next four years, however.