Reality Check: Amnesty is Not a Civil Right

Posted: January 6, 2014 | Author: Pundit Planet | Filed under: Economics, Global, Law & Justice, Mediasphere | Tags: illegalimmigration, Immigration, Jeff Sessions, Mark Zuckerberg, Obama, Obama administration, Peter Kirsanow, United States, White House |3 Comments

Crowding Out U.S. Workers

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The GOP needs to oppose the White House’s immigration plan and expose its flaws

Jeff Sessions writes: Several prominent amnesty advocates, including Mark Zuckerberg and top Obama administration officials, have argued that amnesty is a civil right. The claim is, of course, preposterous on its face. Under this reasoning, every immigrant currently living in the U.S. on a temporary visa has the right to refuse to leave when that visa expires. And every household in a foreign country has the right to enter the U.S. illegally tomorrow and demand the Obama administration’s amnesty for “DREAMers” and their relatives.

To say that amnesty is a civil right is to effectively declare to the world the right to enter the United States without permission, to bring one’s family, and to receive all of the financial benefits our nation provides. To say that one has a right to freely violate our immigration laws is to deny the very idea that a nation can establish enforceable borders.

Mr. Zuckerberg’s motivation is not elusive. He heads a lobbying group representing many of his industry’s wealthiest CEOs, and their companies wish to extract generous guest-worker programs from Congress. Similar efforts are underway from other CEOs seeking new workers for everything from manufacturing to construction to restaurant jobs. Presumably, Mr. Zuckerberg believes it is more advantageous to frame the group’s lobbying as a civil-rights crusade than as a corporate crusade for lower-cost foreign labor.

Peter Kirsanow, a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, has called the argument that amnesty is a civil right “incoherent and ahistorical.” He explains that the civil-rights movement sought equal protection of the laws for all Americans, whereas a grant of mass amnesty necessitates the uneven application of the law, privileging the illegal immigrant over the lawful immigrant and U.S. citizen, causing disproportionate harm to African-American workers in the process. Mr. Kirsanow notes that such policies “would severely affect the rights of blacks generally and all low-income Americans. What it is going to do is displace those individuals from the labor market.”

Kirsanow has written elsewhere that “the bill will wreak enormous damage to the employment prospects of American workers who have already seen their wages and employment rates plummet over the last several years. . . . It will act as a magnet for future illegal immigration and substantially increase the number of legal immigrants. It is conservatively estimated that the bill will result in 30–33 million additional immigrants over the next 10 years.”

The upside-down conception of rights increasingly articulated by amnesty activists would mean that when an illegal worker seeks a job sought or held by an American worker, the civil-rights equity is on the side of the illegal worker…

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National Review Online