Obama’s fake immigration reform

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The Great Deporter’s new executive order for a “sweeping overhaul of the immigration system” de­ serves no praise. If there is anything “sweeping” about President Obama’s immigration policy, it is his six years of deporting 2.4 million immigrants, his repeated lies regarding his so-called legal incapac­ ity to issue presidential executive orders to mitigate the horrors that immigrant communities have been subjected to, and his total failure to pursue anything resembling “comprehensive immigration reform.”

What Obama did do, as with his all-pervasive sur­ veillance system, was to order the implementation of a vicious program to criminalize immigrants in order to jail or deport them at will and to spend countless additional billions to militarize the border to keep them out.

Obama made clear that his executive order was “no different than all previous Democrat and Repub­ lican Party presidents over the past half century.” This statement alone immediately conjures up the heinous “bracero programs” of decades past, when strictly controlled cheap or near slave-wage labor was systematically imported from Latin America to serve the needs of the nation’s major agricultural ti­ tans and their associated industries.

The price to be extracted by Obama’s “promise” to refrain for three years from deporting undocumented immigrant parents of children born in the U.S. is a re­ quirement that all such immigrants officially register their names, addresses, employment records, wages, salaries, and other data with the government, thus subjecting them to immediate persecution or depor­ tation if they don’t pass Obama’s muster. Those with previous felony convictions or perhaps lesser “infrac­ tions” of America’s racist system of “law and order” remain subject to immediate deportation.

Obama’s decree, purportedly affecting four to five million undocumented immigrants, was described by administration officials as prioritizing the deporta­ tion of “felons, not families,” as if the remaining seven to eight million immigrants not covered by his plan were little less than dangerous criminals. Indeed, immigration officials will be instructed to prioritize the hunting down and deportation of so-called “gang members, felons, and suspected terrorists.”

“Today our immigration system is broken, and ev­ erybody knows it,” Obama said. But Obama’s “fix” to date has been to deport more immigrants than any and all previous U.S. presidents combined!

Obama’s order supposedly offers those who qualify the chance to remain in the U.S. temporarily for three years, as long as they pass background checks and pay back taxes—to be determined, no doubt, by tax collectors who will have the final word. Not a single immigrant will be offered a “path to citizenship”; nor will any be eligible for federal benefits or mandated health-care coverage.

Obama failed to mention that these same immi­ grants have often had state and federal taxes deducted from their salaries or wages by merciless employers while simultaneously being denied benefits suppos­ edly mandated to all taxpayers! Obama’s order will demand the extortion of back taxes, but there will be no retroactive back payment to immigrants for their exclusion from the benefits of paying these taxes. Obama’s program is still worse; it will now demand that back taxes be deducted from those who register to comply, while all benefits will still be denied.

To demonstrate his fidelity to his Republican “crit­ ics,” who will undoubtedly appreciate Obama’s sup­ plying corporate America with a steady supply of cheap, no-benefit labor who will be required to pay enormous sums in “back taxes” for future corporate plunder, the president issued his decree in conde­ scending and threatening language: “If you meet the criteria, you can come out of the shadows and get right with the law. If you’re a criminal, you’ll be deported. If you plan to enter the U.S. illegally, your chances of getting caught and sent back just went up.”

But Republican “critics” were nevertheless more than willing to partake in the great American cha­ rade that passes for real politics. “Instead of working together to fix our broken immigration system, the president says he’s acting on his own,” Republican House Speaker John Boehner said in a YouTube video released before the president’s speech. “The presi­ dent has said before, that he’s not king and he’s not an emperor. But he’s sure acting like one.”

In truth, what Obama “unilaterally” proclaimed was likely what the twin parties of capital had previously agreed to during their multi-year “debate” on im­ Tony Savino / Socialist Action