Obama and undocumented immigration, ctd

This article basically confirms everything I previously wrote about Obama and undocumented immigration--that he could act, but was choosing not to, and that only adversarial political pressure would make him change his mind.

Patrick L. Smith provides much-needed context on Obama's stunning ignorance and paternalism surrounding this issue:

“Do not send your children to the borders,” President Obama said in a television interview the other Sunday. “If they do make it, they’ll get sent back. More important, they may not make it.” 

I find this remark not short of disgusting for its several subtexts. Central American parents are so stupid and loveless that they must be instructed to care for their offspring. Their decisions are calculated — suspect, that is. These mothers and fathers are ignorant of the dangers facing their emigrating kids. The best place for them to be is in the environment — to which no reference — they are escaping on orders from the calculating parents.

And:

Obama on undocumented immigration: can't or won't?

Image: Latino protesters against President Obama's immigration policy..."LATINOS ? OBAMA" (source)

Recently, President Obama caused a stir by insisting that he legally doesn't have the power to stop deportations of undocumented immigrants. I'm not a lawyer, so I can't weigh in on whether or not that's actually true. Rather, it's important to note that the weight of the evidence argues persuasively that Obama has no interest in helping undocumented immigrants, regardless of whether or not he actually can.

This is building off a previous post I wrote about how President Obama doesn't care about the plight of illegal immigrants. It's textbook liberal Democrat myth. To summarize that post:

• Advocating for immigration reform does not make you a liberal. President Reagan signed into law that eventually gave amnesty to 3 million undocumented immigrants. John McCain proposed an immigration reform bill that would have provided amnesty to undocumented immigrants in 2008, shortly before winning the Republican nomination to run for President. In 2007, President George W. Bush tried (and failed) to push another bill that would have granted amnesty to undocumented immigrants. Senator Obama helped to kill that bill.
• When, as President, Obama released an immigration reform bill in early 2013, he did so only grudgingly. United States law requires green card holders to wait 5 years before becoming a citizen; the amnesty bill Reagan signed into law required undocumented immigrants to wait an additional 18 months. Obama's plan required undocumented immigrants to wait an additional eight years! Obviously, Obama has to expect his proposal to be the left-most point of the debate; any compromise with Republicans will thus be further to the right than his original proposal. Obama is a smart man; he knows this to be true. That is precisely what he wants to happen. Either Obama and his entire team of advisors are so stupid that they can't game out politics further than an armchair blogger--or he wants a very right-wing immigration reform plan. Remember, he's already in his second term and doesn't need to worry about reelection.
• Others have pointed out that Obama claimed throughout his first term that he could not legally order ICE to defer deportation action against undocumented immigrants who were brought into the country illegally by their parents as children (the so-called "DREAMers"). Then, while running for reelection in 2012, he suddenly ordered ICE to do exactly that, with no legal challenges or consequences whatsoever. As I pointed out, there is no doubt that he did so to help win reelection.
• Even Republicans have a modicum of understanding for the situation of people whose parents brought them across the border as young children--and who thus know no other country as "home." It's very difficult to attack a decision to protect this small fraction of undocumented immigrants. His decision to create a loophole for just DREAMers took very little courage.

Read the full post for more details.

All right then, let's take a look at what immigration enforcement has looked like under the Obama administration. Reminder: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is a branch of the Department of Homeland Security; obviously, Obama appoints the head of DHS and is thus directly responsible for the general direction of ICE efforts, even if he isn't responsible for specific initiatives. Under Obama's leadership, ICE will have deported 2 million people by 2014--in just six years, Obama will have deported more people than were deported from the years 1892 and 1996--combined. In the eight years he was president, George W. Bush deported 2 million undocumented immigrants; Obama will have managed to deport that number of undocumented immigrants in just five years(!). And, the US spends more on immigration enforcement than all other federal law enforcement categories combined, and illegal border re-entry is the most prosecuted federal crime. This isn't a symptom of increased undocumented immigration; undocumented immigration has been on a steady decline since 2008, shortly before Obama was inaugurated. It doesn't have to be this way.

It's worth pausing to note that Congress controls budgeting, and Obama doesn't necessarily have a say in all of this. Nevertheless, if this isn't the outcome Obama wanted, why did he appoint an immigration enforcement hawk to head up DHS? Does anyone really think Obama was surprised when he learned ICE was setting deportation quotas? Indeed, Obama controls Department of Justice priorities; if he can order federal prosecutors to disobey (an extremely unjust) federal law in order to keep low-level drug offenders out of prison, he can at least order federal prosecutors to shift resources away from prosecuting undocumented immigration. Clearly, Obama has no qualms about bending the rules to prevent a perceived injustice; it's just that he doesn't see immigration law as being as unjust as mandatory minimums (except, as outlined in my previous post, when it's electorally necessary). In sum, Obama isn't an immigration dictator, but he isn't powerless, either.

Obamacare's means testing is a phenomenal waste

Image: This is what Obamacare's means testing looks like, in flow chart form (source)

Much ink has been spilled about what an incredible corporate sell-out Obamacare is (my favorite piece).  But the law's centerpiece--the insurance exchanges--is based on the principle of means testing.  Means testing is always a waste of scarce resources.  As Obamacare's exchanges come online, it's worth pointing out (again) just how phenomenally wasteful Obamacare's means testing is.

Sequestration's Latest Victim: The Constitution

Image: Beneficiaries of the bottom tier of the American welfare system (source)

Updates--see below

I previously wrote about a Wonkblog round-up of media accounts of programs getting axed by the sequester, and how the sequester persists only because these cuts are focused on the bottom tier of the American welfare state.  Contrast the harm the sequester inflicts on the poor with the fact that any sequester cuts that inconvenience the rich were quickly rolled back: few things could more effectively express who our government works for.

Jared Bernstein has been running a "Sequester Watch" on his always excellent blog, and I'm embarrassed to say I haven't been keeping up.  In installment #14, he rounds up accounts of specific programs being cut: various Head Start programs, inner city schools, mental health services for Native Americans, low income housing, Meals on Wheels, federal public defenders, and others.  This is poverty sustainment; not giving poor children the educational opportunities they need to succeed is an endorsement of their poverty.

Here's another link describing the effect on federal public defenders:

Federal defenders already were facing a 5 percent budget reduction when $85 billion in spending cuts began coursing through federal agencies in March, lopping another 5 percent from the budget this fiscal year. Some courts have limited the hours they hear criminal matters. Defenders across the country are taking up to 15 days without pay, forcing postponements in many criminal proceedings...

The court system’s alternative is to hire private, court-appointed attorneys to represent indigent clients, since by law they must get a lawyer. They are paid from the same pool of money as public defenders. But they cost more, and according to some studies, are less experienced and less effective.

Nachnanoff told lawmakers that public defenders are expecting another hit to their budget of more than 20 percent in the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1, which would almost surely result in layoffs.

In a letter to the Judiciary Committee, a group of 40 former judges and prosecutors urged Congress to fully fund the defender program.

“These ill-conceived measures undermine not only the Federal Defender system, but the entire federal judiciary, without achieving any real cost savings,” they wrote of the sequestration cuts.

All American citizens have a Constitutional right to a trial and legal representation.  There can be little doubt this right was being trampled before sequestration; there can be zero doubt now that this is now occurring.

But a closer look reveals the cynicism of the sequester: because public defenders are being furloughed, the federal government is actually paying more money for worse representation for poor criminals.  Can there be any question that this is a feature, and not a bug?  Does the American ruling class really find this a convincing argument:

Poor people accused of federal crimes are more likely to go to prison because of the sequester, and we need to help them get adequate legal representation.

or would they rather that poor people suffer from incompetent representation?  That legislators are willing to pay money to ensure worse representation shows that worsening public representation is a pleasant surprise of sequestration, and not an unfortunate casualty.  Constitutional rights are to be protected, but only for the rich.  Remember, we imprison people at a higher rate than the world's autocratic dictatorships:

Links worth reading

How's that whole Obamacare thing going?

"I want to cover everybody.  Now, the truth is unless you have what's calle d asingle-payer system in which everyon'es automatically covered, you're probably not going to reach every singel individual."
-Barack Obama, July 22, 2009

We seem to get new information every week confirming the worst fears of opponents of Obamacare from the left--it's a massive sellout to the health insurance industry at the expense of the uninsured.

Confusing budget baselines is a feature, not a bug

 Image: Paul Ryan and the Path to Prosperity (source)

Dylan Matthews over at Wonkblog has made a heroic effort to compile data from the different budgets.  He details in this post why, exactly, this is so difficult:

All of which is to say is that seemingly simple questions about the budget, like “Does Obama or Ryan cut the Medicare budget more over 10 years?” are rather hard to answer honestly. And that’s leaving out dumb mistakes that get made when you’re trying to get the data out fast. For example, when I was entering numbers for Social Security yesterday, I took care to subtract out the $130 billion in cuts due to chained CPI. Only I cut them from the baseline, not the actual program spending. So what is actually a cut looked like a spending increase. Derek Thompson alerted me to the issue and it got fixed, but the damage was done.

That was a stupid mistake on my part, and I should have done better. But policymakers should do better, too. The reason we have institutions like the CBO is so we can have a common set of assumptions about what policies are going to take effect, what the economy is going to look like and so forth, to enable easier comparisons between policies. So it’s mildly infuriating when institutions like the OMB work at cross-purposes and make it harder for citizens to understand exactly which politicians want to cut what from what.

But Matthews, I think, misses the entire point.  Politicians want people to be confused about their budgets.  How could citizens support budgets if they actually knew what was in them?  I'll use Paul Ryan as an example, because he basically owes his career to being able to obscure his true intentions in confusing budgets.  Here is Paul Krugman calling him out in 2010:

The immigration debate and further exposure of the liberal Democrat myth

Image: Latino protesters against President Obama's immigration policy (source)

I hope to write much more about immigration reform as the debate unfolds.  But the question that progressives conveniently ignore is the question of who undocumented immigrants actually have in their corner.

The myth of the liberal Democrat extends to immigration.  Listen to progressives, and Republicans are cruel xenophobic reactionaries happy to allow businesses to exploit undocumented labor, while Democrats like Obama defend the human rights of the oppressed.  Interesting, then, that, as President, Ronald Reagan signed into law a bill that ultimately provided amnesty to 3 million undocumented immigrants:

Reagan "knew that it was not right for people to be abused," Simpson says. "Anybody who's here illegally is going to be abused in some way, either financially [or] physically. They have no rights."

Reagan said [so] in a televised debate with Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale in 1984.

"I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and lived here, even though sometime back they may have entered illegally," he said.