Politician, Heal Thyself

On Thursday, in his opening remarks during an oversight hearing of the Department of Homeland Security, House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), who has several times made clear he supports the policy of amnesty for illegal aliens while avoiding the use of the term, had some harsh words for the president’s use of “code words” in the immigration debate. He said:

The end result of DHS’s practices is that the American people have lost all confidence in this Administration’s willingness to enforce our current immigration laws or use any enhanced enforcement tools that Congress may give it.  This in turn has made it exceedingly difficult for Congress to fix our broken immigration system.Unfortunately, we can only expect DHS’s efforts to evade its immigration law enforcement responsibilities to escalate.  President Obama has asked Secretary Johnson to “perform” an inventory of the Department’s current enforcement practices to see how it can conduct them more “humanely.”These are simply code words for further ratcheting down enforcement of our immigration laws.

While, of course, the President deserves censure for the use of code words to describe his dismantling of the nation’s immigration laws, it is ironic that Rep. Goodlatte called him out for the use of them in the same breath he used a code word of his own. “Fix our broken immigration system” is simply another code word for amnesty. Absolutely, our immigration system is not working, but our experience in 1986 shows us clearly that amnesty does not fix it. A more honest description of what amnesty would do to immigration is “embrace the chaos.” But Rep. Goodlatte is right that the President has introduced enough chaos into the nation’s immigration system that there couldn’t be a worse time for Congress to add any more.