President Obama purports to be in favor of deporting one category of illegal aliens, at least: criminals. At his El Paso speech on immigration reform, he touted his administration’s record (to boos from the crowd) of deporting “people convicted of crimes.”
Why, then, does Obama support the DREAM Act? (We will leave aside the fact that Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s actual performance deporting criminals is lackadaisical at best.) The DREAM Act would confer legal status and immunity from deportation on illegal aliens with criminal records. Just which criminal offenders would be eligible for amnesty is unclear from the poorly drafted statute. At the very least, illegals who have been convicted three times of misdemeanors and sentenced to under 90 days in total would be eligible (so long as they meet the act’s other residency and education requirements). Whether someone with six convictions sentenced to two weeks each time, say, would qualify is unclear. Given the universal practices of pleading down felonies to misdemeanors, putting offenders on probation rather than sentencing them to overcrowded jails, and failing to prosecute arrestees at all, a wide variety of serious miscreants would be included in the category of criminals with “only” three misdemeanor convictions and 90 days in jail. Harried big-city prosecutors usually treat the theft of a car as a “non-serious” offense unworthy of jail time, so long as you don’t use a gun to steal it. But even if only so-called “minor offenses” were covered by the DREAM Act’s big amnesty tent — shoplifting, for example, or drug possession, drunk driving, and other assaults on public order — why should any criminal offender qualify for legal status, especially after having already broken the law to enter the country in the first place?...
...Illegal-alien activists constantly tout the alleged law-abidingness of illegal aliens. If illegals are in fact such model citizens, their advocates shouldn’t object to requiring a clean record to qualify for amnesty, since such a requirement would exclude very few illegals from eligibility. Or would it?
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