AUSTIN – The Texas Public Policy Foundation today issued the following statement in reaction to the President’s announcement of an executive-branch de facto amnesty for several million illegal immigrants:
“In 2008, then-Senator Barack Obama said, ‘The biggest problems that we’re facing right now have to do with George Bush trying to bring more and more power into the executive branch and not go through Congress at all, and that’s what I intend to reverse when I’m president of the United States of America.’ It’s a shame he’s changed his mind in the six years since,” said Brooke Rollins, President and CEO of the Foundation. “The problems of illegal immigration, from public safety to public finance and beyond, are fundamentally creations of Washington, D.C., and the proponents of big government — and they can’t be solved through big-government methods of unilateral executive action.
“The White House go-it-alone agenda is the worst of all worlds: it abandons the democratic persuasion and compromise that undergirds our republic, it foists a major policy on the American people that they plausibly rejected in the last election, and it further entraps immigrants themselves in a dysfunctional system that cannot last.
“The lessons for Texas and the other states are clear: it is impossible to conceive of Washington, D.C., arriving at — and still less enacting and enforcing — a workable and just solution to the immigration crisis. This is not at bottom a function of particular parties: it is a systemic policy paralysis in D.C. that has endured for half a century.
“The federal government must act to break that paralysis — through democratic rather than autocratic action. Until it does, it will be up to the states working together, using their sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment and their plenary powers to safeguard themselves and their residents, to develop and implement their own common-sense solutions to the challenges posed by Washington, D.C.'s failed immigration status quo.”
Brooke L. Rollins is President and CEO of the Texas Public Policy Foundation.
The Texas Public Policy Foundation is a non-profit, free-market research institute based in Austin, Texas.