Tag Archives: Executive Orders

Department of Homeland Skepticism

28 Saturday Feb 2015

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Almost any reference to the U.S. as the “homeland” makes me cringe. It has such a jingoistic ring to my ear that I am immediately suspicious of the speaker’s motives: “Propaganda Alert!” I suppose anyone who makes their home in this land has a right to call it their homeland, if they must. The term seems uniquely appropriate for native americans. For others residing in this “nation of immigrants”, the homeland always strikes me as a reference to the country of origin of someone’s ancestors.

It’s all the worse when a government super-agency engaged in a variety of controversial activities uses “homeland” as its middle name. That very name, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), suggests that whatever it is they do there must be in the interests of our homeland, and therefore beyond reproach.

To me it’s creepy and Orwellian, but the name of the agency is of little import relative to its activities. Now, as the fight over DHS funding — and President Obama’s executive order on immigration — reaches a fever pitch in Congress, Nick Gillespie asks, “Why do we even have a Department of Homeland Security in the first place?”

“Created in 2002 in the mad crush of panic, paranoia, and patriotic pants-wetting after the 9/11 attacks, DHS has always been a stupid idea. Even at the time, creating a new cabinet-level department responsible for 22 different agencies and services was suspect. Exactly how was adding a new layer of bureaucracy supposed to make us safer (and that’s leaving aside the question of just what the hell “homeland security” actually means)? DHS leaders answer to no fewer than 90 congressional committees and subcommittees that oversee the department’s various functions. Good luck with all that.”

Gillespie expounds on the profligacy and mismanagement at DHS. It has a voracious appetite for resources and taxpayer funds and is notorious for waste, to say nothing of its less than full-throated enthusiasm for civil liberties:

“The Government Accountability Office (GAO) routinely lists DHS on its ‘high risk’ list of badly run outfits and surveys of federal workers have concluded ‘that DHS is the worst department to work for in the government,’ writes Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute.”

That shouldn’t make anyone feel much safer. Gillespie advocates dismantling the entire agency. A high-level org chart for DHS is shown here. Certainly its constituent sub-agencies were able to function before the DHS concept was hatched. There might have been some interagency rivalry, but there was also cooperation. Would a DHS have been better able to anticipate and prevent the 9/11 attacks? That’s doubtful. Given its track record, it’s difficult to see how the DHS bureaucratic umbrella improves security, and it is not a model of cost efficiency despite expectations of reduced duplication of overhead.

Threats by a faction of the GOP to defund DHS enforcement of Obama’s immigration order are creating another deadlock in Congress. The order would grant amnesty to over 5 million illegal immigrants, but a Federal judge has ruled in favor of 26 states that sued to stop enforcement based on the imposition of enforcement costs on the states. GOP leadership would rather approve funding and let the courts do the heavy lifting to stop the order, but the administration has asked the judge to stay his injunction pending appeal. If a stay is granted, and that is unlikely, or if an appeals court overturns the ruling, implementation of the order would go forward before the conclusion of what would likely be a protracted legal process. The de-funders are unwilling to take that chance.

Democrats claim that the effort to defund DHS enforcement of the executive order will shut down the agency, which is nonsense. GOP leadership fears that Republicans will be blamed if there is even a perception of negative consequences. I suspect Obama will do his best to create those perceptions, but the funding gap won’t have much real impact. In any case, I’m with Nick Gillespie: to hell with the DHS administrative umbrella! Releasing the individual security agencies from DHS’s grip would be more likely to reduce costs with no loss of security, and just might promote individual liberty.

Border Integrity or Lines In The Sand?

02 Tuesday Dec 2014

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The constitutionality of President Obama’s recent amnesty order is debatable, to say the least, Obama himself having admitted that he simply “changed the law”. If that’s what he thinks he did, the law professor should know that his action was out-of-bounds from a constitutional perspective. The executive branch cannot make or change laws!

In “Legal but Still Poor: The Economic Consequences of Amnesty“, Joel Kotkin puts aside the constitutional question to focus on difficulties that are likely to be aggravated by amnesty. Kotkin emphasizes the economic distress that now hampers the working class. Illegals already compete for certain jobs, of course, a point Kotkin doesn’t mention. Nevertheless, the amnesty order will create new competition among workers for some positions, many of whom already face difficult conditions:

“… the country suffers from rates of labor participation at a 36 year low. Many jobs that were once full-time are, in part due to the Affordable Care Act, now part-time, and thus unable to support families. Finally there are increasingly few well-paying positions—including in industry—that don’t require some sort of post-college accreditation.”

Furthermore, the order might create incentives for new illegal immigration, leading to further labor market stress. Politically, the order is seen as an act of betrayal by legal immigrants who have gone to considerable effort and expense to obtain their status. It is also likely to be viewed as betrayal by some minority workers, who tend to be more heavily represented in parts of the labor market most vulnerable to the new competition:

“African-American unemployment is now twice that of whites. The black middle class, understandably proud of Obama’s elevation, has been losing the economic gains made over the past thirty years. … Latino-Americans have made huge strides in previous decades, but now are also falling behind, with a gradual loss of income relative to whites. Poverty among Latino children in America has risen from 27.5 percent in 2007 to 33.7 percent in 2012, an increase of 1.7 million minors.”

Kotkin mentions several other administration policies that are likely to diminish prospects for new and existing workers.

“Ironically, the places where the cry for amnesty has been the loudest—New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago—also tend to be those places that have created the least opportunity for the urban poor. … Whatever their noble intentions, these cities generally suffer the largest degree of income inequality, notes a recent Brookings study.”

The amnesty order will be expensive for taxpayers. Many newly legal immigrants will qualify for various forms of public assistance and benefits. The negative fiscal effects will be compounded if, as expected, those immigrants and the workers with whom they compete have greater difficulty finding jobs:

“Herein lies the great dilemma then for the advocates of amnesty. In much of the country, and particularly the blue regions, they will find very few decent jobs but often a host of programs designed to ease their poverty. The temptation to increase the rolls of the dependent—and perhaps boost Democratic turnouts—may prove irresistible for the local political class.”

Obama’s amnesty order attempts to deal head-on with the impossibility of deporting a large number of illegal immigrants. Unfortunately, many others will be made worse-off by the order: legal immigrants, relatively low-skilled workers and taxpayers are all likely to suffer negative consequences. And the order fails to deal adequately with the real economic need for more highly-skilled immigrants; it might well damage the prospects of achieving any near-term reform in this area. Instead of working with Congress to achieve more comprehensive reform, the President’s hasty action fuels suspicion that the real reason for his amnesty order is simply to build a larger constituency for a statist agenda.

No Country For Executive Fiat

08 Friday Aug 2014

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President Obama says he wants to allow the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) to exercise “prosecutorial discretion” in deportation efforts, focusing on individuals convicted of serious crimes instead of immigration violators. He might also expand “deferred action,” by which  legal status and work permits are issued temporarily to certain younger adults and to children arriving illegally. Obama would accomplish this via executive order of questionable legality. An advocate of liberalized immigration, Megan McArdle offers a strong critique of this “trial balloon”:

Whatever your opinion on immigration policy, I hope it doesn’t involve supporting giving the president extremely broad powers to simply rewrite any law that he thinks ought to be different. To see why, you need only ask yourself a simple question: Would you like to give this power to a president from the opposing party on a law where the two of you disagree?

Obama gives lip service to the separation of powers, but he blames the current Congress and the GOP for the current impasse. Ron Fournier is strongly sympathetic to that point of view, but he also lays plenty of blame at Obama’s feet:

Obama’s party is partly responsible for this mess, because of the cynical choices made during his first two years in office to punt on reform, in part because the Democrats who ran Congress wanted to be able to portray the GOP as anti-minority in the 2010 elections.

Obama denies culpability, but the record is clear, and almost any Democrat in Washington will concede, privately, that the president broke his promise to make immigration reform a top priority in 2009-10.

Many arguments can be made against full amnesty for illegal immigrants, most of which I find objectionable, but under the constitution, existing laws must be enforced “faithfully” by the president. Immigration reform is extremely important, but it must be thrashed out through the legislative process.