Deja Vu All Over Again

The map of the area surrounding the epicenter of the horrendous Haitian earthquake indicates the borders of a sovereign nation. America is likewise a sovereign nation, with borders and immigration laws. Upwards of 200,000 Haitians have violated those borders and those laws, and Janet Napolitano's Department of Homeland Security has just moved those illegal immigrants closer to amnesty.

Napolitano's Department of Homeland Security, the Clinton State Secretariat, and the great one, Barack Obama, all support amnesty as a general principle for illegal aliens. Following the advice of "let no crisis go unexploited," a whole new set of illegal immigrants is suddenly on the fast track for citizenship as a result of the crisis in Haiti.

Before proceeding, let's get something straight, lest I be accused of being uncaring. The disaster in Haiti is almost unparalleled in the history of the western hemisphere. Nobody deserves this kind of horror, despite the ravings of Pat Robertson and Danny Glover. As the most humanitarian nation in world history, America has a natural duty to render all the aid it can possibly come up with. Simply as moral human beings we have a duty to help people in times of trouble when we have the resources and they don't.

What we don't have is a duty to throw out $100 million of the beleaguered taxpayers' money as a reward to the corrupt Haitian government for its failures. Obama has already done exactly that. Billions of American dollars have already been thrown down that rathole since the Clinton administration. Little of it has ever been accounted for, and nearly none ever got to the Haitian people. The Haitian government was warned incessantly by US government seismologists that Haiti was overdue for a major, devastating earthquake. Much of the money sent over the past ten years was to be devoted to rebuilding infrastructure, building or retrofitting hospitals to stand a major temblor, and medical and emergency food services. It took less than twenty-four hours after the quake to realize that none of that money had ever gotten out of the pockets of the crooked politicians.

None of this obviates the need for the swift action taken by the United States government to assist the victims. Undeserved cash awards from the grandstanding Obama administration aside, the relief efforts will take weeks or months, huge expenditures of time, logistics, physical labor, man-hours and funds to pay for it all. Our costs will be in the multi-millions of dollars, and we won't pinch pennies to get there. And it's the right thing to do.

However, using the crisis in Haiti is a lousy excuse for side-tracking American immigration law, creating a whole new class of "legal illegals," and setting up a previously unimportant class of border criminals for a future amnesty. The legal vehicle for accomplishing this was the granting of an eighteen-month Temporary Protected Status to Haitians who were here illegally at the time of and prior to the earthquake. Napolitano blithely states "It's sort of a time-out for Haitians in the United States who can begin to work and have some resources to send back to Haiti itself." I'm curious exactly what kind of work they're going to find during the big recession, but I suppose government work is always an option.

Napolitano plans on handing "intermediate immigration status" to an illegal population approaching a quarter of a million people. Her advisers told her that Haiti is in such bad shape it cannot accept any deportees. Democratic Senator Bill Nelson of Florida concurs (of course). Says Nelson, "It's the right thing to do. Haitian immigrants already in the U.S. will not only be able to make money to support themselves, but also to send remittances to their suffering families back in Haiti." Perhaps Nelson thinks there are 200,000 openings for poll workers at ACORN or union reps at SEIU.

Current law provides for such temporary status. But the authors never expected it to apply to such a large illegal population, and there are other avenues for protecting the illegals until the situation is stabilized in Haiti. DHS could simply go to Congress and ask for temporary legislation to cover the specific situation without creating a new "working class" to be protected by broad amnesty later. That could include a "special work visa" solely for the Haitians rather than the current plan to give them "temporary work visas" covered by more general law that regularly leads to legalization of previously illegal immigrants who have not complied with all the other requirements of naturalization.

Compassion and sympathy are for individuals, not governments. Creation of a massive new population of protected illegals is humane (which governments should be), but it is also foolish and a gross attempt to grandstand a large group of illegals into sympathetic permanent resident status. It allows an eighteen month window for the pro-illegal immigration, pro-amnesty crowd to develop the usual mantra of "they've worked hard, paid their taxes, and now they deserve instant citizenship." As with the Latin American illegals, we will now be expected to add the Haitians to the crowd whose first act in the United States was to break our law.

As always, we have precious little intelligence on exactly who all these illegals are, what they stand for, how they got here, and whether they have dangerous or terrorist intentions toward the country that negligently allowed them to arrive and stay here in the first place. So it easily follows that the hopelessly incompetent head of a major intelligence agency should grant them immediate legal status. DHS and ICE need to keep a close watch on these unknowns. Napolitano has already stated that if Haiti isn't back to "normal" at the end if the eighteen month period, she could simply extend the legal status for another eighteen months. Haiti will likely never be "normal," but that shouldn't be the determining factor in deporting the illegals at the earliest opportunity. That will not happen during an Obama administration.

FOOTNOTE: The Wall Street Journal editorial staff disagrees with me. It takes the ambiguous "moral obligation" proferred by Napolitano at face value without discussing a way to allow the illegals to stay without creating a whole new amnesty underclass. However, they were nice enough to point out that Haiti's corrupt government received $1.65 billion in aid from the outside in 2006 alone. And the results? See above. As a financial publication I would have thought they would at least question last week's $100 million grandstanding gift from Obama to the Haitian government. The Journal staff referred to this as "temporary amnesty." Temporary? Amnesty? Where have we heard all of this before?