If you were one of the people who predicted Barack Obama’s “DREAM Act by fiat” – an effective amnesty for illegal aliens imposed through executive power – would swiftly expand to include far more people than the college students it was originally portrayed as benefiting, congratulate yourself for your foresight.
Not content with dropping 800,000 work permits on his exhausted, high-unemployment economy, President Obama will now grant amnesty to another 350,000 low-skilled immigrants, including middle- and high-school dropouts, according to a report in the Daily Caller. As long as they merely enroll in a course to obtain a GED (an alternative to a high-school diploma), they’re good to go.
They don’t even have to get the GED. They just have to show “sustainable measurable progress” toward one every two years. I’m sure a great deal of bureaucratic indulgence will be granted when “sustainable measurable progress” is defined. GEDs are granted after a test that only requires a few hours to administer, so what could be considered “progress” toward obtaining one, beyond merely enrolling in a preparatory course?
Obama deployed a lot of airy rhetoric to defend his painfully obvious vote-buying scheme, some of which the Daily Caller quotes: “Imagine you’ve done everything right your entire life – studied hard, worked hard, maybe even graduated at the top of your class – only to suddenly face the threat of deportation.”
Or maybe you’re a middle-school dropout. Whatever. As long as you vote Democrat.
Applications for two-year amnesty grants will begin tomorrow. There’s no official estimate of how many applicants government agencies can expect, but a pro-amnesty group cited by the Daily Caller thinks we’ll now have a total of 1.76 million new pseudo-citizens joining the 23 million unemployed actual citizens in the Obama economy. The current adjusted unemployment rate for Hispanics is 10.3 percent, fully two points higher than the general unemployment rate. For Hispanic teenagers, it’s 29.4 percent.
A GED provides a functional equivalent to a high-school diploma, and those who earn one can certainly continue on to college. School dropouts have started plenty of small businesses, including some that didn’t remain small. But this lowering of the “DREAM Act by fiat” standards is an explicit betrayal of its ostensibly high-minded goal to grant amnesty only to the most promising students, devoted to higher education and the pursuit of high-skill jobs. Like everything else Barack Obama says, that was all hollow rhetoric with an expiration date.
