According to statistics provided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, President Obama has now significantly decreased the number of illegal immigrants aged under 18 deported or turned away at the border. That statistic has decreased some 488% under President Obama, from 8,143 the last year of President Bush’s administration to 1,669 last year. Meanwhile, the Bush administration deported some 600 minors on average each year; Obama deported 95 last year.
Those statistics demonstrate that George W. Bush was dramatically lax on illegal immigration. But they also demonstrate that President Obama is even more lax – and that laxity has resulted in tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors pouring across America’s southern border.
Meanwhile, Democrats continue to promote higher spending, placing more and more Americans on the public rolls. In 2013, a record one out of five American households used food stamps. A record number of Americans were dependent on the federal government with regard to their higher education debt. Overall, a full 49 percent of Americans receive some form of federal benefits.
Adding millions of illegal immigrants to the public rolls – which will happen in terms of lower education and healthcare by necessity – will skyrocket spending. Which is the plan. Many on the right believe that Democrats are pursuing the so-called Cloward-Piven strategy, in which sociologists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven posited that by overloading welfare rolls, the Democratic Party would be forced to take heavy federal welfare action to save state and local governments.
But this strategy isn’t what Democrats are up to. Cloward-Piven’s goal was to create impetus for government to guarantee a universal living. The modern Democratic Party is significantly less interested in guaranteed benefits than for an economic leveling. The motivating factor of the left is not caring for the poor but tearing down the wealthy. The philosophy of the Democratic Party was embodied by Barack Obama’s response to a moderator question in 2008: “I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness.”
Fairness. Not prosperity. Fairness.
And so the Democrats will move to bankrupt the system. No welfare state can survive with open borders. That is a truism. And yet that’s exactly what Democrats are now promoting: open borders with a full welfare state. Why? Not because Democrats believe that the homegrown poor in America will be better off with more people joining them on the dole; they won’t. Rather, Democrats love the size and scope of the state and despise the rival the state faces in individual success. A growing welfare base requires higher taxation, more degradation of individual success. That is the goal.
It is the goal of the left’s hero of the moment, Thomas Piketty, who seeks a global tax on wealth in order to heal “inequality” – not to bring prosperity. It is the goal of Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who suggests that all wealth is communal, and none is individual:
There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did.
Obviously, none of this does anything worthwhile for immigrants who come here to seek prosperity rather than fairness. But the rise in illegal immigration certainly creates impetus for higher taxes, more economic leveling, and a decline in prosperity for purposes of fairness. The Obama administration isn’t merely taking advantage of a good crisis. They’re creating one in order to do so.
Ben Shapiro is Senior Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the new book, The People vs. Barack Obama: The Criminal Case Against The Obama Administration (Threshold Editions, June 10, 2014). He is also Editor-in-Chief of TruthRevolt.org. Follow Ben Shapiro on Twitter @benshapiro.
