U.S. Immigration and Customs Services, the federal agency which will process millions of applications for President Obama’s executive amnesty plan, will spend $48 million annually to employ an extra 1,000 people and to maintain a new “operational center” in northern Virginia.
“This is how a bureaucracy grows,” The New York Times’ Michael D. Shear wrote in an article detailing the cost side of Obama’s latest amnesty effort, which he announced last month.
Obama’s amnesty plan will apply to an estimated 5 million illegal immigrants.
According to The Times, USCIS’s new operations facility will open next month in Crystal City, Virginia, a Washington, D.C. suburb where a number of federal agencies conduct operations.
More than 5,000 have applied for the new jobs. The new hires will be used to process applications, conduct background checks, and operate a new website.
And though some Republicans are pushing to block funds for Obama’s expansion, USCIS has already signed a $7.8 million contract on the Crystal City facility.
Alabama U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions, who has been a leading opponent of Obama’s amnesty plan, was the first to call attention to the bureaucratic expansion, which the Obama administration did not mention when the plan was announced.
“This facility is a clear symbol of the President’s defiance of the American people, their laws, and their Constitution,” Sessions said of the Crystal City offices. “He is hiring federal employees to carry out a directive that violates the laws Congress has passed in order to foist on the nation laws Congress has repeatedly refused to pass.”
“Some have suggested that implementing this amnesty would not have a financial cost, but this action unmistakably demonstrates otherwise,” continued Sessions, expressing concern that the USCIS will become nothing more than a “rubber stamp machine” for amnesty applicants.
The Obama administration insists that the federal government will recoup the additional infrastructure costs through application fees.
But even if that is true, bureaucratic expansion will have already occurred.
“It’s very easy to focus on the benefits,” American Enterprise Institute Michael R. Strain told The Times. “Those are usually the motivating impulse behind the action. But there are costs to it as well.”
“One thousand new workers springing up in Arlington, Va. — it’s a nice example of the degree to which when the government does something big, it has a lot of consequences that people don’t think of,” Strain continued.
