One of the key arguments advanced by the Obama administration in support of its massive executive amnesty program is that the White House must take action because Congress has failed to do so.
In other words, the lack of congressional action on this front means that there's a big void out there that must be filled by the president's edict, more or less legalizing the immigration status of millions of illegal aliens.
This is what happens when the White House does not like congressional inaction.
But what happens if Congress does not act in a way that is useful to the administration? Suppose the administration likes such inaction?
Well, that's different. That kind of inaction is decisive.
I am no lawyer, but I can spot a blatant inconsistency when I see one, and one such has emerged from the Justice Department in a case involving the OPT program, which defines recent foreign college graduates as foreign students without labor market protections and gives employers up to a $10,000 bonus for hiring the aliens over comparable U.S. workers. (The bonus comes because the employers are charged no payroll taxes if they hire the aliens, but do pay such taxes if they hire Americans.)
John Miano, my colleague as a CIS fellow, won a preliminary round in this case in the DC federal district court, as I reported earlier.
Miano's argument is that the entire OPT program is based only on regulations and gives employers an opportunity to displace U.S. workers and to lower wages generally because of their access to the OPT workers. (OPT stands for optional training program, even though the program has no elements of training in it.)
But back to the contradiction. In a brief filed by the Justice Department it says that it is totally appropriate that there are no labor market protections for American workers competing with the OPT workers:
The Third Circuit ... correctly concluded that Congress's failure to place domestic labor market protections under the F-1 statute, unlike the detailed protections it imposed on other nonimmigrant worker categories, shows that the legislature acted intentionally by not addressing domestic labor market conditions in the F-1 program.
So, congressional non-action in the case of the illegals is deplorable and must be reversed by the White House, but congressional non-action in the OPT case should be regarded as the law of the land.
The hidden consistency, on the other hand, is that U.S. workers are hurt by both the White House edict and by the DOJ lawyers.
The case is Washington Alliance of Technology Workers v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security; for users of the PACER system its number is 1:14-cv-00529-ESH. WATW is a group of Microsoft workers and is affiliated with a local of the Communication Workers of America (AFL-CIO).