Nobody Here But Us Chickens

By Mark Krikorian on February 4, 2009

There's a scene in the Life of Brian where members of the People's Front of Judea are hiding from Roman soldiers in obviously ineffective ways — standing upright with a lampshade on their heads, etc. — and the joke is that the soldiers don't notice them and leave.

Well, that seems to be what the anti-enforcement folks want with regard to the "fugitive operations teams" that are tracking the 500,000-plus illegals who have absconded from deportation orders. A front-page story today in the chief organ of the open-borders side (the New York Times) discusses a report by the chief think tank of the open-borders side (the Migration Policy Institute) revealing in breathless tones that many of the illegal aliens arrested by these teams are people without non-immigration criminal records, or even outstanding deportation orders, who were discovered during raids looking for fugitives. Now, immigration officers may or may not decide to arrest people like this in any given instance, but the anti-enforcement folks want a policy that such people are never to be arrested. In effect, the goal is an administrative amnesty, where the vast majority of illegals are exempt from enforcement and permitted to stay until such time as Congress gets around to passing a real, statutory amnesty. While Dear Leader is less likely to get Congress to enact such an amnesty than McCain would have been, this kind of administrative amnesty is well within his power, and this report from MPI (which includes among its fellows and alumni many immigration officials in this administration) suggests that's likely to happen.