Remember that handsome, and frankly admirable, young illegal who wants to be a Marine? The one in the Mark Zuckerberg TV ad reported on by my colleague Jerry Kammer?
The impression from the ad is that the nation needs to pass the omnibus immigration "reform" bill so that he can enlist.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
There is no need for a 1,200-page piece of legislation, involving the admissions of millions of people a year as immigrants and nonimmigrants, to bring the young man and the Marines together.
The Secretary of Defense currently has the power, under law, to deem that it is "in the national interest" to issue a ruling allowing an illegal, or a bunch of them, to enlist in the services. The legal citation is here. So, if the DREAMers really want to enlist, and feel thwarted, why aren't they demonstrating outside the Pentagon, or the White House?
This ad is just another instance in which the administration is trying to wrap the American flag, and the American military, around its open-door policies.
There is, for instance, a much-ballyhooed provision in the administration's own, fiat-created DACA program (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) that permits some young illegals to secure legal status. It says, among other things, that DACA status can be awarded to any illegals now in the armed forces.
As we pointed out in a previous blog, this is just red-white-and-blue frosting on the cake. Under current recruiting rules the military will not accept illegal aliens, and if some do get through that screening (and some do) they can secure, under another provision of the law, an instant legalization that is much more attractive than the one offered by DACA.
So the whole involvement of the military in DACA is pure froth.
The Center for Immigration Studies has a long-pending Freedom of Information Act request filed with USCIS in which we asked how many applicants had filed for DACA and how many had filed for the military provision? USCIS answered the first part of the question, but not the second; and has not responded to our request for a full answer.
I suspect the reason for this non-transparency is that no one applied under the DACA military provision; none out of half a million applicants. (Or maybe just a handful.)
Unfortunately none of this solid information is included in the misleading ad funded by Zuckerberg — who, as Kammer notes, wants S.744 passed so that his company can hire all those H-1Bs at bargain rates.