The Biden administration recently launched a scheme to give green cards to illegal aliens who are married to U.S. citizens. Originally called “Parole-in-Place,” U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has now rechristened it the “Keeping Families Together” program.
You may be reading this and asking yourself, “So what? What’s in a name?” Apparently, the brass at USCIS has never read any Shakespeare. And it seems to believe simply by giving the program a cute name, it can change it into something that the American public will support and that American courts will ratify.
If the United States wants to keep migrants and their families together, it should encourage them to either stay home or migrate to America legally.
Whatever you call it, PIP or KFT, the program runs directly contrary to the federal statute governing immigration: the Immigration and Nationality Act. The law requires foreign nationals who wish to obtain a green card to enter the United States lawfully and maintain lawful status before they can apply for a green card.
While there are a few minor exceptions to this rule, they are highly limited and explicitly defined in the law. From the start, the KFT program is illegal. Recently, a federal court issued an injunction, temporarily halting the issuance of any green cards through the KFT program.
Moreover, KFT is also an unconstitutional violation of the separation of powers. The president doesn’t have any authority to unilaterally amend the laws passed by Congress, by executive fiat, merely because he dislikes them. Implementing a program like KFT requires Congress to pass a new statute, and that isn’t likely to happen. The anti-borders contingent has been begging for an illegal alien amnesty for decades, but the idea isn’t popular with the public. And despite repeated attempts, no amnesty bill has made it through Congress.
But the real kicker is the intention behind the program’s new name. In reality, the PIP to KFT transformation is just illegal immigration activists recycling the bogus “family separation” claims that have worked so well for them in the past.
“Parole-in-Place” is dry government jargon that doesn’t convey much of anything. It merely implies that certain migrants are going to be subjected to a bureaucratic process of some sort. “Keeping Families Together,” on the other hand, oozes positivity. Who doesn’t want to keep families together? At the same time, it implies that anyone who does separate families, even for good reasons, has sinister motives.
These tropes fall apart under real-world scrutiny. In any society governed by the rule of law, families sometimes face separation. American families experience this when Uncle Jim or Aunt Jane gets convicted of a felony, or when dad is drafted to fight for the United States. Yet, there’s little media commentary suggesting we should abandon criminal law enforcement or national defense simply because they cause families to be separated and unhappy.
The reality is, yes, migrant families are often temporarily separated when they are apprehended unlawfully entering the United States. This occurs both for the administrative convenience of the government, as well as for the safety of the aliens. But that separation is the direct result of the migrant’s decision to break the law.
It isn’t punitive. Illegal aliens deported from the United States aren’t punished, they’re simply removed to their country of origin, where they have a right to live and work without breaking any laws.
So anyone with half a brain should be asking, “Why is it the responsibility of the United States to keep law-breaking foreign families together?” And the straightforward answer is that it isn’t. And any tradeoff that requires most Americans to forego secure borders so that a tiny minority of citizens who are married to illegal aliens can stay with their spouses isn’t just unfair, it’s completely insane.
It may be tempting to suggest that illegal aliens who marry U.S. citizens present a special case; or that it would be cruel to the Americans involved if they were separated from deported illegal aliens. But that argument is also based on tortured logic. If U.S. citizens want to stay with an illegal alien spouse, they’re free to depart the United States and do so, in any foreign country where their spouse has a lawful right to reside.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what anyone calls the KFT program. It’s nothing but an impermissible amnesty sporting a flimsy cloak of pseudo-legality. It will succeed at only one thing: rewarding foreign lawbreakers for entering the country illegally.
As the 1986 immigration amnesty has repeatedly proven, KFT and programs like it don’t just grant a reprieve to a select group of allegedly sympathetic migrants who have citizen family members. Rather, they encourage more would-be illegal aliens to jump the border and hang around waiting for the next amnesty.
If the U.S. wants to keep migrants and their families together, it should encourage them to either stay home or migrate to America legally.
Opinion & analysis
