Over 10 million invaders have been caught at our border, and the Biden administration has released the majority of them into our communities. In response, California has welcomed the invaders, recently making them eligible for $150,000 in first-time homebuyer credits, allowing them to compete in an already overheated housing market.
You would expect a different approach in a state like Oklahoma, where not a single county has voted for a Democrat presidential candidate since 2000. Not in Kevin Stitt’s Oklahoma.
At a time of record legal and illegal immigration, why is Stitt focused on bringing more foreigners into the state rather than enforcing laws against illegal aliens?
The Oklahoma legislature addressed illegal immigration seriously when it passed House Bill 4156 earlier this year. If enacted, the law would have made Oklahoma the first state in the nation to criminalize residency without legal admission to the country. The crime of “impermissible occupation” would be a misdemeanor for first-time offenders, punishable by up to a year in jail and a $500 fine. Repeat offenses would escalate to felonies, carrying penalties of up to two years in prison and a $1,000 fine. Offenders would be required to leave the state within 72 hours of their release and would be barred from returning.
Just before the law was set to take effect on July 1, Federal District Judge Bernard Jones, a Trump appointee, placed a temporary injunction on the law as it moves to the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Instead of defending the law, Gov. Kevin Stitt immediately appointed a task force to explore ways to do the opposite — attract illegal aliens by offering them work permits and state-sanctioned legal documents.
Last week, Stitt’s 11-member task force announced its recommendations to bring more illegal aliens into the state. The task force’s messaging deliberately avoids acknowledging the illegal status of these individuals, with task force members referring to them as “immigrants” or “newcomers.” Tricia Everest, the secretary of public safety and task force chairwoman, said, “The majority of people who are noncitizens are really actually highly educated.”
While some legal immigrants are highly educated, almost no illegal aliens fit that description. Who are we kidding? A new report shows that illegal immigration costs taxpayers $150 billion a year, to say nothing of the accompanying gang violence, criminal vagrancy, drugs, and cartel culture.
One of the task force’s recommendations is to create an “Office of New Oklahomans.” This office would aim to increase work permits and visas for noncitizens who want to move to Oklahoma or are already there. It would also extend “driving privilege cards to qualifying noncitizens.”
Notably, the task force never uses the word “illegal.” Citizens with legal documents already have visas and work permits issued by the federal government and can obtain driver’s licenses in Oklahoma and every other state. The task force’s real goal, hidden behind vague language, is to offer legal documents to those even the Biden administration has declined to approve. Despite half a century of record legal and illegal immigration, the task force seems to think we still don’t have enough foreign workers.
“If we have noncitizens, and they’re coming and training in our universities, and they become specialists in fields where we need them — if we need nurses — there’s not enough visas available nationally where they can actually practice here,” Everest told reporters. The governor himself echoed this point in a post on X last week.
Who in their right mind thinks we have too many Americans working in nursing and engineering and not enough foreign workers? A Kaiser Family Foundation analysis found that the share of hospitals reporting hiring foreign nurses doubled between 2010 and 2022, “and a growing share of hospitals report hiring an increasing number of foreign-educated RNs to fill vacancies over time.” In many parts of the country, you will find natives in the minority among the workforce of health care workers, especially among nurses and pharmacists.
The question is, at a time of record legal and illegal immigration, why is Stitt focused on bringing more foreigners into the state rather than enforcing laws against illegal aliens? He claims he opposes granting driver’s licenses to illegal aliens, but why would his task force need to facilitate licenses for “qualifying noncitizens” if not for those here illegally?
In the past, Stitt strangely argued that granting licenses to a population prone to drunk driving would lower insurance costs. This claim comes alongside his embrace of the electric vehicle grift, which has caused a spike in auto insurance costs.
Stitt seems determined to turn Oklahoma into another California, just as he did by pushing “criminal justice reform.” The state now deals with Chinese immigrant marijuana farmers involved in organized crime. Combined with the decriminalization of theft under a certain threshold, criminal vagrancy has exploded in what was once a quintessential slice of the American heartland.
A scathing audit released by State Auditor Cindy Byrd earlier this year found that the Stitt administration misused COVID funds by funneling money through the Communities Foundation of Oklahoma to resettle Afghan refugees in the state. “CFO directed $6.5 million to relocate refugees from Afghanistan into Oklahoma,” Byrd observed. “This was not an allowable expense for this grant. The State of Oklahoma had other grants available for these types of services.”
It’s amazing how nobody thought of such a brilliant economic plan before Stitt. Let’s import people from the most backward Third World countries to help in specialty jobs because, naturally, Oklahoma doesn’t know how to wipe its rear end without the assistance of such luminaries from Kabul and Kandahar who missed the Enlightenment.
The Oklahoma debacle shows that despite the border crisis and GOP officials’ superficial rhetoric against Biden’s immigration policies, Republican leaders have not changed their ways. Deep down, they continue to support open borders and oppose any effective measures to reduce the incentives for illegal immigration. They focus on maintaining the status quo instead of putting their own citizens first.
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