The Chicago Tribune has warned President Barack Obama that enacting massive executive amnesty would be a “stunt” that could do more harm than good.
“The real question isn’t whether he can, but whether he should,” said a Friday Tribune editorial. “He should not.”
Obama’s hometown paper quoted his previous statement that “the notion that somehow I can just change the laws unilaterally is just not true.”
“Now, though, he seems determined to test those limits,” the paper wrote. “But it feels like a political stunt, and one that could backfire badly. … Our immigration system has been broken for a long time. But the president cannot fix it. He could, in fact, make things worse.”
The paper did push for a comprehensive amnesty bill, but said Obama’s executive amnesty would “antagonize the president’s foes in Congress” by dealing “with only the most divisive part of the immigration puzzle–what to do about those who entered the country illegally–without repairing the system that encouraged them to do so.”
Some strange bedfellows have already united against Obama’s potential executive amnesty, with even the left-wing writer Jonathan Chait saying that liberals may look back on Obama’s executive amnesty “with regret.”
Obama’s potential massive amnesty would hurt American workers. And, as U.S. Civil Rights Commissioner Peter Kirsanow has written, poor black Americans in cities like Chicago would be disproportionately impacted if they have to compete with a flood of low-skilled and cheap labor.
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