Arrest of Indian Diplomat Affects U.S. Relations

Arrest of Indian Diplomat Affects U.S. Relations

“It hasn’t made too much noise here, but there’s a major diplomatic rift developing between the United States and India over the arrest of an Indian diplomat in New York for underpaying her nanny. Senior government officials have refused to meet a visiting U.S. congressional delegation, and security barriers have been removed from outside the U.S. embassy in New Delhi. The government is also reviewing the diplomatic immunity of U.S. officials in the country,” says Slate.

“This all started last week when Devyani Khobragade, consul-general for political, economic, commercial, and women’s affairs at the Indian Consulate in New York, was arrested for visa fraud. Khobragade had stated on the visa application for her nanny, an Indian national named Sangeeta Richard, that the she would be paid $4,500 per month. But Khobragade allegedly later made Richard signs a second contract reducing her salary to $537 per month, or less than $4 per hour. If convicted, Khobragade faces ‘a maximum sentence of 10 years.'”

 

Obamacare Debacle Another Hurdle for Amnesty

“The flawed rollout of the Affordable Care Act has endangered another of President Barack Obama’s top agenda items: Immigration reform. It’s forcing the White House and its allies to confront a basic, but politically potent, criticism. If the government can’t build a website, how can it be trusted to correctly process millions of undocumented immigrants and require every employer to verify the status of their workers?” says Politico.

 

Victor Davis Hanson: Open-Borders Lobby Is Against Any Immigration Control

Writing at National Review, Victor Davis Hanson says that amnesty supporters don’t want to acknowledge that they would abolish immigration controls.

“If there were good-faith efforts to reform legal immigration, again compromise would be easy. We would simply establish criteria that would privilege those with educational degrees and skill sets, make completely crime-free backgrounds mandatory, and ignore ethnic and racial makeup. Yet in the topsy-turvy world we live in today, such reasonable criteria would be anathema to the open-borders lobby, which will fight ferociously against the idea that conviction for a crime or public dependency should be grounds for not extending amnesties to those who came illegally and broke laws to remain in the United States. This, after all, might result not, as is the case at present, in the vast majority of new immigrants coming from Latin America and Mexico but, instead, in classically liberal fashion, in a true diversity of immigrants from Asia, Africa, and Europe as well as our own hemisphere.”

 

Jan Ting – The Moral Case for Rejecting Amnesty

“We hear a lot from the Obama administration and big business and the immigration advocacy groups about the moral reasons why Congress should enact the Senate bill providing an amnesty for immigration law violators and a tripling of legal immigration over the next decade. But we don’t hear much about the moral reasons why Congress should not do that,” says law professor Jan Ting.

“How does President Obama think unemployed and underemployed Americans will find better jobs if millions of illegal immigrants are legalized and able to compete openly with Americans for jobs? How will they manage if in addition the number of legal immigrants is tripled from about a million each year to about three million? How realistic are their hopes for higher wages if the pool of labor in which they compete is expanded through additional immigration as the President advocates? Is income inequality reduced or enhanced when millions of additional low-wage immigrants are added to the legal labor pool?”

 

Congressman Wants To Bring Suit Over Non-Enforcement

“Congressman Tom Rice of South Carolina, a Republican, is sponsoring a resolution in the House of Representatives that would, if adopted, direct the legislative body ‘to bring a civil action for declaratory or injunctive relief to challenge certain policies and actions taken by the executive branch.’ In other words, Rep. Rice wants to take President Obama to court for not faithfully executing the laws,” the Weekly Standard writes.

“‘President Obama has adopted a practice of picking and choosing which laws he wants to enforce. In most cases, his laws of choice conveniently coincide with his Administration’s political agenda. Our Founding Fathers created the Executive Branch to implement and enforce the laws written by Congress and vested this power in the President. However, President Obama has chosen to ignore some of the laws written by Congress and implemented by preceding Presidents,’ Rice wrote in a letter to fellow House members to ask them to co-sponsor this resolution.”