When one thinks of Nebraska, images of rolling cornfields, sprawling livestock, and football filled weekends generally comes to mind. Nowadays, you can add one more item to that list: illegal aliens.
That’s right. Thanks to Nebraska’s legislature, this state in the middle of America’s heartland is slowly becoming a safe haven for illegal aliens, particularly those granted deferred action via President Obama’s executive amnesty.
The latest effort by the Nebraska legislature to accommodate illegal aliens is to dole out professional licenses. Specifically, the legislature is currently reviewing a proposal, LB 947, which would grant professional and commercial licenses to beneficiaries of President Obama’s unlawful Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Last year, the state legislature granted driver’s licenses to DACA recipients, and thanks to a prior legislature, illegal aliens qualify for in-state tuition.
Fortunately, not everyone in Nebraska’s government is drinking the amnesty lobby’s Kool-Aid. Governor Pete Ricketts is opposing LB 947. In a statement released last week, Governor Ricketts made the critical point that granting professional and commercial licenses to DACA recipients is poor public policy because it grants benefits to individuals who are only eligible to work due to executive fiat. “[T]his legislation would extend benefits to a group of people who have immigrated illegally and have been deemed temporarily to be lawfully present in our country by the Obama administration,” he argued. “It is important to understand that President Obama unilaterally granted this status through executive order and it is only temporary.”
Governor Ricketts is right. DACA is a temporary fiction of President Obama’s own making. Granting benefits to DACA recipients only serves to legitimize their presence in the United States and make it more difficult down the road to assert any enforcement action against this subset of illegal aliens. This is of course part of the Obama administration and amnesty lobby’s plan to further engrain illegal aliens into society, such that when individuals think of DACA’s, they don’t think of illegal aliens who Congress never authorized to be here, they think of teachers, physicians, and lawyers.
Governor Ricketts is encouraging Nebraskans to contact their state senators to ask them to oppose the bill. The bill already passed its first round of voting in a 27-7 vote by the state’s unicameral legislature. If legislators advance the bill through two more rounds of voting, it would need 30 votes to override a veto, which the legislature has already proven it can achieve when it overrode Governor Ricketts’ veto last year of the driver’s license bill.
Now is the time for Nebraskans’ to speak up, and for the rest of us to take notice. After all, if it can happen in America’s heartland, it can happen anywhere. Is your state next?
3 Comments
Farmers Have Turned Greedy Like Kansas, Oklahoma and Wisconsin [Cruz states]
They want cheap labor and know Cruz’s lobbyists will deliver, no matter what their candidates lie to us about…
This bill should not pass for something temporary. They have been deemed temporarily to be lawfully present in our country by the Obama administration.
Again, this is why after this election the immigration enforcement side needs to start concentrating on getting these issues on the ballot where the VOTERS can decide these things, because you cannot trust most of the politicians. They run on one thing and then do another. No better example than Rubio. He absolutely ruled out amnesty in his 2010 Senate run and then quickly became a member of the Senate gang of eight amnesty bill.
There is no better indication of what the voters really want than 2014 in Oregon. One of the bluest of the blue states, their voters overruled the legislature’s granting of driver’s licenses to illegals by a 2 to 1 margin in a ballot initiative. It’s now the law, only to be undone by the voters.