As so-called “Immigration reform” surely now returns to the front burner in Congress, Don Barnett, writing at the Center for Immigration Studies, alerts us to yet another reason the Senate-passed S.744 will be a nightmare for America. Barnett says being “stateless” in the US could be reason enough to allow the illegal entrant to stay and be granted asylum.
Longtime readers here know that we have covered the advancement of the media meme of “statelessness” extensively in our coverage of the Burmese Rohingya (whole archive here) and to a lesser degree the attachment of that label to Palestinians. The label could be applied to Somalis as well.
Here is Barnett (emphasis mine):
White House Director of Immigration Reform Esther Olavarria reportedly told an audience at the September 19 Congressional Black Caucus annual conference that S.744 (the Schumer-Rubio amnesty bill) has a number of “important provisions that have stayed under the radar, and we’d actually like to keep them under the radar … because we want to be able to maintain them as we go through the legislative process.”
The elite media, indeed the entire commentariat, is seemingly anxious to keep the whole bill “under the radar”.
Chalk up one more provision of the bill not quite ready for prime time news hour discussion: Section 3405 of S.744 creates a new category of individual eligible for conditional and then permanent residency as a result of being identified as a “stateless person present in the United States”. There is no need for the individual to establish that he or she fears persecution; it is sufficient to merely declare oneself “stateless”.
Asylum has always been available to stateless individuals who manage to get to the U.S. as long as they establish a “well-founded fear” of persecution on the grounds of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a “particular social group”.
[…..]
The U.N. estimates there are some 12 million stateless persons in the world today. This group includes former Soviet and Yugoslav citizens still in limbo in successor states as well as certain Palestinians, Somalis, Syrians, Royhinga from Burma, and others.
Here is some information from wikipedia on Olavarria. The page is outdated in that it doesn’t include her role in the Obama White House:
Ms. Olavarria has spent years representing immigrants and working on the issue of immigration. Between 1986 and 1998 she was a staff attorney for the Haitian Refugee Center, co-founder and managing attorney of the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center, and on staff with Legal Services of Greater Miami as directing attorney with the American Immigration Lawyer Pro Bono Project. From 1998-2007 she was counsel to Sen. Edward Kennedy and the United States Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security, and Refugees and from 2007-8 Senior Advisor for Government and External Relations to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. From August 2008 until her appointment to the Department of Homeland Security in February 2009 she was Senior Fellow and Director of Immigration Policy at the Center for American Progress.
Guess that tells you all you need to know! For readers visiting here for the first time, Kennedy was the chief architect of the Refugee Act of 1980 that was responsible for our present-day refugee program. And, of course the Center for American Progress is a George Soros creation.
Photo is from the Wilson Center, here.