Hidden gems from the Hagel-Martinez amnesty scam

Last year's Hagel-Martinez amnesty - the one that passed the Senate - had so many loopholes and hidden "features" it's hard to keep track of them. Here's a discussion from June 2006 by Rosemary Jenks of Numbers USA:

...in fact there are three other – at least three other, maybe more – amnesties, including one for anyone who entered the United States illegally before the age of 16, one for members of persecuted religious minorities who have applied for amnesty by 2003, and believe it or not, there's one buried in here for sheep herders, goat herders, and dairy workers. So it's sort of a smorgasbord for everyone.

The first one that I want to talk about is one that I'm pretty sure was not included in the estimates that Senator Sessions' office did on the numerical impact of this bill, and I know that it wasn't included in Robert Rector's estimates, and it was actually in the committee markup by Senator Brownback. It's mislabeled "widows and orphans," but what it says is that – and I'm going to read you the actual language here because it's too good to pass up – it essentially invites any alien outside the United States who's determined by a consular or immigration official to be a minor under the age of 18, "for whom no parent or legal guardian is able to provide adequate care, who faces a credible fear of harm related to his or her age, who lacks adequate protection from such harm and for whom it has been determined to be in his or her best interest, to be admitted to the United States, or who is determined by such official to be a female who has a credible fear of harm related to her sex, and a lack of adequate protection from such harm to come to the United States as a non-immigrant," to get refugee cash benefits and then adjust to legal permanent residence pretty much immediately.

So we're talking about women at risk of harm in the world and children without someone to adequately support them in the world coming here. Well, if women are just over half the population of the world, we can exclude: the United States, Canada, Australia, most of Western Europe, and then I hit a blank. You know, you could argue that women in just about the rest of the world have a credible fear of harm. So, that is a provision that is mind boggling, the impact that that could have, and I have not heard word one about this...

Immigration2007a · Wed, 04/25/2007 - 22:11 · · Importance: 1