Washington, DC – Activists with the Project 21 black leadership network are critical of just-announced executive action by President Barack Obama to grant amnesty to non-citizens illegally in the United States.
“What President Obama did is reward those who broke our laws. This will only embitter and endanger the citizenry and legal immigrants who are similarly looking for work, just scraping by and worried about their economic future,” said Project 21 Archbishop Council Nedd II of St. Alban’s Anglican Church. “God has blessed America with abundance, and I cannot fault those seeking a better life here. But the unregulated surge of people across our borders is problematic, unsustainable and in violation of carefully-crafted rules.”
“By himself, and against the protests of congressional leaders, President Obama is giving the illegal alien community absolution for its law-breaking. Obama’s action effectively rewards the intentions of these illegals to exploit a broken immigration system and lay claim to the American way of life at the expense of its citizens and legal immigrants who obeyed our laws,” said Project 21’s Derryck Green, a southern California resident. “Our nation will undoubtedly suffer from further and a likely intensified strain on our infrastructure as well as resources that are already limited in supply due to a poor economic recovery.”
“What we are now witnessing with Obama’s amnesty plan is a complete destruction of our constitutional republic. We no longer seem to live under a system of checks and balances or separation of powers,” said Project 21’s Shelby Emmett, a lawyer and former congressional staff member who dealt with immigration issues. “We the people apparently have no more say in our representation or our form of government.”
Project 21 has issued six “DataReleases” on immigration in recent weeks, covering the following major policy areas:
- Jobs: Jobless Black Americans are demographically similar to illegal immigrants and amnesty means they encounter substantially increased head-to-head competition for jobs. Illegal immigrant migration to urban centers exacerbates challenges for black jobseekers. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights concluded that illegal immigrants “depress both wages and employment rates for low-skilled American citizens, a disproportionate number of whom are black men.”• Fairness: Carefully-crafted rules to manage immigration into the United States with an eye toward health, financial sustainability and clean legal records are discarded by mass amnesty, which also is unfair to those who immigrated after waiting in line. Obama-backed immigration policy changes would eliminate the method by which a quarter of all African immigrants, who historically have emigrated legally, are allowed residency in the United States while millions of Latin Americans who arrived illegally are granted amnesty.• Health: Health providers along the U.S-Mexico border are dealing with flu, tuberculosis, chicken pox, scabies and other illnesses brought into the U.S. by illegal aliens. The legal immigration process contains health screening, but the massive influx of Latin American children in 2014 in particular led the Obama Administration to rely on inferior screening processes and a resettlement strategy that dispersed them across the country.• Public schools: Attorney General Eric Holder told public school administrators they have an “obligation to enroll students regardless of immigration status.” This influx expands class sizes and stretches school budgets.
• Refugees: Designating Latin American illegal aliens as “refugees” from gangs and drug lords to justify an executive action blocking them from deportation would disrupt rules and limits for accepting refugees into the United States and put refugee candidates from other parts of the world at a severe disadvantage.
• History: Immigration surges historically have tended to hurt the employment prospects of black Americans.
This year, Project 21 members have been interviewed and published hundreds of times on immigration, including an op-ed in the Orlando Sentinel by Project 21’s Joe Hicks, a former executive director of the Greater Los Angeles chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Project 21, a leading voice of black conservatives for over two decades, is sponsored by the National Center for Public Policy Research (https://www.nationalcenter.org).
Read more at https://www.eurweb.com/2014/11/project-21-black-conservatives-obamas-amnesty-order-harms-jobs-schools-health-and-simple-fairness-black-activists-say/#htK1hZVv4ilAhCKF.99