Auntie Zeituni Gets to Stay

[Rick Oltman]

Lead item in the LEAST SURPRISING DEVELOPMENT category this week is the announcement that President Barack Obama’s Kenyan aunt, Zeituni Onyango, will not be deported but will be allowed to stay in America until her next hearing which is scheduled in February 2010. I am confident that sometime in the next ten months information, real or manufactured, will be presented that will convince an immigration judge to allow her to remain in America for the rest of her life. Nobody I know actually thought she was going to be deported in any case.

Ms. Onyango, 56, came to the U.S. in 2000 and overstayed her visa. In 2003 and again in 2004 she was ordered deported after her asylum claim was denied. Failing to leave, like hundreds of thousands of others, she continues to live in the U.S., in her case on the public dole in Boston, MA. Officially she is an absconder.

This single case wouldn’t warrant a mention if she was not the half sister of President Obama’s Kenyan father. And, because she is related to the president she isn’t going anywhere, and we all know it. It just isn’t that important in the overall scheme of things. Case closed.

But, this does give us a chance to talk about what is important and that is that there are currently over 600,000 “absconders” in our country right now. 600,000 people have been officially told to leave, and have simply ignored their deportation orders and are living and working here illegally, some living off the taxpayer in public housing, like Auntie Zeituni.

Our government doesn’t know where the absconders are. Once they receive their final order of deportation, known by ICE agents as a “run letter” the illegals…run. They take off. They change their name and are never heard from again unless they run afoul of the law. Whenever they interface with law enforcement they can be identified, though not always, and turned over to ICE for processing and removal. But, looking for 600,000 in a country with 308 million is a very time consuming and manpower intensive process. And, with all the official and un-official “sanctuary cities” in the country they are never going to catch even a fraction of them. We are all left to hope that in that large and growing group there aren’t too many criminals, drug traffickers, terrorists or kidnappers.

On the other hand, the government does know where about 8 million illegal aliens are right now, where they work anyway. In 2007 the Social Security Dept. and DHS prepared letters to 148,000 employers to tell them that over 8 million social security numbers don’t match the names they are attached to. These “no match” letters identify the employee and the erroneous social security number. But, the AFL-CIO and other unions sued to halt the mailing out of these letters to the employers and the matter is still pending in federal court in San Francisco.

These 8 million are the illegals that are not working for cash. Many more work in the underground economy. But knowing where 8 million of them are working is a pretty good lead if one wants to locate them and remove them to their nation of origin. Certainly it is easier than trying to locate the absconders.

But even the slam dunk of visiting employers known by the government to be employing illegal aliens is not going to happen. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano has signaled that worksite enforcement is going to change and focus more on the employer. (Translation: They are ending worksite enforcement.)

So, while the story of President Obama’s illegal alien absconding aunt is an attention grabber, the real story is that our government is doing less and less each day to secure the border, discourage illegal immigration and protect American workers from having their jobs taken by illegal aliens.

Glenn Beck Show discusses Auntie Zeituni http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXdbHynBkIA

CAPS Home page http://www.capsweb.org

[Calamagrostis]

It is great that Rick was able to get on national television to expose the scandal of Obama's aunt. But Glenn Beck is such a jerk. While Rick is trying to explain CAP's postion Beck keeps interrupting, making goofy faces and weird hand gestures, and generally acting like a 12 year old. I don't think that it is good to associate the organization with this clown.