The speaker of the house seems to have an interesting definition of the word "amnesty."
U.S. Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) released a question-and-answer sheet Tuesday explaining his reasons for supporting the vision of immigration reform set forth by House Republicans last week. The statement revives a talking point popular among some conservatives -- the idea that a failure to pass immigration reform amounts to "de facto amnesty."
From Boehner's Q-and-A sheet:
Q: Isn’t your approach "amnesty"?
A: No. Just the opposite is true. Right now, there are few, if any, consequences for living here illegally. What we have now is amnesty.
In fact, there are consequences for living here illegally. Roughly 400,000 people have been deported annually since President Barack Obama's second year in office. Congress requires the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to detain an average of 34,000 undocumented immigrants per day. For much of the time that President Obama has been in office, more people have been getting convicted of immigration offenses than any other federal crime. And the federal government spends more money on immigration enforcement than it does on all other federal law enforcement agencies combined, according to a study released last year by the Migration Policy Institute.
In spite of all of this, Boehner's not the only politician to characterize the present-day circumstances as "amnesty." U.S. Rep. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) also dropped the A-word during an interview with Fox News in March.
I've got a news flash for those who want to call people names on amnesty. What we have now is de facto amnesty. We have 11 million people here. They've been here, some of them, for a decade or more. No one is telling them to go home. No one is sending them home.
Nearly 2 million people have been deported from the United States since Obama took office.
U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fl.) also went to the "de facto amnesty" place repeatedly last year, in an apparent effort to make the comprehensive immigration reform bill passed by the Senate seem more palatable to those who oppose a pathway to citizenship for the undocumented.
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