Huckabee’s Immigration Cluelessness
It’s obvious that I disagree with Huckabee’s immigration plan, but it is a striking example of how unengaged and uninformed on policy he really is. Similar to the Flat Tax that is the heart of fiscal policy, Huckabee appears to have just read Mark Krikorian’s National Review article laying out the plan, and has just adopted the entirety of it. The ignorance displayed is unparalleled – I’ll let you figure out what I mean:
Propose to provide all illegal immigrants a 120-day window to register with the Immigration and Naturalization Service and leave the country. Those who register and return to their home country will face no penalty if they later apply to immigrate or visit; those who do not return home will be, when caught, barred from future reentry for a period of 10 years.
This plank of the plan is bad on its own merits, it will surely discourage people from registering with the INS because Huckabee doesn’t explicitly lay out a plan to increase the visa quota for the unskilled immigrants he’s trying to get to leave on their own, they would have very little incentive to register with the feds, go back to their home country and then wait in line for god-knows-how-long to see if they can come back.
But ignore all those criticisms, surely the more important one is that the Immigration and Naturalization Service doesn’t exist anymore. In fact, it hasn’t existed since March 1, 2003. Most of its functions were transferred from the Justice Department to the Department of Homeland Security in March. The administration side of the INS — registering immigrants, keeping track of citizenship status, sending out green cards — is under the purview of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, while the enforcement side of the INS is now mostly under U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). It seems like a fairly basic requirement for being President is knowing whether large Executive Branch agencies still exist.
