The US does not have, as frequently asserted, a “broken immigration system”. It has a broken deportation system.

And plans are afoot to break it still further, because the Boehner/Obama amnesty drive appears to have stalled.

It’s part of a twofold Treason Lobby attack, coordinated in the usual suspicious way: the repeated claim that the Obama Regime has been deporting a record number of people [e.g. Barack Obama, deporter-in-chief, Economist, February 8, 2014]; and the aggressive assertion that, given the success of  DACA for young illegals—Obama’s not been impeached, has he?—he can stop deportations, effectively extending his Administrative Amnesty to every illegal in America.

Here’s a typical article, by Treason Lobby apparatchik Sally Kohn (note her full disclosure buried in the text):

The White House is deporting more than 1,100 illegal immigrants per day. Why Obama can—and should—stop sending away would-be Americans.

Currently, President Obama and his Administration are deporting more than 1,100 aspiring Americans every single day. That’s 1,100 mothers and fathers and hardworking folks who come to the United States because our economy desperately needs them, our businesses aggressively recruit them, and yet our laws have not kept pace with that reality.

The White House argues that it does not have the legal authority to stop or reduce the number of deportations in America—that the only possible recourse is passing comprehensive immigration reform.  But last week, advocates with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) filed a 41-page rulemaking petition with the Department of Homeland Security presenting compelling legal analysis of how the Administration can use its executive authority to dramatically reduce or halt deportations (full disclosure: I have consulted with and supported the activities of NDLON).  Most notably, the White House has already used this authority, enacting the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program last fall to give temporary relief to young immigrants known as Dreamers.  The White House could very clearly, and very legally, apply such deferred action to other undocumented immigrants. [Links in original]

Obama Could Legally Stop Immigrant Deportations, By Sally Kohn, Daily Beast, February 11, 2014

Kohn [Email her] thinks all this is horrible, and that Obama has a “clear legal authority” to “unilaterally halt or reduce deportations “ which would be “welcome relief from letting Republican hand-wringing ambivalence drive the immigration debate.” (It’s called democratic debate, Sally.)

But let’s put this in perspective.

• The claim that Obama has deported exceptional numbers of illegals is, simply, a Big Lie, as VDARE.com has pointed out repeatedly. See, for example, National Data | Obama's Big Lie—Illegal Alien Deportations Have NOT "Shattered Records" by Edwin S. Rubenstein, August 30, 2011.

By any measure, deportations have been flat to down since the late Bush years, when they were running just below 400,000 annually.

And “by any measure” I mean that

• On examination, the Obama numbers turn out to be a pack of lies—smaller lies, but still lies.

Thus Federale recently quoted a CIS backgrounder to the effect that the Obama administration has been spinning the deportation numbers. The biggest “smaller” lie: “One-half of removals attributed to ICE were the result of Border Patrol arrests that would never have been counted as a removal in prior years.”

Here’s CIS’s executive summary [emphases added]:

• The number of deportations resulting from interior enforcement by ICE declined by 19 percent from 2011 to 2012, and is on track to decline another 22 percent in 2013.
• In 2012, the year the Obama administration claimed to break enforcement records, more than one-half of removals attributed to ICE were the result of Border Patrol arrests that would never have been counted as a removal in prior years. In 2008, under the Bush administration, only one-third of removals were from Border Patrol arrests.
• Total deportations in 2011, the latest year for which complete numbers are available, numbered 715,495 – the lowest level since 1973. The highest number of deportations on record was in 2000, under the Clinton administration, when 1,864,343 aliens were deported.
• When claiming record levels of enforcement, the Obama administration appears to count only removals, which are just one form of deportation, and only a partial measure of enforcement. Beginning in 2011, a shift of some of the routine Border Patrol case load to ICE enabled the administration to count an artificially high number of removals. 
• Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the division of ICE that is responsible for work site enforcement, combating transnational gangs, overstay enforcement, anti-smuggling and trafficking activity, and busting document and identity theft rings, now contributes very little to immigration enforcement. In 2013 HSI has produced only four percent of ICE deportations, making just a few thousand arrests per year throughout the entire country.

Deportation Numbers Unwrapped | Raw Statistics Reveal the Real Story of ICE Enforcement in Decline, CIS.org, By Jessica Vaughan, October 2013

Jessica Vaughan’s last point, about Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) contributing  “very little to immigration enforcement,” is part of the phenomenon Federale calls “ICE SVU”—busting a Canadian cheese smuggling ring, and fining moving companies for doing interstate moves without a Federal license.

Kohn, whose own website identifies her as one of the “leading progressive voices in America,” says that Obama has “deported more undocumented [VDARE.com: a.k.a. illegal] immigrants than any of his predecessors.”

But we read above that Bill Clinton, in his day the “leading progressive voice” in America, deported 1,864,343 in 2000.

Deportations equal returns plus removals—there's been a bipartisan decline in actual numbers of people leaving in the 21st century.

And in 1954, Operation Wetback is reported to have sent about 1.3 million illegal farm workers back to Mexico, proportionately a much larger removal from a much smaller U.S. population. Buses and trains deposited many deep within Mexican territory. Some 700,000 are thought to have left voluntarily—a.k.a. “self-deported.” [Handbook Of Texas Online]

In the long run, deportation isn’t the solution for illegal immigration—the solution is to stop allowing them to work and live in the US. I explained in January, 2012 that Trafalgar Square, in London, no longer has its famous pigeons, because the Greater London Authority  made it illegal to feed them. The pigeons just left.

If illegals can’t get employment, free education, food stamps, and birthright citizenship, they’ll just leave, too.

But that’s not going to happen under Obama, no matter how many phony “records” he breaks.

James Fulford [Email him] is a writer and editor for VDARE.com