Democrats have enlisted thousands of young illegal immigrants to drag their supporters to the polls on Election Day tomorrow.
These get-out-the-vote workers may or may not be breaking the law by helping with voter mobilization. Because the workers are already unlawfully present in the United States, presumably all employment they engage in –including electioneering— already violates laws against unauthorized employment.
It’s not like their patron, President Obama, would do anything about it anyway. This past summer Obama swept aside federal law in order to pander to this growing constituency. In a move more imperial than presidential, Obama bypassed Congress and partially implemented the so-called proposed DREAM Act which would have offered a path to U.S. citizenship for youthful illegals who served in the armed forces or attended college. Up to 1.4 million illegal aliens could benefit from the move.
Using undocumented aliens as election workers is a new low for the activist Left.
“For people who aren’t supposed to be in the country in the first place to be deployed for partisan advantage is the last straw,” said Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a group that favors limits on immigration levels.
“‘The strategic deployment’ of illegal immigrants who benefit from the Obama administration program is a ‘corruption of the political process,’” he said.
And there can be little doubt that some of the Obama supporters these election workers cajole into voting booths will themselves be illegal immigrants ineligible to vote in the national election. Lax, and in some cases non-existent ID requirements, at the state level will allow people to vote who have no legal right to vote.
In the battleground state of Nevada, Culinary Workers Union Local 226 is strong-arming union members who are bona fide U.S. permanent residents into unlawfully casting ballots. (Permanent residents, or green card holders, are allowed to reside and work in the U.S. permanently but are not allowed to vote unless they become naturalized as U.S. citizens.) The union is affiliated with the UNITE HERE labor federation.
Union members who have a shaky grasp of the English language told Glenn Cook of the Las Vegas Review-Journal that they were tricked into signing voter registration forms and are now being pressured to vote. President Obama and Democrats are counting on the unions in Nevada to help get them across the finish line tomorrow.
“One of the immigrants was visited at home by a Culinary representative and said the operative made threats of deportation if no ballot was cast,” Cook writes. He notes that in Nevada no proof of citizenship is required in order to register to vote or to vote. “One would establish identity and one would establish residence,” Clark County Registrar of Voters Larry Lomax said. “Just like every other voter in Nevada, they will not be asked to prove citizenship.”
In the swing states of Colorado, Florida, and Ohio, the young illegal aliens doing the voter-mobilization work are “often referred to as Dreamers after the failed DREAM Act legislation that would have offered them a path to citizenship.” They are knocking on doors, working in telephone banks, and asking students on college campuses to vote, the Wall Street Journal reports. They are also active in solid-blue California and in Republican-dominated Texas.
The illegal campaign workers are targeting Latinos, a fast-growing demographic that President Obama has urged to “punish” its “enemies.” Obama is reportedly running ahead among Latino voters so the efforts of the so-called Dreamers could help down-ticket candidates in congressional and state races.
One of the leading groups exploiting the free labor of undocumented workers is the Colorado Immigrants Rights Coalition (CIRC). Illegal campaign workers “are winning the hearts and minds of Coloradans through their efforts,” said CIRC executive director Julien Ross.
CIRC pushed the Obama administration to enact a policy, now called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, that lets those under the age of 31 who arrived in this country by age 16 and have lived here for the last five years to seek a renewable two-year reprieve from deportation and a work permit.
CIRC has some unsavory friends. It is a “partner” with the far-left Center for Community Change (CCC) and the National Day Laborers Organizing Network (NDLON).
CCC is headed by Deepak Bhargava, who worked for a decade at ACORN. CCC sponsored a December 2007 forum for thousands of community organizers from across America. Bhargava introduced speaker Barack Obama at the event and said America was “a society that is still deeply structured by racism and sexism.” He elicited a pledge from Obama that if elected the president in 2008 he would invite CCC and other Saul Alinsky-inspired community organizing groups to “help [the new administration] shape the agenda.”
NDLON’s mission is to interfere with the enforcement of immigration laws and its “strategy is to make legal everything about the illegal immigrant except his immigration status.” The group pressures local governments to set up day laborer centers and works with labor unions to unionize day laborers.
Felipe Sousa-Rodriguez from Brazil thinks illegal aliens getting involved in electoral politics is a great idea.
“We can’t vote but we can get people to vote who support our issues. It’s our way to participate in this democracy,” said Sousa-Rodriguez, who is supervising a get-out-the-vote drive in Florida and Ohio that is co-sponsored by United We Dream, a national undocumented youth network.
United We Dream’s stated mission is to create “meaningful alliances with other national immigrant and education rights organizations and making sure there is a voice for immigrant youth in these organizations.”
One of the group’s more high profile board members is Josh Bernstein. Bernstein is “director of immigration” at the radical labor union SEIU. (Who knew labor unions had directors of immigration?) Back in the 1980s he was director of Californians for a Fair Share, a group created to fight welfare cuts.
Take a guess which political party will benefit from all this unpaid labor performed by Bernstein’s illegal election workers and all the other illegal election workers mentioned in this article.