The high cost of President Barack Obama's executive action in granting amnesty from deportation for as many as 5 million illegal aliens is beginning to be revealed — for openers, 1,000 new federal employees to process them, at $40 million in salaries per year, and a newly signed $7.8 million annual lease for office space in a new building in Crystal City, Virginia.
The Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is hiring people for jobs ranging in salary up to $157,000 a year,
Fox News Latino reported.
The Washington Times noted that hiring for the new positions was posted just 10 days after Nov. 20, when Obama announced his unilateral executive action, indicating that plans for the hiring were well in place before the announcement.
Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Alabama, reacted with anger, stating the new office building and hiring are "a clear symbol of the president’s defiance of the American people, their laws and their Constitution,"
The Washington Post reported.
Sessions added that Obama is "hiring federal employees to carry out a directive that violates the laws Congress has passed in order to foist on the nation laws Congress has repeatedly refused to pass," the Post said.
However, because up to 95 percent of USCIS funding comes from fees immigrants pay, the Post noted that Congress likely will not be able to override the expenditures by cutting off funding when a Republican majority takes over in January.
In an internal email to employees, the USCIS stated it was "taking steps to open a new operational center in Crystal City, a neighborhood in Arlington, Virginia, to accommodate about 1,000 full-time, permanent federal and contract employees in a variety of positions and grade levels.
"The initial workload will include cases filed as a result of the executive actions on immigration announced on Nov. 20, 2014," the Times reported.
While Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said he considers the possibility of fraud in applications to "have the potential to undermine the whole process," only seven out of the 1,000 new jobs are slated for the USCIS fraud detection unit, the Times reported.
Michael R. Strain, American Enterprise Institute economist, told
The New York Times, "It’s very easy to focus on the benefits. Those are usually the motivating impulse behind the action. But there are costs to it as well.
"One thousand new workers springing up in Arlington, Va. — it's a nice example of the degree to which when the government does something big, it has a lot of consequences that people don’t think of. Our public debate and our political leaders need to do a better job of identifying those effects."
"This is going to be the crux of the fight," Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution told the Times. "It really goes to what is the extent of executive authority to make policy and then implement policy."
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