President Barack Obama is doing a "smoke and mirrors … kabuki dance" in Congress in order to mislead the American public into believing that it requires nearly $4 billion to deal with the crisis at the border when in fact the situation can be remedied with the stroke of a pen, national security expert James Carafano tells
Newsmax TV.
Obama's 2012 executive — Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — is the catalyst for the flood of illegal migrants converging at the U.S. border and if Obama would reverse it, Central Americans would not make the journey.
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"If you look at the numbers, it really begins after 2012, after the president announced DACA, which is the deferred removal for unlawfully present minors in the United States," he explained on "America's Forum."
"The obvious things to say is if the president withdrew DACA, the major motivator for people coming will disappear and that will be the first thing you'd want to do. You don't need a law for that because that was an executive order."
Even if new laws are passed, if the president chooses not to enforce them, as his administration has been accused of doing currently, "you're back to where you started."
Little to none of the $3.7 billion being requested by Obama is slated to address border security, according to Carafano, who says that's the most necessary component to solving the crisis.
"The president has framed this problem as what are we going to do about the children," he said. "Just like we've framed immigration as what are we going to do about the 11 million here? When you frame the problem that way there are a lot of really good answers, but you're framing the problem all wrong.
"What's the number one national security interest? Is it establishing the sovereignty and stability of the border? We have huge interests at stake here. The border is an economic engine, we have to move goods and services back and forth, the cartels are a huge national security challenge, we're importing diseases, we're destabilizing the border, we're pulling people away from focusing on other tasks.
"This is the problem — we need to deal with minors in context of solving the problem. What the president has done is flip the whole issue on its head and said well we can't do anything about anything until we deal with these children."
Congress needs to nix the president's reckless and needless spending request in the bud, according to Carafano, and send a message to him and the American people that his failure to enforce the law will not be tolerated.
"They need to say the supplemental spending is pure Obama politics and we are going to ignore it because it's ridiculous," he said. "It's not solving the problem — it's the president wanting to pretend he is solving a problem. They should laugh it out of the Congress."
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