Republicans are up in arms about an internal draft memo by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) leaked last week which outlines “administrative relief options to…reduce the threat of removal for certain individuals present in the United States without authorization.” Immigration hawk Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) blasted the Obama administration, stating, “[t]he President has promised border security and immigration enforcement. He has said we must hold individuals accountable for their illegal acts. But now we find out the truth: while saying one thing to the public, the Obama administration is scheming to ensure that immigration laws are not enforced.” Smith went as far as to accuse Obama himself of “conspiring to implement amnesty without any Congressional action.” However, Smith’s attack doesn’t line up with some comments he made a few years ago.

In 2000, Lamar recommended officials handle the harsh effects that the 1996 Immigration Act was having on legal immigrants administratively, rather than have Congress amend the act. At the time, the New York Times reported that “Representative Smith suggested two ways for the government to stop deportations that, though required by the statute, would be inhumane” — options that caught the Immigration and Naturalization Service office off guard:

First, he [Smith] called for the Immigration and Naturalization Service to exercise prosecutorial discretion in hardship cases. That is, immigration officials would simply decline to proceed with a deportation case. [...]

Second, Mr. Smith proposed that the attorney general use a provision of immigration law that allows her to ”parole” aliens into the country for ”urgent humanitarian reasons.” Parole, he argued, could be used to prevent deportation as well as to allow entry. [...] ”The Justice Department or I.N.S. could assign one staff member to look at these cases for parole,” Mr. Smith said. ”He could probably handle 10 cases a day.” [...] ”The government can always do what it wants to do in hardship cases,” the Congressman said. ”We should not let the letter of the law get in the way of the spirit.”

Granted, Smith was referring to the government’s ability to parole legal immigrants with deportation orders. However, Smith concedes that it is within the President’s power to do so — something that many of his Republican colleagues have argued is not. In a letter authored by GOP senators requesting a hearing on the issue, they stated that they “are troubled that the executive branch could be engaged in an effort to inappropriately expand its authority to ensure illegal immigrants are not removed from the United States.” However, in 2000, Smith probably would’ve rightly argued that it’s not an inappropriate expansion of power, but rather, an exertion of the capacities that are legally within the purview of USCIS.

Contrary to what Republicans suggest, however, that doesn’t mean USCIS is or ever planned on moving forward. An editorial in the Washington Times warns, “the question is not whether government can implement the myriad suggestions in the memo, but rather why President Obama is going to such extraordinary and unprecedented lengths to protect millions of people who are in violation of federal law.” However, other than a memo written by low level staff members that was “borne out of brainstorming sessions” that took place in 2007 during the Bush administration, there’s not a shred of evidence to suggest that’s the case. One USCIS spokesmen clarified that “as a matter of good government, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) will discuss just about every issue that comes within the purview of the immigration system.” He also definitively stated that “DHS will not grant deferred action or humanitarian parole to the nation’s entire illegal immigrant population.”

The reality of the situation is that deportations have actually reached an all-time high under the Obama administration. Immigration and Customs Enforcement expects to deport an estimated 400,000 people this fiscal year, 25 percent more than were deported by President Bush in 2007. And if that’s not enough, Obama explicitly rejected the idea of granting administrative relief in his July 1 speech at American University, proclaiming, “there are those in the immigrants’ rights community who have argued passionately that we should simply provide those who are [here] illegally with legal status… I believe such an indiscriminate approach would be both unwise and unfair.”

Most importantly, while granting administrative relief to certain vulnerable undocumented populations would certainly alleviate some of the suffering of the immigrant community, it wouldn’t fix the broken immigration system. Republicans don’t like to admit it, but comprehensive immigration reform isn’t amnesty. Instead, it consists of creating an immigration visa system that responds to the nation’s economic needs, securing the border, and putting undocumented immigrants on a tough, but fair path to legalization — politically, or practically, none of these components are a solution on its own. Perhaps that’s why Smith essentially supported the status quo in 2000 by recommending ad hoc administrative action directed at a small group of people over Congress actually fixing the “inhumanity” of the immigration system once and for all.

Recently, the Republican Party has been rallying around a new effort to potentially repeal provisions of the 14th amendment which automatically grant citizenship to those born in the U.S. Despite the media attention the GOP is generating, few reporters have reminded their audiences of one major procedural hurdle involved: getting two-thirds of Congress and three-fourths of the states to support an amendment to repeal part of the Constitution. Given the fact that it’s unlikely that such an amendment would get very far, it begs the question of why lawmakers like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), and others, are proposing the Senate Judiciary Committee waste its time by organizing hearings on the topic. The truth is it likely boils down to two things: riling up their base before November’s midterm elections and creating a toxic environment to kill any chance of the DREAM Act passing if and when it is introduced this fall.

To begin with, the notion that pregnant women are crossing the border in herds simply to have a U.S. born “anchor baby” is simply mistaken. While it has certainly been known to happen, it is by no means the norm. Even immigration restrictionist Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies points out, “there’s no evidence suggesting that this ‘drop and leave’ stuff is true…. My own sense is that most illegal alien women who have kids here…didn’t come for that purpose; they came for jobs or to join relatives, and one thing led to another, birds-and-bees style, and they had kids.” Denying citizenship to those who are born to undocumented immigrant parents would only compound the problem of illegal immigration by ballooning the number of those in the country without documents.

However, the potential introduction of the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act, or DREAM Act as it is known, explains a lot. In July, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) indicated that he would introduce the DREAM Act in the coming weeks if he feels he has the votes. Based on estimations, the DREAM Act would potentially put a little under a million undocumented youth who were brought here at a young age by their parents and meet certain requirements on a path to legalization. The usual right-wing anti-immigrant talking points simply don’t hold up as well when talking about the DREAM Act. It’s much more difficult to argue that “DREAMers” are lawbreakers who are being rewarded for coming here illegally to take jobs from U.S. citizens when they were brought to the U.S. by their parents and, through no fault of their own, invested in by the U.S. education system and raised as Americans. Perhaps in response, the Republican Party is shifting the conversation to focus on the definition of citizenship itself. As they move the debate farther to the right to argue that the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants shouldn’t be citizens, it will tighten the space Democrats have to make the case for legalizing the undocumented children of undocumented immigrants.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party stands to rack up cheap political points with its base. Graham, McCain, and Kyl have all been accused by the right of being soft on immigration. Taking such an extreme position allows moderates like them to prove that they’re willing to back up their radical anti-immigrant base rather than working with Democrats to solve the problem. And in the unlikely chance that they succeed, it would also conveniently mean more undocumented immigrants who would probably vote for Democrats, but can’t. Yet, what the senators are probably overlooking is that all those “anchor babies” already are or probably will become voters who will remind their children and their grandchildren of the party who tried to take that right away.