‘Uncle Obama’ wins a driver’s license for working illegally

An April 3 story in the Boston Herald,  “Uncle Obama on the roads again,” reported that Onyango Obama, the president’s uncle and a Kenyan national who has been living and working illegally in the U.S. since 1963 – even after he was ordered deported in 1992 – “scored his limited [driver’s] license yesterday from the Registry’s Wilmington branch, after convincing a hearing officer that life without wheels would have posed an undue hardship on his livelihood as a liquor-store manager. Obama bolstered his case with a letter from his employer.” As always with the mainstream media, the Boston Herald didn’t note the irony that Onyango Obama was working illegally. The Herald did not remind its readers that it had, in a previous story, described Obama’s employer as being in “total shock” that Obama was working illegally. There was no follow-up quote from Obama’s employer, who has apparently been allowed to keep his illegal hire instead of opening up the job to a U.S. citizen or legal immigrant worker.The mainstream media and the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles apparently share the same high opinion of illegal employment – and disregard for displaced workers. For them, illegal employment is to be celebrated and rewarded – in this case, with a driver’s license. Obama’s hearing officer judged it to be too cruel to deny Obama the ability to drive himself to his illegally-obtained U.S. job. But neither the hearing officer nor the Boston Herald mentioned the unemployed or underemployed worker who has lost his ability to earn a living so that Obama and his employer may profit from their illegal actions.If the Boston Herald was concerned, as it should be, about illegal employment with over 20 million citizens and legal immigrants unable to find full-time work, it could investigate how Obama and his employer are able to manipulate the system, and what should be done to prevent others from doing the same. The trail would ultimately lead them to the Legal Workforce Act, H.R. 2885, which is currently blocked by House Leadership in Congress. Massachusetts is unlikely to pass a mandatory E-Verify bill. Even if it did, it could never pass a law that would expose existing hires like Onyango Obama. Only a national bill like H.R. 2885 can open up the more than 7 million non-farm jobs illegally occupied by foreign nationals to the U.S. citizens and legal immigrants who need them.JEREMY BECK is the Director of the Media Standards Project for NumbersUSA