Shady is as shady does. And the Biden administration is about as shady as it gets.

On Friday, the Department of Homeland Security announced an expedited deportation "relief" process for illegal immigrants who report their employers, according to the Post Millennial.

To put it another way, illegal immigrants are to be rewarded for ratting out the American citizens who hire them.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas labeled business owners who hire illegal immigrants as "predatory actors" and vowed to hold them accountable.

"The updated policy is an expansion of the principles Mayorkas outlined in a memo from October 2021 regarding immigration enforcement within workplaces," the Post Millennial reported.

In the memo, Mayorkas said DHS is focused on "delivering more severe consequences" to "unscrupulous employers who exploit the vulnerability of undocumented workers." One of the department's stated goals is to "increase the willingness of workers to report violations of law by exploitative employers."

I get flashes of communist dictators encouraging people to spy on their neighbors. It reminds me of the Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn novel where everybody is afraid of everybody else, including their own families.

According to the DHS website, "under existing regulations, a noncitizen granted deferred action may apply for and obtain employment authorization for the period of deferred action if they demonstrate 'an economic necessity for employment.'"

[firefly_poll]

Unless the "noncitizen" is a drug dealer, a human trafficker or independently wealthy, odds are that he's going to have an "economic necessity for employment."

Let's see if I have this straight. An illegal immigrant who has been hired in America rats out his employer and in return gets a stay on deportation and is then authorized to work in the country. The citizen is punished while the "noncitizen" is rewarded.

Sounds like a win-win for the illegal immigrants. Send it out over the airwaves. Come one, come all. Snitch on your boss and get a reward.

I'm all for protecting citizens from unfair competition in the workforce from illegal workers. Businesses that hire these migrants are breaking the law and should be held accountable.

But the migrants who are in the country illegally get a complete pass. They get to stay in the country, legally get a job and must, presumably, pay taxes on their wages.

And there's the rub.

Business owners who hire "undocumented" workers cheat the government out of taxes. In a "spend, spend, spend" administration, the government needs all the income it can get. It needs taxes from everybody, including illegal migrants.

DHS defines "deferred action" as "a form of prosecutorial discretion to defer removal action (deportation) against a noncitizen for a certain period of time." It goes on to point out that "DHS can terminate deferred action at any time, at its discretion."

That's a bit shady. What does "a certain period of time" mean? A year? Ten years? A hundred?

What about terminating deferred action "at any time, at its discretion"? Why would DHS deport a "noncitizen" working in the U.S. if he is paying taxes and behaving himself?

The government holds the power of deportation over the heads of these migrants. They will, of course, conform to governmental demands. They might even feel pressure to vote for Democrats who will either keep the policy in place or grant them full-blown citizenship.

In other words, the Biden administration is cultivating a herd of potentially millions of good little sheep.

But the migrants aren't the real winners here. They're actually victims. The government wins.

Illegal migrants who don't cooperate with DHS don't pay payroll taxes and are not under the government's thumb. The government would like to cull these from the herd of migrants currently streaming over the southern border.

I wonder how long it will take those migrants who are fleeing from socialist totalitarian nightmares to realize that they might just be walking into more of the same.

Mayorkas must be impeached. He's as shady as they come.

This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.