President Barack Obama has quietly handed out an extra 5.46 million work permits for non-immigrant foreigners who arrived as tourists, students, illegal immigrants or other types of migrants since 2009, according to federal documents released by a Freedom of Information Act request.

“The executive branch is operating a huge parallel work-authorization system outside the bounds of the [immigration] laws and limits written by Congress [and which] inevitably reduces job opportunities for Americans,” said Jessica Vaughan, the policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies, while filed the FOIA request.

“The true magnitude of how often he has evaded the limits set by Congress on foreign workers has never been known until now,” she told The Daily Caller.

“If Congress wants to take back control of our immigration system, it needs to control the issuance of work permits, which have been the vehicle for Obama to get around the [legal] limits on immigration and work visas imposed by Congress,” she said.

On Tuesday, senators will vote for or against a budget measure that would sharply limit Obama’s ability to award another five million work permits to illegals via the Department of Homeland Security. Obama promised to hand out the next five million work permits as part of his unpopular November 2014 executive amnesty, which also largely ends efforts to repatriate the 12 million illegals living in the United States.

Fewer than 10 percent of Americans want a greater flow of immigrants, according to a new Gallup poll.

If Obama’s November amnesty survives court review and weak opposition from GOP leaders, he’ll have added more foreign workers than jobs to the economy since 2009.

Obama’s aides claim he has added 10 million jobs to the economy since 2009.

But Obama’s quiet award of five million work permits, plus his November amnesty, will have added roughly 10 million foreign workers to the economy by the end of 2015. The influx adds to the normal inflow of 1 million immigrants per year and the standing population of 2 million white-collar and blue-collar guest workers.

So 18 million foreign students and workers — including many university-trained workers — have jumped into the U.S. economy since Obama was inaugurated in 2009.

The 18 million is almost level with the roughly 24 million young Americans who have turned 18 and joined the work force in the six years since 2009. In effect, Obama has given employers the option to hire a government subsidized foreigner in place of roughly one-in-two Americans who have graduated since 2009.

That’s a great deal for employers, because the foreign workers are indirectly subsidized by the government. The subsidy is the government’s promise of citizenship to many workers if they gain and hold jobs sought by Americans, plus the many aid and welfare programs that are provided to all low-income workers.

In June 2013, the Congressional Budget Office said a large influx of migrants would stall wages and spur Wall Street profits.

The influx of foreign workers coincides with a steady drop in the percentage of Americans who are working or seeking work.

In mid-2007, roughly 66.5 percent of Americans older than 16 were working. Since then, it has declined steadily, and is now just under 63 percent. The decline means that roughly 5 million Americans have dropped out of the workforce, and are not even trying to find work.

In November 2014, one in every five U.S. jobs was held by a foreign-born worker, up from one in six jobs in January 2010, according to federal data highlighted by the Center for Immigration Studies.

The data shows that Obama’s efforts have provided work permits to 54,495 tourists in 2009, and 126,998 work permits to tourists in 2014.

His deputies gave work permits to 68,220 students in 2009, and to 147,373 students in 2014. This increase likely includes work-permits for foreign college graduates, said Vaughan.

Officials provided work permits to 68,374 illegals in 2009, to 374,517 illegals in 2013 and 158,194 illegals in 2014.

That category includes more than 650,000 younger illegals who were given work permits after June 2014 under the so-called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. It also includes work-permits for many of the 50,000-plus Central American adults and youths who crossed the border in the summer of 2014.

Overall, 690,459 work-permits were given to 50 categories of foreigners in 2009, Obama’s first year. That number rose to 1,034 million in 2014, yielding a cumulative total of 5.46 million during Obama’s tenure.

The new numbers are only for first-time awards, not work-permit extensions.

Most of the work-permits are temporary — but they can be extended until a court decides to repatriate a foreign worker. The court backlog is now so great that it takes five years or more for a court to decide whether an illegal should be repatriated, said Vaughan.

Officials “can call it a temporary status, but it is effectively indefinite,” she said.

“That’s why this is such a huge incentive to game the system… [because illegals] they know they can get a work permit [and] it takes a long time to resolve the case,” she said.

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