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Beverly Hills, California, United States
Eli Kantor is a labor, employment and immigration law attorney. He has been practicing labor, employment and immigration law for more than 36 years. He has been featured in articles about labor, employment and immigration law in the L.A. Times, Business Week.com and Daily Variety. He is a regular columnist for the Daily Journal. Telephone (310)274-8216; eli@elikantorlaw.com. For more information, visit beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com and and beverlyhillsemploymentlaw.com

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Tuesday, August 05, 2014

On Immigration Relief, Obama's Obstacle Is Political, Not Legal

Bloomberg Businessweek
By Josh Eidelson
August 5, 2014

Iowa Republican Steve King made headlines over the weekend by urging his colleagues to consider “that ‘I’ word” – impeachment – if President Obama wields executive authority to let millions of undocumented immigrants stay in this country. Warning Obama against deciding “that he is simply not going to enforce any immigration law, or at least not against anybody except the felons,” Congressman King told Fox News’ Chris Wallace, “If that’s not enough to bring [impeachment] about, then I don’t know what would be.”

But is it? As I wrote last month, legal scholars say the president actually has discretion to go much further than he’s likely to choose to given his political constraints. That could include granting “deferred action” – temporary relief from the threat of deportation and the opportunity to get a work visa – to most of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants currently in the United States.

Obama, says UCLA Law Professor Hiroshi Motomura, “has legal authority to exercise discretion in the way that all prosecutors do,” choosing which cases to pursue and how (witness the lack of prosecutions of big banks under Obama, or the choice to stop trying to break up Microsoft under George W. Bush). The White House has already taken steps in this direction when it comes to immigrants: In 2012, the administration announced a new policy of deferred action for many people brought to the United States as kids. Groups like the National Council of La Raza and the AFL-CIO now say they just want Obama to extend that policy to everyone who would have qualified for a path to citizenship under the Senate’s immigration bill. “That’s going to be the brass ring,” Frank Sharry, director of the pro-immigration advocacy group America’s Voice, said in July.

The politics, though, are more complicated. On Friday, House Republicans voted nearly unanimously to defund the existing deferred action program, a condition demanded by conservatives as a condition for supporting a bill backed by Republican leaders to address the increase in unaccompanied minors. (That bill, which has significantly less funding and more strings attached than what the White House requested, was dismissed by Obama on Friday as a pre-recess stunt; in absence of the $3.7 billion the president requested from Congress, the administration plans to move $405 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other areas to address the situation at the border, where tens of thousands of unaccompanied children have been detained in recent months.) Republicans have blamed Obama’s deferred action for fueling the rise in child migration, while pro-reform groups have argued that that crisis demonstrates the urgency of overhauling the immigration system, and that deferred action has proven a political as well as policy success.

“The constraint that the president has to vastly expand [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals] was largely political, and I think that constraint has been removed,” National Day Laborer Organizing Network Legal Director Chris Newman argued last month. Still, he acknowledged, “the president will hit his political limit before he hits his legal limit.”

For more information, go to:  www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com


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