New York Times (Editorial)
August 9, 2014
Sometime
in late summer, if predictions are right, President Obama will use his
executive authority to protect many unauthorized immigrants from
deportation.
We
don’t know the details. Mr. Obama and the Department of Homeland
Security have not yet supplied the who, what, when or even, officially,
whether. But Mr. Obama has
promised to respond to Congress’s refusal to act on immigration reform.
And the most obvious thing is to lift the threat of deportation from
immigrants who should be the lowest priority for removal: those with
citizen children, jobs, clean records and strong
community ties. Some reports put the size of that group at four million
to five million.
The
mere possibility of Mr. Obama’s protecting any of the 11 million
immigrants living here outside the law is already making Republicans
clutch at their chests and cry
out: Oh, the legality! He has done nothing yet, but right-wingers have
pre-emptively declared him Caesar, crossing a Rubicon into lawlessness.
In
truth, Mr. Obama is well within his authority to madden the right. His
power to conduct immigration policy is vast. Congress has given the
president broad flexibility
and discretion to enforce immigration law. It has also given him the
resources to deport about 350,000 to 400,000 people a year, as Mr. Obama
has done, relentlessly. It could have given him billions more to deport
everyone, but it has not.
For
Mr. Obama to use the tools at hand to focus on high-priority targets —
felons, violent criminals, public-safety and national-security threats —
and to let many others
alone would be a rational and entirely lawful exercise of discretion.
It is the kind of thing prosecutors, police and other law-enforcement
and regulatory agencies do every day. And with the authority to defer
deportations of certain immigrants comes the authority,
clearly spelled out in federal statute, to give them permission to
work.
Despite
the shrill alarms, deferring deportation is not the dreaded “amnesty”
that Republicans made a dirty word. It is temporary and revocable. It is
not legalization;
it is not a path to citizenship; and it permanently fixes nothing.
But
there is clearly a value to a program, however limited, that tells the
enshadowed population: Come out, give us your names; keep working and
paying taxes, supporting
your families and staying off the dole.
And
the national interest goes well beyond such practical benefits.
Consider the cost, in lawlessness and squandered resources, of
indiscriminate immigration enforcement.
The wastefulness of chasing millions who pose no threat but keep the
economy afloat. The crime and exploitation that flourish wherever the
undocumented remain hidden and vulnerable. The rampant wage-and-hour
violations that off-the-books workers endure in
silence. The civil-rights abuses when cops commit racial profiling,
when racist sheriffs stage “crime suppression” patrols to sweep up those
with brown skin. The cost to all workers when unscrupulous employers
push pay and working conditions to rock-bottom
levels. The ripe conditions for crime in communities where vulnerable
immigrants fear and avoid the police.
The
country understands this, and was once moving toward an overhaul of the
immigration system. But Congress has failed at every turn. Even a
small-scale idea — legalizing
“Dreamers” who were brought here as children and are Americans in all
but name — has been repeatedly stymied by the nativist right.
Pressured
by those young strivers, Mr. Obama used his authority in 2012 to allow
them a two-year reprieve to stay legally and work. Now the president is
poised to expand
this shield — possibly to the Dreamers’ parents, siblings, grandparents
and perhaps millions of others.
If
Mr. Obama acts, as he should, and the right wing explodes, it will be
worth taking time to consider what Senator Jeff Sessions, Representative
Steve King and their
hard-core colleagues and allies would have Mr. Obama do. For them, the
right number of unauthorized immigrants to welcome is zero; the right
time is never. They would let the system rot in place, to maintain the
fiction that the country can deport its way
to lawfulness. Their dishonesty is repellent, as is their blindness to
the lawless status quo, and to the cruelty of denying the hopes of
millions whose labor is welcomed but whose humanity is not.
Mr.
Obama’s critics in Congress belong to a branch of government that has
chosen to do nothing constructive about immigration — not even to
resolve this summer’s crisis
of migrant children at the border, which they looked at and punted on,
before going on vacation. This is, after all, an election year. They
have abandoned a difficult job to the care of Mr. Obama. They are in no
position to complain when he does it.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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