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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