Wall Street Journal
By Laura Meckler
November 20, 2014
WASHINGTON—President
Barack Obama was preparing Thursday to announce that millions of
illegal immigrants will gain protections from deportation under a plan
that would bypass Congress.
The
plan, to be presented by Mr. Obama in a prime-time address Thursday,
will give more than four million illegal immigrants the chance to apply
for work permits and a temporary reprieve from
deportation. People who have been in the U.S. for at least five years
and are parents of citizens or legal permanent residents would be
eligible to apply for the protections. The White House said nearly a
million more could benefit through other new or expanded
programs.
“What
I’m describing is accountability—a common-sense, middle-ground
approach: If you meet the criteria, you can come out of the shadows and
get right with the law,” Mr. Obama would say, according
to prepared remarks. “If you’re a criminal, you’ll be deported.”
Mr.
Obama’s plan contained only minor benefits for businesses that crave
more visas for foreign workers and that have lobbied unsuccessfully for
action in Congress. A new program will expand
immigration options for foreign entrepreneurs who meet certain
criteria. But White House officials said they couldn’t include a plan,
favored by high-tech companies, to make visas available from a set that
had gone unused in prior years, after concluding they
couldn’t justify the plan legally.
By
giving work papers to millions of illegal workers, Mr. Obama’s plan
could affect businesses in unexpected ways, enabling workers to seek new
jobs and higher wages to the benefit of some
business sectors more than others. Some in the agriculture industry,
for example, worried that newly legalized workers would leave for other
sectors.
Republicans
criticized the move as presidential overreach. “The action he’s
proposed would ignore the law, would reject the voice of the voters and
would impose new unfairness on law-abiding
immigrants—all without solving the problem,” said Senate Minority
Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.).
Advocates
for immigrants, who lobbied Mr. Obama to act without waiting for
approval from lawmakers, planned celebrations, rallies and watch parties
across the country. “I feel like everything
I did now is paying off,” said Martha Sanchez Almaraz, of Shakopee,
Minn., who advocated for the change and stands to benefit from it. Two
of her three children are U.S. citizens. “Sometimes, I felt like this
would never happen.”
As
a candidate for president, Mr. Obama had vowed to make an overhaul of
the immigration system a priority in his first year. That didn’t happen.
The president pushed for legislation as his
second term opened, but a bipartisan bill that passed the Senate died
in the GOP-run House.
Now,
with two years remaining in office, the president has turned to
unilateral action using executive powers as his main tool in shaping his
legacy, both on immigration and addressing climate
change, where his policies also face Republican opposition.
Republicans in Congress have spent the last several days looking for ways to block implementation of the Obama policy.
Many
have suggested using legislation that must pass by Dec. 11, needed to
keep the government funded, as a vehicle for enacting limits on Mr.
Obama’s policies. That idea hit a roadblock Thursday
when the House Appropriations Committee said that Congress cannot
defund the primary agency involved in Mr. Obama’s plan, U.S. Citizenship
and Immigration Services, because it is self-funded by fees. In fact,
the agency could continue operating even if the
rest of the government shut down.
Mr.
Obama’s action raised the question of whether immigration legislation
was now dead for the rest of his term—as GOP leaders said his unilateral
action would “poison the well’’ in working
with Congress—or whether it created new pressures for lawmakers to
revisit the issue.
Some
lawmakers said Congress may respond to Mr. Obama by renewing efforts to
pass legislation, likely in piecemeal fashion, as many Republicans have
advocated.
“Congress
needs to re-establish its authority in this,” said Rep. Mike Simpson
(R., Idaho). “Ultimately, we’ve got to solve the problem, so why not
just start doing it?”
“It
was extremely unlikely prior to this action,” said Sen. Chris Murphy
(D., Conn.). “This is a forcing mechanism. Republicans can sit down and
negotiate with us tomorrow to make this executive
action last all of a few weeks.”
Economically,
the plan was likely to have unpredictable impacts. Economists say that
people who have been working illegally may now seek higher paying jobs,
heightening wage competition in
a number of sectors. A 1986 law, which offered legal status to nearly
three million undocumented immigrants, had an almost immediate labor
market impact, with many low-wage workers moving to other jobs that pay
better.
The
executive action satisfies few priorities of business groups, which
have lobbied Congress in support of the broader overhaul and are now
regrouping.
The
executive action will create a new program for entrepreneurs who can
show they have investors and can create jobs, and it will expand a
program that helps foreign students who have graduated
and are awaiting work visas.
That
falls short of changes that many businesses want: more legal visas for high-skilled, low-skilled and farm workers. Some business groups vowed
to continue the legislative push.
“We
hope there is ultimately calm after the firestorm,” said U.S. Chamber
of Commerce spokeswoman Blair Latoff Holmes. “Republicans will have an
opportunity in the next Congress to put forward
bills to address our dysfunctional immigration system.”
Those
changes could come in the form of a series of smaller bills that
address boarder protection, employment verification and improvements to
the legal immigration process, she said.
“We
will continue to push for a permanent legislative solution,
notwithstanding the fact that the president’s unilateral action will
likely make that objective exceedingly difficult,” said
Brian Turmail, senior executive director of public affairs at the
Associated General Contractors of America.
The
most controversial part of the president’s plan is a new “deferred action” program, which gives a temporary reprieve from deportation and
the chance to apply for work permits. Parents
of U.S. citizens and permanent residents will be eligible for the
program. To qualify, they will have to undergo a background check and
pay application fees.
In
addition, the administration is expanding criteria for an existing
program that gives the same benefits to young people brought to the U.S.
illegally as children, sometimes called Dreamers,
making about 270,000 people newly eligible.
However,
senior administration officials said they could not legally justify
giving shelter to the parents of these young people. They said that
Congress had recognized the importance of the
relationship between children and their immigrant parents, in that
citizens are able to sponsor their parents for green cards. But there is
no such justification for the parents of Dreamers, who have no legal
status of their own, they said.
For similar reasons, they said, they considered but didn’t create a special program for farm workers.
“It’s
a bittersweet moment for us,” said Felipe Sousa-Rodriguez, a Brazilian
immigrant who was raised in Florida and has legal protections under the
existing program. “Many people who got
us to this point won’t have the relief of knowing their parents are
protected from deportation.”
White
House officials said they had scrubbed the policy to make sure their
actions were lawful and cited similar rationale from previous
administrations.
“The
actions I’m taking are not only lawful, they’re the kinds of actions
taken by every single Republican president and every Democratic
president for the past half century,” Mr. Obama said
in his prepared remarks. “And to those members of Congress who question
my authority to make our immigration system work better, or question
the wisdom of me acting where Congress has failed, I have one answer:
Pass a bill.”
The
plan also makes changes to the enforcement regime. Under newly crafted
guidelines, gang members, those with serious criminal convictions and
people who crossed the border after Jan. 1,
2014, will top the list of priorities for deportation. People with only
minor immigration violations or traffic convictions, but no other
offenses, will no longer be targeted, officials said.
It
wasn’t clear that deportations, which have hit record numbers under Mr.
Obama’s tenure, would fall under the new policy. Most of the people
deported in recent years would have qualified
as priorities for deportation under the new rules.
The
president was also replacing the Secure Communities program, which
mandates that local law enforcement detain illegal immigrants and notify
federal authorities. Under the new program,
immigration-enforcement officials will be notified, but people will not
be held for any extra time.
Senior
administration officials said the legal justification for Mr. Obama’s
plan was based on the principle of prosecutorial discretion—there are
insufficient resources to target all 11.2
million illegal immigrants, so the administration can assert
priorities.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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