I hope President Obama goes ahead and makes his executive order on immigration, and does it soon. The best indications are that it will be based on setting priorities for federal enforcement. Since there are not nearly enough Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers to round up all 11-12 million undocumented residents, there is considerable discretion in how to go about enforcing the rules on the books.
It appears the president's EO will set certain conditions as a very low priority for enforcement. These would include people who have U.S. citizen children or are living with other U.S. citizen family members, people who were brought here as very young children, those who have other close citizen relatives, and people who are working in occupations in which there is a shortage of U.S. citizen labor. There may be additional categories as well. Estimates are that these new directives will apply to about half the current 11-12 million people in the U.S. without papers. President Obama has previously singled out lawbreakers as the first priority for strict enforcement and deportation.
It is inhumane to tear parents away from children or send children who have known no other home to foreign countries. It is not helpful to our prosperity to dislocate workers who are employed and contributing to the national economy. It is destructive to businesses to deprive them of workers they are depending on.
Obama should not worry that conservative Nativists will scream. They always scream no matter what he does. The Gallup Poll says that Americans favor a path to citizenship for law-abiding undocumented immigrants by a margin of 88 to 12. The Senate already passed a bipartisan, comprehensive immigration plan back in June, 2013 by a 68-32 margin with 14 Republican votes. The Republican-controlled House has had a year and a half to do something. They ought to vote right away on the Senate proposal. Many Democrats are urging them to do that right now. Here is a letter from Sen. Barbara Boxer about it. But they are stuck between their business backers, who want the immigrant labor, and their prejudiced base, who hates immigrants. Consequently they fulminate and criticize, but do nothing.
The president should therefore act. He is right on humanitarian grounds. He is right on economic grounds. And he is definitely right on political grounds. If the Republicans do nothing he will have helped the country make its immigration policies more rational and humane. If the Republicans instead vote against him or find a way to block him, they will devastate their chances among Latino voters and drive them to the polls en masse for the 2016 elections and beyond. All they need do is ask California Republicans what happened here after Pete Wilson passed the anti-immigrant Proposition 187 in 1994. They haven't been competitive in the state since.
No comments:
Post a Comment