Obama & Immigration: A Dreamer Deferred
Seven years ago, when Barack Obama’s Hope and Change campaign was sweeping the country there seemed a chance that he was different—after all, he didn’t look like any President before him and he was a community organizer before becoming a politician. The honeymoon was short-lived. A month ago it would have been an understatement to say the left had become disillusioned with Obama.
But lo! Right after the Mid-Term elections Obama signed the Immigration Accountability Executive Action on November 20th and took dramatic action to do right by our nation’s countless undocumented immigrants. Could there still be Hope for Change?
That’s exactly what Obama and the Democrats want you think, but Obama’s latest executive action is best viewed as political maneuvering and little else. It is certainly not broad or far-reaching enough to really help immigrants.
4.4 million parents of U.S. Citizens and green card holders will now be protected from deportation for three years, provided they submit biometric data, register, pass background checks and pay fees. The action also expanded the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA). The program will now allow an additional 300,000 immigrants who arrived as minors before 2010 to enroll in DACA (which also grants temporary relief from deportation) and all those previously enrolled in the program have their temporary status in the U.S.A. extended by another three years. The Secure Communities program, which required local law enforcement to do the job of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has now been terminated. It addresses a host of points relevant to the economy and directs immigration enforcement to focus more on the border.
The termination of the Secure Communities program was the most significant step in the right direction. Originally piloted by George W. Bush in 2008, Secure Communities was expanded by Obama to encompass virtually the entire country by 2011. It allowed for all immigrants under arrest to be subject to a biometric database shared with the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration Customs Enforcement (Chief Justice Earl Warren estimated the number of immigrants arrested is over 88,000.) and has been widely criticized for breaking up families, including U.S. citizens, leading to unfair deportations. Obama deserves credit for ending the program, if only for shutting a Pandora’s box that he should have never opened when he came into office.
Obama’s move does protect some immigrants, temporarily. Obama grants four million parents of U.S. citizens the right to pay taxes and assurance they will not be deported in the next three years, yet no right to health care, and no clear path to citizenship. Furthermore, parents of those enrolled in DACA are offered no protection whatsoever, and no green card. By doing this, four million immigrants will enter limbo, where their status would to be determined by the next congressional immigration reform. There is no program outlined for immigrants that do benefit from the program beyond three years yet.
The nut of Obama’s executive action is all talk and no substance. There are many who are taking the bait and hailing this as a momentous achievement and a big step in the struggle for immigrant rights. With that Obama accomplishes his first goal: he maintains his legacy as a president who stood for something different and one who accomplished important goals in office. This new action makes the term lame duck president stick in your throat a little more despite a House and Senate that will almost certainly be Republican-controlled. Ultimately, Obama’s executive action is a tactic designed more to hinder the Republicans than to help immigrants.
The Republicans now find themselves between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand you have the Tea Party wing, led by Texas’s own Ted Cruz. Cruz recently advocated blocking all of Obama’s executive appointments for the next two years until the immigration program is rescinded, and our governor-elect, Greg Abbot, plans to sue Obama over the executive action. This is just what Obama wants.
Republicans are forced to be on the defensive. In the next two years they have little time to prove to the country they are able to govern and send meaningful bills to Obama. Every day the Republicans squabble and bicker amongst themselves is one less day that they are doing anything viewed as productive.
Yet there seems to be no correct choice for them. If the Republicans do nothing, if they don’t fight, they certainly stand to irritate their waspy base, but if they fight this tooth and claw, they will destroy whatever Latin@ support they may have left. The more Republicans fight the bill, the more Obama looks like the hero of a dramatic action and sets his party up well for 2016.
I admit that I was excited when Barack Obama was elected President. However, you’ve had to have your head in the clouds if you think Obama has stood for any meaningful change over the last six years; his latest executive action is no different. If you fought for immigrant rights before you should continue to fight for them now; and if you never gave them a second thought before, now is the time to start. After all, thinking Obama has solved our immigration problem is perhaps the worst thing our nation’s undocumented immigrants could ask for.