Is Obama Right to Grant Young Illegal Immigrants Work Permits? >
Obama Policy Is Positive Step, But Could Delay Real Reform
President Obama is doing the right thing by halting deportations, but the actual effects of the policy remain to be seen
June 19, 2012
About Alex Nowrasteh:
Alex Nowrasteh is the immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute's Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity.
President Obama exercised his executive power to defer deportations for young unauthorized immigrants who can now apply for temporary work permits. Regardless of their legality, the president's actions carry the miasma of an executive power grab. While the air of legal impropriety surrounding Obama's action make long run immigration reform more difficult, we shouldn't ignore the benefits of deferring deportations.
Deferring deportations for young unauthorized immigrants brought here as children allows people who are already American in every way but legally to stay here for a bit longer—perhaps until real immigration reform takes place. Many of these young people do not even remember the nation their parents took them from or speak any language besides English. Richmond teenager Heydi Mejia was brought here by her mother from Guatemala when she was 4 years old, and her knowledge of that country is limited to what she learned from Wikipedia and dinner table chats. She considers herself American.
[See a collection of political cartoons on immigration.]
Both native born Americans and immigrants like Heydi are made worse off by deportation. We lose the benefits of one more free and productive person, and Heydi loses decades of greater earned income, a higher standard of living, and the freedom to live where she chooses. If Americans want to employ, sell products to, and rent housing to Heydi, they should be allowed to without government enforced disqualifications based merely on birth location. Obama's memo, however temporary and imperfect, at least takes a small step toward relieving the pain caused by our immigration policy.
The last time Obama used his prosecutorial discretion to review deportation cases, his administration promised to stop the deportations of unauthorized immigrants with strong American family ties and no criminal records. Since that policy went into effect in November 2011, Department of Homeland Security officials stopped deportations in a bare 2 percent of the 411,000 cases reviewed. Last week's memo could be just a repeat of that.
Therein is the crux of the problem. The policy change that Obama introduced was a positive step, but because of his methods we cannot predict how far it will actually go or how long it will be enforced for. The goals of Obama's memo are laudable but the process could delay real reform.
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- Other Arguments
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Yes — The president's policy is good news, but is not a long-term solution to the large immigration problem
TAMAR JACOBY, President of ImmigrationWorks USA
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#347731943
Yes — Obama's immigration policy makes moral, economic, and political sense
MARSHALL FITZ, Director of Immigration Policy at the Center for American Progress
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#419344879
No — Obama oversteps bounds of presidency with dreams of overriding Congress to pass his own policies
MATTHEW SPALDING, Director of the B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies at the Heritage Foundation
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No — We need a permanent immigration solution, but Obama's policy has too many unknowns
LUIS ALVARADO, Political Analyst for CNN Español and Telemundo
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#615144571
No — Obama was threatened by Sen. Marco Rubio's bipartisan reform, so he undermined it
COLIN HANNA, President of Let Freedom Ring
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#718216329
No — President Obama's immigration policy violates constitutional order
MARK KRIKORIAN, Author of 'The New Case Against Immigration, Both Legal and Illegal' and 'How Obama is Transforming America Through Immigration'
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#829237891
No — President Obama's policy will hurt to an already struggling workforce
ROY BECK, Founder and President of NumbersUSA
