President Barack Obama’s unilateral changes to immigration policy may represent the only way any of the undocumented immigrants who have built lives in the United States could hope for any relief from the fear of deportation in the foreseeable future — an upheaval that, in many cases, causes more social damage than it resolves.
For that reason — and in the hope that the politics behind the executive action may spur Congress to finally move on comprehensive reform to the nation’s dysfunctional immigration system — the president was right to choose the only remaining option in a policy toolkit that, for now, is empty.
Unquestionably, however, this is not the optimal means of governing, and it is truly deplorable that federal governance has deteriorated to such a state. There is blame to go around.
Obama, who campaigned as a post-partisan unifier, has not fulfilled any of that pledge. Chief among his shortcomings is a lack of affinity for the dealmaking game, which requires a lot more relationship-building across the partisan divide, and even intra-party among Democrats, than the president has accomplished.
It’s also true, though, that his Republican opposition drew its battle lines immediately, and has never budged. Any of Obama’s overtures — on a "grand bargain" budgetary deal, to name the most prominent example — ultimately ran aground on ideological differences that proved insurmountable.
On the immigration issue specifically, the GOP House leadership refused to take a vote on the comprehensive reform bill that passed on a wide bipartisan vote in the Senate. Its preference was to cherry-pick the items that it preferred, primarily the ones involving border enforcement.
Even then, no House bill passed since this Congress was seated in January 2013. With the increasingly conservative tenor of the new wave of GOP freshmen, prospects for immigration action that would grapple with the full range of problems seem even dimmer. To suggest otherwise is simply unrealistic.
The executive action announced this week differs from similar initiatives championed by the Reagan and first Bush administrations, not only in the number of people affected but because it’s disconnected from congressional action.
Still, for Obama to forego any action in the interim would be willful ignorance of the real suffering that many families have endured for years, a decision simply to let that suffering persist rather than offering relief for up to 5 million people, including thousands in Hawaii.
From the standpoint of prioritizing immigration enforcement resources for the most critical needs, targeting illegal immigrants with a criminal record and giving the established and productive families a period of relief, the policy shift makes sense. The substance of it is favored by the majority of the American public.
However, that public is rightly disheartened by the way it has been accomplished. The Republicans undoubtedly resent being boxed in this way, with any effort to counter the executive action surely being read as punitive to immigrants. Given the increasing political potency of the pro-immigrant voting bloc, most of them Latino, nobody wants to wear the black hat in this melodrama.
But as the president pointed out in a moment of pique during his Thursday speech, the correct response from Republicans would be to seize some of the credit themselves for fixing the broken immigration system by passing a bill. Legislation remains the only way to create lasting change in a system that has been crying out for reform for decades. It’s time to answer that call.
