Thursday night, citing a change in “enforcement priorities,” President Obama announced that his IRS would from now on be too busy auditing liberal nonprofit groups to collect taxes from thousands of U.S. defense contractors.
Just kidding – Obama actually announced that he would stop applying immigration laws to about 4 million people present in the U.S. illegally.
To be sure, the policy offers temporary status only to those illegal immigrants who have committed no felonies and have been here for more than five years, or have children who are citizens. Even so, it is an actual change of the immigration law conferring status on those who currently live here unofficially. That should require congressional action.
Obama’s justification for taking this action unilaterally – from behind the closed doors of an executive agency and not in the sunlight, televised in a transparent debate in the chambers of Congress – is that he is merely exercising discretion in enforcement. He is supposedly just shifting resources away from deporting families, as he put it, and toward deporting felons.
But in reality, this “re-prioritization” is a mere pretext. There is no “re-prioritization” here. In fiscal 2013, 98 percent of the 368,644 deportations carried out were of “convicted criminals, national security risks, serious immigration offenders, and recent border crossers,” the New York Times reported. Obama’s order applies to none of the groups currently being deported. And so the idea that the conferral of status is part of a “re-prioritization” is fiction. The priorities aren’t changing – what is changing is that Obama is cynically picking a political fight that he thinks will help build his legacy, expand his own executive power, and solidify his party’s position with a crucial voting bloc.
Obama’s argument that he needed to do this because Congress failed to act is particularly galling. Obama once had a Congress that could have passed immigration reform, but he did not consider it enough of a priority to expend any political capital then, nor at any other point until after the last election of his presidency. Having lacked the courage to address the issue when he could have done it according to America’s constitutional process, he has made himself a legislature of one.
As Obama knows all too well, his action makes a bipartisan immigration bill – whose effect would outlast his own presidency – a near-impossibility politically. And this is, of course, the entire of point of Obama’s action. He sees a potential benefit in the political rancor it will create and the coming clash with Republicans. This is the triumph of political cynicism to which Obama has sacrificed a permanent immigration reform law.
Many Americans will be upset by Obama’s action. But those awaiting long-term or permanent relief from America’s ridiculously restrictive immigration laws should know and understand that they suffered a huge defeat last night, all in the interest of advancing one man’s legacy and one political party’s future prospects.
