Thoughts on Obama's Executive Action on Immigration?

[Zymologist]

I'm surprised nobody's posted anything about this yet....

[Cow Poke]

[Sam]

I'm surprised nobody's posted anything about this yet....

It's legal and does not even stray terribly far from historical precedent. It is sufficiently limited in scope that the president cannot even be rightly accused of deviating from the spirit of immigration law. If Congress appropriates enough money to deport ~400,000 people per year and there are 11-13 million undocumented immigrants in the country right now then providing temporary security and relief for ~5 million of those immigrants still leaves a functional bottleneck for at least 15 years, assuming net immigration is zero.

The argument has quickly moved off the legal aspect of Obama's executive order, with even conservative scholars agreeing that Obama has sufficiently wide latitude in immigration law to provide this relief, and onto "political norms," arguing that Obama is setting a precedent that a Republican president in the future can use to, say, waive the individual mandate or provide tax relief. What people seem to be forgetting is that G.W. Bush used his executive authority to cut back enforcement of the estate tax and that Mitt Romney repeatedly promised on the campaign trail in 2012 to waive the individual mandate through an executive order on Day One of his presidency. Obama didn't open a door for future GOP presidents to use; at worst, he walked through a door that was broken off its hinges by G.W. Bush. But, realistically, he didn't even do that. This order is a difference of degree to Reagan and H.W. Bush's orders, not a difference in kind.

[Epoetker]

It's legal and does not even stray terribly far from historical precedent. It is sufficiently limited in scope that the president cannot even be rightly accused of deviating from the spirit of immigration law....

Now for the democratic response:

....Obama didn't open a door for future GOP presidents to use; at worst, he walked through a door that was broken off its hinges by G.W. Bush. But, realistically, he didn't even do that. This order is a difference of degree to Reagan and H.W. Bush's orders, not a difference in kind.

Yes, Bush and Romney at least had the excuse of the issues underlying those executive orders being both clearly and presently necessary and extremely popular among the affected people. Also not having repeatedly said that dealing with the issue via executive order was beyond their authority.

[Paprika]