US Immigration: An Advance and Pending Issues

The United States president released an executive order yesterday [June 15], in which he grants an amnesty of up to 24 months and the possibility of obtaining work permits to undocumented young people who have arrived in the country at age 16 or younger; that currently are a maximum of 30 years of age; and who also fulfill a series of requisites, like having remained in U.S. territory for the last five years, having concluded secondary education and not having been convicted of major offenses. Upon announcing the aforementioned determination — that, according to estimates from the Pew Hispanic Center, would benefit 1.4 million people and enable them to avoid being deported — Barack Obama maintained that it did not make sense to expel talented young people and warned that the order is not a path to obtain citizenship, but a temporary measure in order to attempt to solve a problem.

Above all and accounting for the restrictions previously mentioned, the measure is good news for the communities of undocumented immigrants in our neighbor country, not only because it relaxes the difficult situation that confronts millions of young students and workers in that nation, but because it counteracts, in some measure, four years of an erratic and disastrous policy in the area of immigration by the current administration.

It is fitting to remember that this proposal constituted one of the most advanced and hopeful points of Obama’s presidential campaign, which earned him sympathy in the Hispanic electorate and in the most progressive sectors of U.S. society. Notwithstanding, due to having relied upon a majority Democratic Congress during the first two years of his administration, Obama was incapable of obtaining sufficient legislative support on immigration. To the contrary, the Senate rejected the so-called Dream Act in December 2010 — which would have granted to foreign-born young people the possibility of becoming legal residents after spending two years in college or the armed forces — and U.S. society assisted, in the last two years, the intensification of expressions of racism and xenophobia within and outside of regulatory framework. This remained evident with the passing of the disgraceful SB1070 bill by the Arizona legislature and with the deportation of an unprecedented number of people — almost 400,000 — between 2010 and 2011.

In this sense, and without sidestepping the intrinsically positive character of the announced measure, this ought to be seen, more than as a gesture of goodwill on the part of the White House, as a triumph of the mobilization and social pressure exercised in recent months over U.S. authorities, and as a show of the capacity of immigrants to exercise an effective counterweight to Washington’s chauvinist and xenophobic sectors.

On the other hand, the fact that the aforementioned cease of deportations of young immigrants is the consequence of an executive order and not from the mandate of U.S. congressmen puts in evidence that the executive branch relies on its own institutional authorities in order to disentangle the difficult situation that confronts migrants without papers in its territory, and defuses in some measure the complaints formulated by Obama himself, who has spent the last two years placing responsibility on Republican opposition for the lack of advances in the area of immigration.

Since then, as the leader himself recognizes, the highlighted regulation — constrained only to a sector of the immigrant population and limited by the aforementioned determinants — cannot be seen as a substitute for a comprehensive reform that permits legalization for the millions of undocumented [persons] that work or study in the country. It is significant, in this sense, that the resolution announced yesterday is occurring in one of the most uncertain moments for eventual immigration reform: when the Republican opposition dominates Congress, when Obama’s presidential term is approaching its end and when it is unknown whether he will achieve reelection for another four years or if he will be defeated by Republican Mitt Romney at the polls in November.

In the face of these uncertain circumstances, it will fall to the immigrants themselves to continue pressuring Washington, independently of partisan affiliations, in order to achieve the legal recognition they deserve on the basis of the invaluable contributions they make to the economy and culture of the country.