Obama Offers a Reprieve to Undocumented Immigrants and to His Presidency

A small break for 5 million unauthorized immigrants and a big political trap; by announcing in a formal speech at the White House on Nov. 20 that he is going to use his executive power to regulate immigration, Barack Obama has once again cloaked a political maneuver in grand words. “It’s a very big move that is going to really stir up the political scene in the next two years and will also force all the candidates in the next presidential election to take a position on the subject,”* explains Stanley Renshon, professor of political science at the City University of New York and consultant to the conservative think tank Center for Immigration Studies.

“Are we a nation that accepts the cruelty of ripping children from their parents’ arms?” asked Obama, getting back to hints of his most grandiloquent words of 2008. His answer consists of a series of orders that should permit, between now and spring, all parents of children born in the United States to obtain green cards and temporary work permits, for a length of three years. Close to 4 million undocumented immigrants, out of 11 million estimated to be on American soil today, are affected and will thus escape the threat of deportation.

Relief. The news is huge for millions of undocumented residents who live in permanent fear of being deported at the drop of a hat if, for example, they are arrested during a routine inspection. But it’s not only about a three-year respite, at the end of which their status will have to be reexamined. Another measure announced by Obama on Nov. 20 will bring some relief to young immigrants who arrived on American soil as children: The two-year pause on deportation that was given to them before the presidential election of 2012 will be extended a year and will be offered to all those who arrived in the United States before January 2010 — rather than the June 2007 date of before.

After having himself presided over a record number of forced departures, close to 400,000 a year on average, and having earned the title of “Deporter-in-Chief,” Barack Obama is once again calling on the “country’s better angels,” as Chris Cillizza, editorialist at the Washington Post, said ironically. But, above all, the head of state is trying a new political move that aims, all at the same time, to save the last two years of his presidency, divide Republicans and make the election easier for a Democratic successor to the White House in 2016. The pause announced Nov. 20 means that undocumented immigrants and their families will only have a year’s reprieve ahead of them at the time of the next presidential election. They will have to mobilize to ensure the election of a president and a Congress who will prolong the measure.

Until then, Obama is showing by his announcements that he is not a lame duck, limping to the end of his term without doing anything. Better: He has the possibility of aggravating discord in the Republican camp. The president is “usurp[ing] the legislative power” in according a vast “amnesty” to immigrants who entered the U.S. “illegally,” shout the most conservative Republicans, like Senator Ted Cruz. “The President has taken actions that he himself has said are those of a king or an emperor, not an American president,” exclaimed the Speaker of the House John Boehner, who is trying to bring together the different parts of the Republican Party. In the House and the Senate, the elected members already rip each other to shreds about how they could respond to the coup of Obama: refuse government funding, as they already did in October 2013; freeze the budget of agencies in charge of immigration; block all nominations proposed by the White House or even launch an impeachment procedure… To start, the Republican representatives in the House filed a complaint on Nov. 20 against another of the flagship projects of Obama’s presidency, his health care reform.

Retrograde. At the heart of the GOP itself, the most moderate members fear that this new battle will lock the party in its old-fashioned image: hostile to immigrants, if not xenophobic. They stress that Latinos make up a growing part of the electorate that they absolutely have to win over if they don’t want America to tip into the hands of the Democrats for the long-term. “If you overreact, it becomes about us, not President Obama,” warned Senator Lindsey Graham, supporter of a bipartisan immigration reform currently blocked by Congress.

“Obama is very clever … but sometimes too clever for his own good,” judges Professor Renshon of the Center for Immigration Studies. “He threw down the gauntlet by saying to Republicans, ‘Take this since you haven’t made the reforms I asked for.’ But a slap in the face isn’t the best way to ask someone to have a discussion.”* Immigration was already a topic of passionate feelings and burning controversy in the United States. Obama’s orders are not going to calm the debate.

*Editor’s note: This quote, though accurately translated, could not be sourced.