Moratorium on Deportations

It looks like another genuine Obama tour de force. After all the political defeats and foreign policy sabotage by Congress, the president looks poised to get one more win against his most rabid Republican opponents. With their election victories in the Senate and their continuing majority in the House, they thought they were powerful enough to neutralize their nemesis for the remainder of his administration, but they miscalculated. Ironically, Obama will bypass both legislative bodies and govern by executive order. Some call it courage; others say it’s pure symbolism.

Last week, President Obama announced a moratorium on the deportation of around 5 million of the 11 million undocumented aliens currently in the United States. He said those in the U.S. for more than five years, who have a work permit or have given birth to children automatically considered citizens while resident, could now “come out of the shadows” and assume the duties of citizenship — by which he meant pay taxes. At the same time, he announced increased security at borders to better control illegal immigration.

Obama’s desperate leap forward is mainly a reaction to his own previous inaction. For years, he left it up to the House of Representatives to reform America’s patchwork of immigration laws, and the Republicans always sat that one out. Now, the president has turned the tables on them and demanded that they pass the legislation or stand on the sidelines and watch as he does so by executive order. He knows he has the Latinos in his corner on this one even if he doesn’t have a majority of voters supporting him. He has forced the Republicans’ hand.

Obama doesn’t want his executive order misconstrued as amnesty, and in that matter, he has the backing of The Washington Post’s so-called fact checker, which holds that there is no criminality involved in his action. But 5 million people out of a total population of 316 million constitutes about 1.5 percent. Germany would have to get more than 1.2 million people “out of the shadows” in order to top Obama’s feat.

How many people in Germany live in the shadows is hard to say. Estimates hover between 140,000 and 330,000, a mere fraction compared to the 11,000,000 in the United States. If Germany were to give residence permits to half of them, 200,000 people could breathe more easily.

But it is precisely such tentativeness that is exactly the problem in the U.S. as well: The affected illegals would be registered and subject to taxes but with no prospect of any sort of orderly process of gaining citizenship. Once they’re out in the sunlight, the easier it would be to round them up and deport them — despite the government’s admission that mass deportation would be impractical. Not even “Obamacare” would be available to those being merely tolerated.

Germany has already had one unspeakably horrible experience with registration and selection, but an Obama who protects 5 million people from deportation could make it into the history books.