One Cheer for Obama’s New Immigration Policy

The new legalization non-deportation policy President Obama announced on Friday, which I'll call "Executive DREAM," is really interesting.  A half-measure not worthy of unadorned praise or condemnation, Executive DREAM creates mixed feelings in those of us who want liberalized immigration laws -- because immigrants are generally a good thing for a country -- but want to see actual, you know, law-making get us there.  Not executive initiatives, not prosecutorial discretion, not administrative-agency diktats, but honest-to-goodness passed-by-Congress-and-signed-by-the-President laws.

I thus join my colleague Alex Nowrasteh in calling this a "temporary, tepid" immigration fix.   Alex notes that Executive DREAM, if its operation turns out to be similar to the proposed DREAM Act, "will shrink the informal economy, increase economic efficiency, and remove the fear and uncertainty of deportation from potentially millions of otherwise law-abiding people.  It would be a good first step toward reforming immigration and a glimpse at what the Dream Act would do."

Now, while the result of this little Executive DREAM is good, the manner in which it was promulgated ensures that it will be a short-lived stopgap that prevents real reform and undermines the rule of law.  There’s no reason not to normalize the status of those who would have been eligible for legalization under the DREAM Act, but doing it by executive discretion after Congress had rejected the equivalent legislation shows contempt for a co-equal branch of government.  That President Obama announced it in the midst of an election campaign, after not having spent any political capital on immigration during the first three-and-a-half years of his term, only adds to the corrosive cynicism surrounding the issue.

Our immigration system needs comprehensive reform that will only be achieved with buy-in from both parties.  Executive DREAM feels good and is the least we can do for over a million law-abiding, productive young people, but makes the long-term goal that much harder to achieve.  Indeed, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) has already indicated that the president's actions have essentially sucked the oxygen from his nascent attempts at reform.

Doug Mataconis has a similar take.  He concludes that "this action was made somewhat inevitable by Congress’s failure to act on immigration reform for at least the past six years. When there’s a power vacuum, someone will move in to occupy that space. Unfortunately, that’s what the President has done and, in the process, he’s done real damage to the Separation Of Powers."