For Latin America and the Caribbean, President Obama’s proposed changes to US immigration policies are a mixed bag of common sense reforms of outmoded legislation, and a likely source of unwelcome security challenges. Within America, perceptions of the President’s plans have ranged from predictable denunciations from the Republican Party to a Democratic Congressman comparing the proposed changes to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.
Immigration, legal and otherwise, has long been one of America’s most divisive issues. The complex demographics of key swing states have made both major parties wary of the likely fallout from a failure to secure politically acceptable compromises on the issue. To date, Obama’s record has been surprisingly draconian. His administration has deported an average of 400,000 immigrants each year — more than 2 million so far – a harsher record than any previous president. On the other hand, Democrats are still seen as more receptive to compassionate deals regarding immigration reform. The last time a major immigration initiative was in play — the DREAM Act (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors), in December 2010 — its passage through the Senate was undermined by GOP threats of filibustering. (Ultimately, the bill failed to secure the 60 votes needed for a cloture motion that would have ended further debate and forced a vote.)
Learning from earlier disappointments, the administration is seeking to impose its new plan unilaterally. Faced with two years of a lame-duck presidency, President Obama seems to have decided that the time is ripe for executive action. His rollout of the plan has stressed that the new measures lie within his legal powers — a preemptive strike against the Republicans who accuse him of harbouring imperial tendencies. Earlier this week Senator Ted Cruz wrote that if Obama used executive action to get his way on immigration he would be “acting as a monarch.” Cruz even suggested that the Republican-controlled Senate could exact its revenge by refusing to confirm government nominees to anything except national security posts.
While President Obama is undoubtedly correct about the scope of his legal authority, his use of executive action to forestall the impact of unpopular laws is risky. At best his actions will be “temporary and revocable” — according to the New York Times — at worst they will establish a precedent that future administrations could use to emasculate laws they didn’t like. As the political columnist Jonathan Chait has warned, “What if a Republican president announced that he would stop enforcing the payment of estate taxes? Or suspend enforcement of regulations on industrial pollution? Or laws on workplace discrimination against gays and lesbians?”
Obama’s reforms do provide much needed clarification to the Byzantine system which has sent confusing messages to migrants for decades. The new arrangements could shield up to five million undocumented aliens from deportation, and offer a reasonably safe pathway to citizenship. In addition to the obvious tax benefits, the plan will lift the stigma from countless workers, particularly in service industries, who have long functioned in the shadows of America’s legitimate economy. All of this is long overdue, and very welcome. Even so, 6.2 million undocumented immigrants will remain vulnerable to deportation under the new dispensation.
More troubling, at least from the perspective of Latin America and the Caribbean, is Obama’s determination to “keep focusing enforcement resources on actual threats to our security” — that is, to deport more convicted criminals. Admittedly current definitions of the category are overbroad – a recent study by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University concluded that a majority of American citizens would be deemed criminal according to existing criteria. But if the experience of the last decade is anything to go by, the repatriation of hardened gangsters from the American criminal justice system could easily overwhelm law enforcement agencies throughout the region.
There has been surprisingly little discussion of this problem in the United States. That may prove to be a costly oversight, for the US can ill afford to further destabilize the tenuous security environments in several of its Central, South American, and Caribbean neighbours. Until it is able to take account of this problem, and to adopt a more compassionate approach to the 150,000 deportees who have recently been forced to leave their children in the United States, not to mention the many thousands of deserving migrants who are refused visas on the flimsiest of pretexts every year, it is difficult to see how the current reforms will amount to anything more than a partial success.
