Obamas Executive Order to Protect 4.4 Million Undocumented Immigrants Plan will grant some, but not all, of what immigrant activist groups had been seeking. President Obama will create a new deferred-action program for parents, to be dubbed DAP, that will give temporary legal status to unauthorized parents of children who are U.S. citizens or permanent legal residents and have been in the country since Jan. 1, 2010, according to people briefed on a plan he will announce in prime time Thursday night. He also will remove the age restriction on the current Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, such that people older than 31 who were brought here by their parents before age 16 will be able to qualify. Like the new deferred action for parents, eligibility for this new DACA expansion is based on being in the country for five years. Those two programs will cover about 4.4 million unauthorized immigrants, according to White House figures that were provided to immigration advocates ahead of Obamas prime-time Oval Office speech Thursday. Not everyone who is eligible for these deferred deportation programs is expected to apply, however. Only about half of the 1.4 million unauthorized young people who were eligible for DACA have applied. Undocumented parents of DACA recipients are not included in the new executive package, a nod to Obamas statement in 2013 that he didnt have the authority to extend the program to those parents. Many of those same parents, however, have children who are U.S. citizens and can qualify for legal status that way. The deferrals are carefully crafted to adhere to past precedent when it comes to the presidents discretionary authority to let people without papers stay in the United States. There is nothing of what they listed for us that gives us any pause about legality, and we at AILA watch that very closely, said American Immigration Lawyers Association Advocacy Director Greg Chen, who was on the conference call Thursday that explained the plan. The grassroots immigrant-activist community is reacting with mixed feelings to Obamas expected order. They are thrilled to finally have a major White House action directed at relief of their unauthorized-immigrant friends and family, but they also feel that Obama backed himself in to the action by making promises since 2008 that havent come to pass. Theres a benign gratification for it and, Thank you to the president and still hostility to those forces that oppose any type of accommodation, said Nativo Lopez, an immigrant-rights activist in Southern California who was among the first Latino agitators to urge Obama to act on his own. Other national immigrant groups are standing firmly behind the president, even though they have been asking for much broader relief from him for several years. Obama is offering a virtual bait and switch for the tech industry, which was clamoring for some relief from the lack of visas available for skilled workers. Only 140,000 work-based green cards are available per year, and the quotas dictate that they cant all come from one country. Originally, it was thought that the White House would use executive authority to recapture some 250,000 unused green cards since 2001 to help clear the backlog for people who have subsisted on H-1B visas for years. That recapture idea is not in the package, according to Chen, but Obama will put in place another long-sought change in the H-1B program, a preregistration process that will allow employers who hire H-1B workers every year to bypass the onerous bureaucratic screenings. Another high-tech feature of the package is an expansion of the time allotted for foreign graduates of U.S. universities to work in science, engineering, and mathematics before adjusting to a green card or H-1B status. Perhaps the biggest victory for immigration advocates in the package is discontinuation of the Department of Homeland Securitys Secure Communities program, in which local law enforcement and federal immigration officials share data on foreigners in local jails. White House officials say the DHS will no longer issue detainer notices to local police about an immigrant in jail unless that person has a felony criminal record or is a threat to national security. That means that local police have no reason to hold an immigrant in jail for minor offenses because DHS will only notify them of immigration-related problems in high-risk cases. Obama also will create a new set of priority guidelines for all immigration enforcement agencies within DHS, including the Office of Customs and Border Protection, which previously was not subject to the memos outlining where immigration officers would exercise discretion in deportations. Chen views that as a positive change but says he would prefer clearer guidelines than the current laundry list of factors to consider, which covers everything from employment to familial ties, disabilities, and community involvement. We need some brighter-line assumptions, he said. The announcement does move immigration reform forward, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka wrote in a statement, and the labor group stands ready to defend Obamas unilateral action. But Trumka said the group is concerned by the presidents concession to corporate demands for even greater access to temporary visas that will allow the continued suppression of wages in the tech sector. The administration is operating within its authority to advance the moral and economic interests of our country, and while we stand ready to defend this program, we must also be clear that it is only a first step, the statement said. Unfortunately, more than half of those who currently lack legal protections will remain vulnerable to wage theft, retaliation, and other forms of exploitation. Chen views that as a positive change but says he would prefer clearer guidelines than the current laundry list of factors to consider, which covers everything from employment to familial ties, disabilities, and community involvement. We need some brighter-line assumptions, he said. The announcement does move immigration reform forward, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka wrote in a statement, and the labor group stands ready to defend Obamas unilateral action. But Trumka said the group is concerned by the presidents concession to corporate demands for even greater access to temporary visas that will allow the continued suppression of wages in the tech sector. The administration is operating within its authority to advance the moral and economic interests of our country, and while we stand ready to defend this program, we must also be clear that it is only a first step, the statement said. Unfortunately, more than half of those who currently lack legal protections will remain vulnerable to wage theft, retaliation, and other forms of exploitation.
Posted on: Fri, 21 Nov 2014 03:06:43 +0000
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