Tuesday, the Associated Press reported that two previous Republican presidents—Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush—had taken unilateral action to protect undocumented immigrants from deportation, and the political reaction was much less vitriolic than what Obama has faced as he prepares to make a similar move. Conservatives, notably The Atlantics David Frum and National Reviews Mark Krikorian, quickly pushed back. Frum argues that, while legal, Obama’s upcoming executive action would be an unprecedented violation of political norms. Krikorian goes further, calling it Caesarism, pure and simple. But in the end, though they difference in their vehemence, both Krikorian and Frum’s analyses do more to reveal the flaws in the conservative position than prove the lawlessness of Obama’s upcoming action. Krikorian and Frum’s main argument is that Reagan and Bush’s unilateral actions were simply fixes to the 1986 immigration law that granted green cards to three million undocumented immigrants. Reagan and Bush discovered that, due to an unintended consequence of that law, many spouses and kids of newly-legalized immigrants faced deportation, potentially tearing families apart. In response, Reagan and Bush implemented “cleanup measures,” as Krikorian terms them: In 1987, Reagan’s Immigration and Naturalization Service announced that kids of newly-legalized immigrants would not be deported; Bush extended those protections to spouses in 1991.
Posted on: Sat, 22 Nov 2014 06:47:10 +0000
© 2015