Let Us Govern Again

Last week, President Obama addressed the nation to announce that he was taking executive action on immigration. Nobody is entirely happy with his plan, although the withered Democrat House minority is pretending that they are. Republicans denounced it as an unlawful “amnesty,” while immigrants rights groups are angry that after all this time the president still refuses to go far enough.

I must admit that when a President resorts to executive orders to implement a major policy change, I cannot help but view him as something of a failure in the legislative arena. At the risk of delving too deeply into political science jargon, executive orders are intended to function as part of the president’s “completion power.” Although there is no explicit mention of them in the Constitution, executive orders have been issued in differing numbers by every president since Washington under the justification of Article II, Section 3, Clause 5 that orders the president to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” They are used primarily as a method for filling in the blanks in legislation. Congress is by no means omnipotent, and hence the laws that they pass tend to be of a general nature. They paint the contours of a new policy in broad strokes, and the president in his capacity as chief executive is expected to fill in the details by issuing marching orders to executive departments and agencies regarding their “proper” interpretation.

Herein lies the problem. President Obama is filling in the blanks in a law that has not yet materialized. That is called legislating, and that is not his job.

That is really too bad, because the policy changes that he outlined Thursday night are not radical. In his own words: “If you’ve been in America for more than five years; if you have children who are American citizens or legal residents; if you register, pass a criminal background check, and you’re willing to pay your fair share of taxes, you’ll be able to apply to stay in this country temporarily without fear of deportation.” The “temporarily” of which he speaks is a mere three years (long enough to push a permanent decision on the issue past the 2016 presidential election, cynics will say—and they’ll be right). But his decision is ultimately a practical one. There is no way that we could feasibly identify, round up, and deport 11 million people, and if we did the cost of the operation would number in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

Obama’s “deal” will not apply to anyone who has arrived in the last five years, including the massive influx of unaccompanied minors who poured into Texas this summer; it would not apply to anyone arriving illegally in the future (thus deflating the argument that this move will encourage further illegal immigration); it will not apply to any individual with a criminal background (and will probably accelerate deportations of criminals now that they are the main priority for law enforcement resources); and, perhaps most importantly, it grants citizenship to no one. This is not an amnesty. President Obama’s message is: “Let’s halt deportations of the good guys for a while so we can figure this out.”

So while this is not an ideal fix for the situation, it is something that I can live with. My ideal solution would look something like this: Speaker Boehner allowing a vote in the House on the full 2013 Senate immigration bill. Fourteen Republican senators, including our 2008 presidential nominee, joined with all 52 Democrats and Independents to vote for that bill. Is it a perfect conservative solution to the problem? Of course not, but we are not going to get one with this president in the White House even with large Republican majorities in both Houses of Congress. Does that mean that we should twiddle our thumbs until we have a Republican in the Oval Office as well? It shouldn’t, because President Obama is right in characterizing our present situation as an effective amnesty for the millions that flaunted our laws and entered the United States illegally. The fact of the matter is that we have ignored the problem for far too long and it has metastasized to a dimension that is entirely unmanageable. There are too many people here to deport, and too many potential contributors of tax revenue to ignore.

I do not speak in such clinical language to diminish the humanity of undocumented immigrants, for I find the argument that they will destroy our American culture tedious at best and anti-American at worst. I speak in terms of dollars and cents because mercy is not in the job description of the American government. The Constitution and its amendments provide for the rights of American citizens, and if a person is not an American citizen then the Constitution simply has nothing to say regarding them. The federal government does not have an obligation to be merciful; it does have a duty, however, to “establish justice” and to “promote the General Welfare.” Requiring the payment of a fine and back taxes is the easiest way to satisfy those goals with regard to the undocumented population already in America. If we stop dithering and complete a reform of the broken American immigration system now, then we won’t have to make such a choice in the future.

Andrew B. Pardue ’16 is a government concentrator in Mather House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.