Expert’s Take: Stopping executive amnesty

 By: Teresa Mull 11/19/2014      

 

Will the president use his executive powers to grant amnesty to 5 million illegal aliens already here in the United States? Is what Obama plans to do even legal? What, if anything, can the GOP do to stop him? Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, answers our
questions:

What is Obama proposing to do exactly?

     “Because Congress chose not to approve the legislation he wanted, he is going to try to do unilaterally as much as he thinks the courts of Congress will let him get away with, and the big element of his plan is going to be to unilaterally legalize amnesty of millions of illegal aliens, perhaps five million. This is presented by the administration as merely a putting off of deportation – a sort of looking the other way to present it as similar to a cop stopping you and deciding not to give you a speeding ticket, just telling you to slow down.

“That’s not what it is though, because what the president is proposing is the massive expansion of what he did two years ago in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which was his riff on the DREAM Act, which Congress also refused to pass. Rather than simply looking the other way and not pursuing illegal immigrants who fit certain descriptions, what the administration is proposing we do is to give them work permits and social security numbers and states would be required to give them driver’s licenses. Essentially, it’s ‘green card light,’ instead of ‘green card premium.’ Those aren’t real terms, I’m making them up, but the point is, it’s almost everything that a green card, or formal immigrant status would give you except the eventual ability to apply for citizenship.
“These work permits would have to be renewed every two years, but we have lawful programs like this that give people temporary status, and they’re always renewed, even though the supporters of the president’s scheme pretend that it’s temporary thing. It’s not. Everybody understands it’s irreversible, and that’s one of the reasons there’s been such tense congressional concern to stop this power grab before it happens.”
Is what the president plans to do legal, and if not, what, if anything, can the GOP do about it? Can they stop him before he acts, or do the Republicans have to wait and charge him after the fact?
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