No, Reagan Did Not Offer An Amnesty By Lawless Executive Order
Gabriel Malor

Today is the big day, and the Progressive media is in full spin to mitigate the anger Americans are expressing about President Obama’s decision to offer legal status to millions of people who broke the law. That spin has taken many forms, including the novel arguments that the executive branch is empowered to act whenever the legislative branch declines and that the executive branch’s enforcement discretion includes the affirmative grant of benefits not otherwise authorized by law. Most recently, however, Progressive columnists have settled on an old favorite tactic: justify Democratic misbehavior by claiming (falsely, as you will see) that a Republican did it first.

Democrats across print, web, and cable media have been repeating the claim that Obama is doing nothing more than what Presidents Reagan and Bush 41 did first. They point to executive actions taken in 1987 and 1989 that deferred the removal of certain aliens. But, as usual for Progressive commentators, they elide the crucial facts that distinguish those actions from Obama’s. The sign that you’re being swindled isn’t so much what the con artist tells you, but what he does not tell you. What the Progressive commentariat is not telling you is that the Reagan and Bush immigration orders looked nothing like Obama’s creation of a new, open-ended form of immigration relief.

Legally, i*****l i*********n is dealt with in two steps. First, the Department of Homeland Security (in Reagan and Bush 41′s time, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, or INS) has to show that an alien is removable (deportable, in Reagan and Bush 41′s lingo) from the United States. Then the alien gets a chance to show that they are eligible for some form of relief from removal or deportation. Ordinarily, those forms of relief are created by Congress. There is asylum and adjustment and cancellation of removal, and so on and so forth, all set down in statute by Congress over the decades (more than a century in the case of certain waivers) in an overlapping mess of eligibilities and disqualifiers and discretionary decisions.

With some regularity, however, the existing forms of immigration relief have been overtaken by circumstances. When that has happened, Congress steps in. In 1986, faced with a large and growing population of i*****l a***ns, Congress created a new, time-limited form of immigration relief for certain aliens who, among other things, had to have come to the United States more than six years previously. This is the much ballyhooed Reagan amnesty. It was, unfortunately, riddled with fraud in its execution, the uncovering of which is still roiling the immigrant community. But even setting that aside it left President Reagan with a moral dilemma. Congress’ amnesty was large—just shy of 3 million people—and it had the unanticipated effect of splitting up freshly-legalized parents from their illegally-present minor children who did not qualify for relief.
What the Progressive commentariat is not telling you is that the Reagan and Bush immigration orders looked nothing like Obama’s creation of a new, open-ended form of immigration relief.

So Reagan, seeing this family unity problem that Congress had not anticipated or addressed when it granted amnesty to millions of parents, issued an executive order to defer the removal of children of the people who had applied for immigration amnesty under Congress’ new law. He allowed those children to remain in the United States while their parents’ applications for amnesty were pending. A few years later, Bush 41 extended this bit of administrative grace to these same children plus certain spouses of the aliens who had actually been granted immigration amnesty under Congress’ new law.

Congress, though it had desired to grant amnesty, had not considered and not included the spouses and children. Importantly, nor had it excluded them. So Presidents Reagan and Bush 41 filled that statutory gap. “What do we do with spouses and children?” INS asked. “Well,” the executive branch leaders said, “defer their deportation. Decline to exercise your lawful authority for the particular cases that are related to those Congress has offered amnesty.”

These Reagan and Bush 41 executive actions were obviously different than what Obama is doing now. They were trying to implement a complicated amnesty that Congress had already passed. Congress’ action was a form of immigration relief that obviously fit within our constitutional system. Moreover, Congress left a gap when it came to immediate family members, including minor children, of individuals who qualified for the amnesty. Presidents Reagan and Bush 41 forbore from deporting people in that select group.
Obama is clearly contravening both ordinary practice and the wishes of Congress—as expressed in statute—by declaring an amnesty himself. This is nothing like Reagan’s or Bush’s attempts to implement Congress’ amnesty.

Obama, in contrast to Reagan and Bush 41, is not trying to implement a lawfully created amnesty. There has been no congressional amnesty. In fact, there has been no immigration action from Congress in the past few years except the post-9/11 REAL ID Act of 2005, which made it harder, not easier, for aliens to qualify for immigration relief. More than that, Congress declined to pass a legalization of the type Obama is issuing during both Obama’s term and in a hotly-contested bill during President Bush 43′s term.

Thus, Obama is clearly contravening both ordinary practice and the wishes of Congress—as expressed in statute—by declaring an amnesty himself. This is nothing like Reagan’s or Bush’s attempts to implement Congress’ amnesty. The progressive media’s claims otherwise are blatant lies, relying on their readers’ ignorance of events in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Such attempts should be rejected wherever they are found.

If Obama wants to justify his lawless immigration action, he will have to do it some other way than citing (blaming, more like) prior Republican presidents. They, to their credit, were trying to implement Congress’ will. Obama, on the other hand, has declared that his government will act despite Congress, or, I suspect, to spite Congress. Such pettiness finds no support in the presidencies of Reagan and Bush.

Reagan and Bush Offer No Precedent for Obama's Amnesty Order

Not only were past executive actions smaller, they didn't work.
David Frum Nov 18 2014, 5:26 PM ET


“What about Reagan in 1987? And George H.W. Bush in 1990?”

This has become a favorite Democratic and center-left rebuttal to Republicans angry at reports that President Obama may soon grant residency and working papers to as many as 5 million i*****l a***ns. If Obama acts, he’d rely on precedents set by Republican predecessors. Surely that should disbar today’s Republicans from complaining?

Surely not, and for four reasons.

1) Reagan and Bush acted in conjunction with Congress and in furtherance of a congressional purpose. In 1986, Congress passed a full-blown amnesty, the Simpson-Mazzoli Act, conferring residency rights on some 3 million people. Simpson-Mazzoli was sold as a “once and for all” solution to the i*****l i*********n problem: amnesty now, to be followed by strict enforcement in future. Precisely because of their ambition, the statute’s authors were confounded when their broad law generated some unanticipated hard cases. The hardest were those in which some members of a single family qualified for amnesty, while others did not. Nobody wanted to deport the still-illegal husband of a newly legalized wife. Reagan’s (relatively small) and Bush’s (rather larger) executive actions tidied up these anomalies. Although Simpson-Mazzoli itself had been controversial, neither of these follow-ups was.

Five Reasons Obama Shouldn't Declare Amnesty

Executive action by President Obama, however, would follow not an act of Congress but a prior executive action of his own: his suspension of enforcement against so-called Dreamers in June 2012.

A new order would not further a congressional purpose. It is intended to overpower and overmaster a recalcitrant Congress. Two presidents of two different parties have repeatedly called upon Congress to pass a second large amnesty. Congress has repeatedly declined. Each Congress elected since 2006 has been less favorable to amnesty than the previous one, and the Congress elected this month is the least favorable of all. Obama talks as if Congress’s refusal to fall in with his wishes somehow justifies him in acting alone. He may well have the legal power to do so. But it hardly enhances the legitimacy of his action. Certainly he is not entitled to cite as precedent the examples of presidents who did act together with Congress.

2) Reagan and Bush legalized much smaller numbers of people than Obama is said to have in mind. While today's advocates cite a figure of 1.5 million people among those potentially affected by Bush's order, only about 140,000 people ultimately gained legal status this way, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement data as reviewed by Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies. (Updated: Krikorian reconsidered the numbers and now concludes the true figure is even lower—less than 50,000.) Obama’s June 2012 grant of residency to the so-called “Dreamers”, people who were brought to the United States illegally as children, could potentially reach 1.4 million people. His next round of amnesty, which is advertised as benefiting the parents of the Dreamers and other illegal-alien parents of U.S. resident children, could reach as many as 5 million people.

Put it another way: If all the potential of Obama’s past and next action is realized, he would—acting on his own authority and in direct contravention of the wishes of Congress—have granted residency and work rights to more than double the number of people amnestied by Simpson-Mazzoli, until now the most far-reaching immigration amnesty in U.S. history.

As the philosopher liked to point out, at a certain point, a difference in quantity becomes a difference in quality.

3) The Reagan-Bush examples are not positive ones. The 1986 amnesty did not work as promised. It was riddled with fraud. The enforcement provisions were ignored or circumvented. I*****l i*********n actually increased in the years after the amnesty. The supposed "once and for all” solution almost immediately gave rise to an even larger version of the original problem.

The argument that “Reagan and Bush did it,” is essentially an argument that future generations should not learn from the errors of previous generations. With the advantage of experience, it is clear that their decisions did not produce the desired result, and actually greatly worsened the problem they sought to solve. Let’s not repeat their mistake.

4) The invocation of the Reagan and Bush cases exemplifies the bad tendency of political discussion to degenerate into an exchange of scripted talking points. “Oh yeah? Well, this guy you liked also did this thing you don’t like!” Is that really supposed to convince anybody? What we have here is not a validation of the correctness of President Obama’s action. It’s the shaking of a fetish, an effort to curtail argument rather than enlighten it.

It’s a style of argument borrowed from the late-night cable-comedy shows, in which a clip of somebody saying something at some point in the past is supposed to estop that person—or anybody in any way connected to him, or supportive of him, or even mostly but not entirely admiring of him—from ever saying anything different in the future. But a zinger is not a rebuttal. In this case, with all the huge differences between Obama’s situation and those of his predecessors, it does not even zing.

http://www.teaparty.org/big-score-sheriff-joe-fight-vs-obama-77299/


These are times, that try men’s souls.

And these are the times that somehow produce great men. Men that will go down in history as being at the right place at the right time for the good of all.
“The president does not have the authority to rewrite i*********n l*ws.
Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s legal action against the president has shown us all what true patriots that stand up and do the right thing means. Sheriff Joe Arpaio is such a man. He will be remembered long after this
Fool that’s sits in the Whitehouse has gone.
One man will be remembered as having dedicated his life in service to his fellow man. Serving with p***e and honor the people of his city, State, and country. A man that has chosen to follow the words of our nations Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
The other will go by the way side of history as a foot note as the first black president. ( Even that is tainted as it were. )

So I wish to give a shout out to Sheriff Joe, our country’s top sheriff.

RETW 8-) 8-) 8-) 8-) 8-) 8-) 8-) 8-) 8-) 8-) 8-) 8-) 8-) 8-) 8-)