August 7, 2014
IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN PART OF W'S LEGACY:
On immigration reform, President Obama as emancipator? (Charles Lane, August 6, 2014, Washington Post)
Not since Abraham Lincoln pondered his Emancipation Proclamation in 1862 has a president considered ordering a more sweeping adjustment to membership in the American community than the mass relief for illegal immigrants that President Obama is said to be contemplating. [...]The ideological concept behind Obama's grand slicing of the Gordian knot of immigration, if he attempts it, would be akin to that which drove Lincoln's action: the president as liberator.The proposal that's being bandied about -- offering up to 5 million undocumented parents of U.S. citizens and others the same two-year renewable reprieves from deportation plus work permits that Obama already ordered for undocumented residents who arrived as children -- wouldn't cover all illegal immigrants any more than Lincoln's proclamation freed every slave. (It omitted Union-held territory.)Still, its impact would be dramatic, and might define Obama's legacy as powerfully as the Emancipation Proclamation defined Lincoln's.
Posted by Orrin Judd at August 7, 2014 2:06 PM
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