In November 1986, President Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, providing amnesty to more than 3 million immigrants who had come here illegally but had been working in the country since at least 1982.
However, that immediately created a major problem: The new law did not address the fate of the spouses and children of those to whom it gave a path to legalization. A father or mother who had been legalized through IRCA still faced the very real prospect of seeing their spouses and children taken from them and deported.
After Congress made sporadic and unsuccessful efforts to address what became known as the "family unity" issue, Reagan decided to act on his own. Citing his executive authority, he issued "Family Fairness Guidelines" in 1987 that ordered immigration enforcement officials to cease deporting children who were here illegally as long as both their parents -- or one parent in a single-parent household -- had qualified for amnesty.
That policy was still decried as inhumane and insufficient. In congressional hearings, members were told of families being torn apart, with some children and spouses being deported while legalized immigrants and children born here were allowed to stay.
In just one example of many, a 35-year-old hotel employee in Texas was taken from his home and deported to El Salvador, leaving his legalized wife and four legalized children here with no one to support them.But still Congress refused to act. So in 1990, President Bush expanded that initial executive order, this time extending it to all children of legalized immigrants and also to the spouses of such legalized immigrants, even if the spouses themselves would not qualify under the 1986 IRCA. Under the administrative change, the spouses would be allowed to stay and be granted work permits, and its impact was significant. As Mark Noferi pointed out in The Hill last month:
"The Bush administration anticipated its family fairness program could help enormous numbers of immigrants—up to 1.5 million family members, which amounted to over 40 percent of the 3.5 million unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. at the time."
And as we all know -- some of us from history books, some by having lived through it -- both Reagan and Bush were impeached by Congress for that astonishing abuse of their executive discretion and the U.S. Constitution.
Or am I imagining that?
The executive actions being studied by President Obama are in many ways quite similar to the steps taken by Reagan and Bush. In one proposed major step, for example, Obama would use his discretion to cease deportation of parents who have children born in the United States and who have lived here at least five years, thus helping to keep families together just as his predecessors had.
In addition, immigration enforcement resources that had once focused on trying to find and deport such people would be shifted to border areas to tighten security and speed up deportation of those still attempting to cross. The president would be setting priorities, based on his assessment of where resources would be put to the best use, an action that is well within his constitutional prerogatives.
If Republicans want to shut down the government as a result of such actions, or even impeach Obama as Charles Krauthammer and others are suggesting, Obama has made it clear that's a risk that he is willing to take if they are.
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