Ever since President Obama announced that he intended to make a move on immigration reform before the year is out, the media has been in a full tizzy. Though he has yet to announce what exactly his plan will be, some expect him to roll it out as early as this week, and if Obama does make good on his commitment to executive action, or “whatever lawful actions he could take” while acting alone, our country might very well be facing an entirely different playing field as we go into 2015.

Photo Credit: Mr. Wrightcc
Photo Credit: Mr. Wright

The President is expected to, for instance, expand high-tech visa issuance by having the State Department expand visas for foreign-born workers who have high-tech skills. It’s a move that’s been long-awaited from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who yearn to make U.S. businesses more attractive to foreign talent. He could use his sway to make it less costly to become a citizen, or increase pay for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.

But Obama is aiming even higher. The primary focus of the executive action is expected to be expansion of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival program, which originally launched in June 2012 and allowed children brought to the states before they were 12 to apply for certain privileges. The crux of his proposal now will (likely) be to expand deferred action for young, undocumented immigrants, as well as, according to Min S. Suh and Gregory J. Eck at HR Legalist, people who are parents of a U.S. citizen or legal permanent resident. As Suh and Eck detail:

DACA does not provide legal status and is not a path to permanent residence or citizenship.  Rather, DACA provides the ability to work legally, pay taxes, apply for a Social Security number, and apply for a driver’s license. Under the president’s expected plan, the DACA program would be expanded to cover anyone who entered the U.S. before they were age 16, and extend the cut-off date to January 1, 2010. It is estimated that an additional 300,000 illegal immigrants will be eligible

…[Expanding deferred action for parents] would significantly expand the DACA program by also providing employment authorization and related benefits to adult illegal immigrants who have been in the U.S. for more than five years and have children who are U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents. This measure could allow an additional four and a half million illegal immigrant adults to stay, according to estimates.

The President is also expected to give provisional waivers to spouses and children of legal permanent residents. This would be an ambitious one expansion of DACA, affecting millions of unauthorized immigrants across the country. Freeing up resources here could be a way for Obama to leverage more money, time, and people into border security.

It’s been a bumpy road for Obama, who’s gone back and forth on what he can do with immigration and Congress’ role in the matter. Refocusing the immigration issue by expanding coverage of DACA and reinvigorating border security could be the balanced approach Obama needs to deal with Congress. Angelo A. Paparelli, in a unique piece for Nation of Immigrators, steps into Obama’s shoes and describes now as the time to face the music and speaking the truth on immigration instead of mud-slinging:

I’ll order reforms that allow a 2.5 million to 5 million undocumented to receive work and travel permits (except for recent arrivals, hardened criminals and terrorists). I’ll authorize measures that will speed up — ever so slowly — the immigrant visa backlog.  I may allow early filing of employment-based green card applications.  This would grant professional and skilled foreign workers and their families work and travel permission sooner than now. But they’ll still be stuck in the waiting line just as long and won’t get green cards until their visa numbers are current. I could recapture 600,000 or more immigrant visa numbers that my own and previous administrations squandered by not using them before the end of each fiscal year.  I could say that spouses and kids would not be counted in the employment-based green card quota.  I could make USCIS stop denying benefits to people on technicalities or imagined grounds of ineligibility.   I haven’t decided on these yet.

As Alex Nowrasteh writes for Cato at Liberty, these moves would not only be an expansion of the DACA, but also an extension of presidents before Obama:

To add a wrinkle to this issue, every President since Eisenhower has deferred the deportations of some classes of unauthorized immigrants or paroled some of them into the legal immigration system.  The Immigration Policy Center has put together a wonderful document explaining these previous executive actions.  The most interesting action was President George H.W. Bush’s deportation deferral for about 1.5 million unauthorized immigrants who were the spouses and children of those legalized under the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act.

If the President’s executive action is constitutional and would not crowd out a series of reform bills, then executive action would be an unambiguously positive policy development that would reduce the harm caused by our restrictive immigration system.  If the executive action is either unconstitutional or stymies a real immigration reform effort in Congress then the long term harm will outweigh any short term benefit.

Even so, the nation can definitely expect Republican blowback. With any luck those won’t come in the guise of legal grounds, which most can agree leave Obama well within his executive rights, specifically stating that the DACA not only legally viable but prime for expansion. Many news outlets and pundits are calling his actions overdue, but the expansion of the DACA might be exactly the step he needs. As Paparelli touches on in his article above, the original DACA program was a large part of what got him elected the second time, so why not make the expansion of it the capstone for his presidency?