Executive Action on Immigration

By Robert H.

Ezra Klein has an excellent and fair take on Obama's immigration reform.  I disagree with his conclusions, though.

Congress has told the President to export over 10 million people, but they've given him the resources to export less than 500,000 people a year.  So that's a problem.  Fortunately, they've also given him broad discretion to choose which sort of cases to go after.  Given all that, you have two choices for how to manage your resources if you are the President: create clear rules for whom you will and won't deport, announce those rules, and follow them.  Alternately, just wing whom you deport in a jumble of local discretion, happenstance, and random chance.

So which of these supports rule of law?  Which supports good governance?  To me it is obviously the former. Laws should be as transparent, clear, and predictable as possible.  If our officials are choosing to prosecute some deportation cases and not others -- and they are by necessity -- we should want to know what criteria they are using.  This move gets us closer to that.

So I am not worried that this clearly legal action will somehow undermine the rule of law in America.  It will do the opposite.  But isn't it violating political norms?  Maybe.  But if there is a norm in American politics that the president should deport people in a haphazard, chaotic, and unpredictable manner rather than using his legal authority to prioritize deportations, that norm is dumb.  Thank God a president is ignoring it.