President Obama's executive action on immigration just came out. With a bang! While it doesn’t solve the broader need for comprehensive immigration reform, his case and legal basis for his decision are indisputable. No one can argue that the political ping pong that has been comprehensive immigration reform in the last decade has to be dealt with sooner rather than later. The president waited long enough for the proper congressional channels to do something about it. He even broke his promise to act on immigration through executive power before the midterm elections. A move that would gain him the fierce denunciation of so many who had trusted him to act. Once the dust of the midterms settled, the president did act doing the right thing.
He's been saying all along that he didn't have the power to act on immigration. That is true as far as legislative powers are concerned. Given the ineffective monstrosity that is our immigration system, the wallflowering of congress on the issue and in light of the millions of undocumented residents in this country whose only crime was to cross the border illegally or overstay their visas, it would have been a bigger crime to stonewall the problem into the new year.
The president's action falls well within the precedent of prior executive actions on immigration in the United States. It is neither illegal nor unconstitutional. Every president during the last 60 years has acted on immigration and among them Ronald Reagan shines the brightest having gone to the full extent of his powers granting amnesty to undocumented immigrants while he was president. Executive power doesn't get any more powerful than that and no one accused him of being an imperial president. Was it a political or a practical move on his part? It was both, but above all Reagan saw it as the right thing to do.
This makes the loud Republican acrimony all the more shallow. If there ever was a political issue that could have been easily decided through the legislative process and in a bipartisan fashion, it was immigration reform. At least the US Senate agrees having passed a compromising but effective bill, but the entrenched partisanship and ideological shortsightedness of the US House of Representatives proved too much to give comprehensive immigration reform its day in the sun. Not even the two biggest Republican forces in the first decade of our millenium - George W. Bush and John McCain - were able to bite into it despite their desire and efforts to bring about a reform and acknowledging the problems with our current immigration system.
The Obama presidency has made something starkly clear, our political establishment of the Right kind has an anti-immigration problem. That problem our friends on the Right would have us believe is a political problem at its core. No one will doubt the political or better yet the partisan nature of the issue. But the issue of immigration and immigration law is at its deepest root one of ethics. Is what the president has done by exerting his executive power on our broken immigration reality morally defensible? Beyond the law, is it morally right or wrong? No question that the whole issue is tainted by politics, but has the president been motivated by something more substantial than the law as it is currently written? Is there an appeal to a higher authority than legality itself regarding the destiny of individuals and families affected by the immigration status quo? I believe that in both of his executive actions the president has made that appeal clear.
Remember his executive action for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) two years ago when he said "It's the right thing to do"? It is a moral appeal that has received little attention in the media perhaps due to the perceived "amoral" political nature of the conversation, but it has been there. And then in his most recent action on the issue, he quoted Holy Scriptures! Many may see this cynically as in "Oh, how convenient!" Granted, every politician worth his salt must be skilled in the art of political expediency, but is that what the president did here? I don't think so.
Remember his executive action for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) two years ago when he said "It's the right thing to do"? It is a moral appeal that has received little attention in the media perhaps due to the perceived "amoral" political nature of the conversation, but it has been there. And then in his most recent action on the issue, he quoted Holy Scriptures! Many may see this cynically as in "Oh, how convenient!" Granted, every politician worth his salt must be skilled in the art of political expediency, but is that what the president did here? I don't think so.
With this line of reasoning I'm not proposing that we hold the president as a true believer in a religious sense since religious practice tends to be highly moral. He may or may not be depending on whom you ask and quoting Scripture in a political speech does not one a believer make. So such judgements will have to be left in the hands of a better judge.
What indeed comes through in both his executive actions on immigration is that they more than appear to be based on higher moral grounds than other political actions our electoral politics afford. This particularly comes into play when one faces the prospect of any elected official acting unilaterally, on the sole basis of his authority. Here the best example is obvious, the Officer in Chief of the USA exerts his power as such. Our political system allows for such use of power, albeit delegated, and when power is exerted on the basis of one's sole authority the ethics of the action and its repercussions are heightened. Did the president do the right thing on purely moral grounds with his executive orders on immigration or not? One would be hard pressed to say that he didn't. He's on the way out so politically speaking he doesn't need to score any more points.
To this extent I contend that it is the opposition, the anti-immigration political establishment who has no moral grounds to stand on regarding their views. The more they fight this executive action the more hollow both they and their arguments appear. What is their cohesive anti-immigration moral argument? They don't have one. The more noise they make the more ridicule they'll receive. In fact, they still have a window to up the president and show the rest of us that politics still have a respectable future in our country. Pass a bill. Unlikely, because according to them the American people have been victimized by an imperial president.
What indeed comes through in both his executive actions on immigration is that they more than appear to be based on higher moral grounds than other political actions our electoral politics afford. This particularly comes into play when one faces the prospect of any elected official acting unilaterally, on the sole basis of his authority. Here the best example is obvious, the Officer in Chief of the USA exerts his power as such. Our political system allows for such use of power, albeit delegated, and when power is exerted on the basis of one's sole authority the ethics of the action and its repercussions are heightened. Did the president do the right thing on purely moral grounds with his executive orders on immigration or not? One would be hard pressed to say that he didn't. He's on the way out so politically speaking he doesn't need to score any more points.
To this extent I contend that it is the opposition, the anti-immigration political establishment who has no moral grounds to stand on regarding their views. The more they fight this executive action the more hollow both they and their arguments appear. What is their cohesive anti-immigration moral argument? They don't have one. The more noise they make the more ridicule they'll receive. In fact, they still have a window to up the president and show the rest of us that politics still have a respectable future in our country. Pass a bill. Unlikely, because according to them the American people have been victimized by an imperial president.
Imperial histories show us that the seat of power and the source of authority lay with the emperor. "Hail, Ceasar! Son of the Gods!" But the truth is that no emperor nor his or her empire is eternal. In spite of appearances, even in empires all authority is delegated. When a theological eye is put upon such seats of power, it is undeniably clear that they respond to a higher seat of authority. No human is or has ever been the root of power. We are all opportunistic when it comes to it. We seize it by any means necessary. Even the vote is an expression of that seizure. No human being is the ultimate authority. The affairs of men and their politics are ultimately shaped by a higher arbiter in whom reside the true seat and absolute source of all authority and might.
If this is true, then I cannot escape the question of Do President Obama's actions on immigration fall under the purview of a grander scheme of politics in which he is only a player, even an important player in comparison to the rest of us? In short, was he an instrument of God in "his" use of power and authority to benefit almost five million undocumented residents of this country?
The imperial histories portrayed in the Bible - Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus, Caesar - will say that this is not a far cry in its application to what we have just witnessed in the president's' executive order. God avails himself of the most powerful precisely to show them and us all who is ultimately the most powerful. His purposes, while political insofar as they pertain to his kingdom, are far more reaching than comprehensive immigration reform. It so happens that the issue could not have been more appropriate, because as the president said in his speech, "We were all strangers once."
The longing of the human heart is to not be estranged from one another. It is to be "legit", validated and approved. The longing of the human heart is to be embraced not rejected. No one wants to be an outsider, an alien. We all want to belong.
We still need comprehensive immigration reform in our country, but the president has given us all a clear example of how power can be used swiftly and morally, in spite of smoke charges to the contrary, to change not only a derogatory description - illegal alien - but the livelihood of almost five million people in our country. No human being is illegal, and while many today assert that this president is the most ungodly president that has come around in a while, behind his executive action on immigration of November 2014 I hear a prayer answered and I see God's merciful hand at work.
